Andy Strowman Remembers His Uncle Barney
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Poet Andy Strowman wrote this memoir and poem as a tribute to his late Uncle Barney whose birthday it is today.
There is a quiet cemetery where you may find yourself the only living soul other than the grave diggers. It is East Ham Jewish cemetery. Amongst the graves is one Barnett Cohen, my Uncle Barney. He is the only Barnett Cohen buried there.
The East End is a sparsely populated Jewish area now. Time has crept away, and Barney and I are of a time long gone. Yet behind each gravestone there is a story.
Uncle Barney was born in Whitechapel in the early twenties, to Milka and Herschel Cohen, refugees who escaped the pogroms, the mass slaughter of Jews, in Eastern Europe.
The memory I have of him is as the personification of kindness. A man with a gentle sense of humour who came to visit our house in Milward St where he had grown up himself, a street that was one hundred and fifty years old when I was born, behind the London Hospital. He was born in Villa, now part of Russia, in 1897 and was married in 1914.
I recall he would always eat an orange after every meal to conclude it. When he visited me and my mum, he would bring us so much joy by doing magic tricks, like holding a penny in place in front of an eye. He confided to me about the time he visited London Zoo dressed in his new suit and a chimpanzee humiliated him. The large creature came to greet him at the side of the cage, then spat water all over his suit while the surrounding crowd laughed.
Yet the bravery of his choice to leave the army during the Second World War as a Conscientious Objector because he did not want to kill anyone revealed the moral courage of the man. Even so, he was ridiculed by North London Jews when he moved there from the East End.
It was something I identified with personally, since when my school moved to Essex, me and my friend were humiliated by Mr Philpott, the head teacher, in front of the school assembly when he said, ‘We will not have children in our school, who live in the gutter and play in the gutter, behaving badly in our school.’ Today I recall those words and how the rest of the school turned to look at us. I still remember how the teacher asked ‘Where’s your pen?’ with the reply, ‘I ain’t got one, Sir.’ To which the teacher said, ‘Speak properly, boy’ and the pupil said ‘I haven’t got one, Sir.’ ‘Not “I haven’t got one”‘ insisted the teacher, ‘I have not got one, Sir.’
So what became of Uncle Barney? He had an arranged marriage to a woman called Dolly. Before I was born, he had lived in the same house where I grew up. His brothers were Jack and David and his sisters were Rachel and Rose. They occupied 17 Milward St behind the London Hospital and their mum and dad were Milka (Millie in English) and Hershel (Harris in English).
I got the feeling that Barney lacked confidence. Much like me, he went to a school where University was not an option. The concern of the day was survival and so he went to work in the garment industry, leaving school at the tender age of fourteen to enter the workplace.
When the World War Two broke out, he enlisted into the army. Sensitivity and inferiority left him unable to hurt anyone and full of fear. He told his sergeant that he did not want to be shipped out to fight. Barney did not want to kill anyone. In all my time of knowing him I never heard him say a bad word about anybody. He was put in the guardhouse and then transferred to Wormwood Scrubs Prison where his weight deteriorated to five and a half stone. Millie, his mother, knew she had to act or risk his death.
She had two sisters who were well-off and lived in North London. One of them went with her to a government office and – as we say in the East End – ‘the old brown envelope’ was handed over and Barney was released.
One retired prison officer told me recently, ‘You wouldn’t have liked it in there. The cells were very small and there was only a tiny courtyard. You could have had someone banging on the wall of the next cell and shouting through the night, and be threatened too. The only time we intervened was if one prisoner hit another.’
Uncle Barney had lost a lot by being in prison and developed a habit of scratching his backside. In the workplace he was not an asset and, if he worked alongside his brother Jack, he continually asked him if it was any good the work he was doing.
When I was sixteen, my mum told me Uncle Barney had endured six sessions of Electro-Convulsive Therapy at Long Grove Hospital, the same place Ronnie Kray went to. The hospital was closed in 1992.
Yet it would be unbalanced to leave out the wonderful kindness bestowed on Uncle Barney that he transferred to others. Nor his sense of humour which he brought out in others with his magic tricks.
Such was his aura and persona that, when I was a child, I did not want Barney to leave. Whenever he visited us at 17 Milward St during his lunch hour from Ellis & Goldstein where he worked and was talking to mum, I crept quietly to the front door and locked it by sliding the bolt across. When my mum struggled to open the door, it prompted a laugh from my Uncle Barney. I must have been about eight years old at the time.
At the tender age of fourteen, my mum was chosen to be bridesmaid at his wedding to Dolly. Marriage can be very hard at times and I am sure the legacy of coming from a poor family and having complex mental health problems demanded much understanding from all the family. In my experience, it can be very challenging not only to get help for it, and good help, but having your family understand what you are going through, because unless they have been through it themselves it can be very straining for them and for the patient.
Barney looking dapper at this son’s wedding
BARNEY
I honour you today
Like an FA cup,
Your eyes glazed by kindness
And your lips sealed by honesty.
Kissing the frontiers of your life
I exchange sugar with Alan Sugar,
Tip toe through the darkness of your life
And strangle the people who ridiculed you.
Hours have passed and light bulbs have died.
We could not stop you going into the Army
Or the mental hospitals,
But we never stopped loving you
For the laughter you gave us.
Daily we watched it grow.
Uncle Barney is fourth from the left at the back at my brother Howard’s Barmitzvah party. I am seated on the chair at the bottom left.
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Alan Shipp, Hyacinth Grower
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‘I could not imagine what my life would have been like without hyacinths’
One blustery day, I took the train up to Waterbeach outside Cambridge to visit Alan Shipp, Hyacinth Grower who cultivates two hundred and forty-three different varieties of this favourite flower, which are in bloom now. I stood in the rain, inhaling the fragrance of the gentle breeze wafting over Alan’s field of hyacinths, flourishing in the rich soil of the silted water-meadows of the River Cam.
Alan Shipp is Britain’s only Hyacinth Grower and is also the Custodian of the National Collection of Hyacinths. He has the world’s largest collection of varieties and knows more about this intriguing plant than anyone else alive. In other years, Alan has opened his hyacinth nursery to the public at peak flowering time, drawing international press attention to the tiny village of Waterbeach for this celebrated event in the horticultural calendar, which can attract over a thousand enthusiasts – travelling from far and wide to gawp at this incomparable hyacinth spectacle.
The lines of multicoloured hyacinths stretch to horizon. They seem to sing against the black soil. The rain makes them shine and then the sun makes them glow, luminous with light beneath a dark East Anglian sky. Alan Shipp & I stood alone together in the field contemplating the hyacinths in silent pleasure – until the storm broke, when we took shelter in Alan’s greenhouse where he told me the astonishing story of his life in hyacinths, as the rain hammered on the glass and the wind rattled the panes around us.
“In the eighteen-eighties my grandfather, Thomas Shipp, won a pony and whip in a raffle. To put it to some use, he managed to borrow a harness and cart, and went round door to door selling vegetables. Then he bought a piece of ground and started growing his own, and that is this piece of ground. That was how it all started, growing fruit and vegetables.
Eventually when my father, Kenneth Shipp, got involved, he started wholesaling the produce we grew ourselves. In the fifties, we started selling imported fruit too which we used to bring up from Spitalfields Market on Monday and Wednesday each week.
At the entrance to the Floral Market on Lamb St in Spitalfields was the Floral Cafe and I can still remember the bacon sarnies. It was a whole slice of fried gammon between two pieces of bread. We used to try and get there at four-thirty or five – it was a wonderful atmosphere. The owner was a chap called Leonard Swindley. I said to him once, ‘I’ve seen the porters just walk behind the counter, make themselves a jug of tea and disappear. You can’t carry on like that, you’re being robbed!’ He replied, ‘Can you think of a happier way of losing money?’ I left the argument defeated.
We stopped selling produce after one of our salesmen left and set up on his own in opposition. We had been growing acres and acres ourselves but the method of vegetable production changed out of all recognition. We would have a little plot of a couple of hundred square metres of leeks that we would plant by hand but today, two miles away, there is a field of one hundred and forty-five acres of leeks. To get a reasonable living, we needed a larger farm but I know of no land that has come up for rent in Waterbeach in the last thirty years.
So in 1985, I decided I could best increase the output per acre by becoming a hyacinth grower. It was just sheer chance. There was a clearance sale at a bulb nursery at the the other side of Cambridge, including hyacinth bulbs. So I bought one hundred, twenty each of five different varieties, and planted them because I had always been a very keen gardener. After the leaves died down, I dug them up and moved them elsewhere but there was one that I missed. It had rolled under a shrub. When I found it next summer, it had put its roots down but the rest of the bulb had been eaten away where it was exposed and, upon this surface, small bulbs had formed. The slugs had actually illustrated for me the method of propagating hyacinths.
I thought, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing this,’ so I got a planting stock from Taylors Bulbs of Holbeach. Their general manager gave me advice, he said, ‘Alan, don’t grow many varieties.’ I didn’t really heed his advice because I now have two hundred and forty-three. And that’s how I got started!
I discovered there was a National Collection of Hyacinths at Barnard Castle and I got in touch to say that, as I was the only hyacinth grower in the country, I was willing to propagate for them free of charge. They brought me two bulbs each of fifty varieties that I propagated and which became the nucleus of my collection. I seemed to come up against a wall, regarding getting more varieties, after one hundred and eight varieties. Then I got a letter from a lady in Lithuania who had a collection of hyacinths that she had assembled from all over the former Soviet Union – things I’ve never heard of, things that we thought were extinct! She’d got the names but knew nothing but about them so I sent her my research and we exchanged bulbs.
I thought I had missed double-flowered yellow hyacinths by one hundred years but lo-and-behold she had got two – one with a name and one unidentified. The one with the name was in catalogues from 1897 and the other I grew as ‘unidentified double-yellow hyacinth.’ Then in 2013, by sheer chance, a friend of mine came across an illustration of it by Mary Delany in the British Library. That was the world’s first double-yellow hyacinth, introduced in 1770! When it was introduced, it was £800 a bulb yet Mary Delany had painted it, so I wondered how she got access. But it was reported she had contact with Court and it was George III’s bulb that she illustrated at the time he was at Kew Palace in Kew Gardens. So that was a breakthrough.
I am on the Royal Horticultural Society’s Bulb Committee. It was the ‘Daffodil & Tulip Committee’ but, in 2012, the remit embraced all bulbs and we had an intake of other specialists. One of them was Alan Street from Avon Bulbs who regularly wins a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. ‘Alan,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an unusual hyacinth, it’s red and white. I can tell you’ve heard of it by the look on your face.’ It was Gloria Mundi.
Hyacinth Mania was a hundred years after Tulip Mania. It was started by the Scottish Horticulturalist Peter Voorhelm who found a white double hyacinth with a rosy coloured centre in 1708. Previously, all double hyacinths had been discarded as inferior because they are deformed by extra petals in the middle, but he so liked this one that he propagated it and called it Konig Van Groot-Brettanje in honour of William of Orange – and that started Hyacinth Mania for white doubles with coloured centres.
Gloria Mundi was a lost variety of white double with a coloured centre in the catalogues in 1767. Alan Street had a friend in Switzerland called Ingrid Dingwell and Ingrid had a gardening friend who was a lorry driver called Theo, who took a load of humanitarian aid to Romania during the Ceaucescu era to a remote village with a population of three hundred and seventy-odd souls. Theo’s friend fell in love with a local girl and married her, and Theo was given hospitality by the bride’s father at the wedding. To show his gratitude, Theo gave the bride’s father a pocket watch and the old man asked Theo to help himself to any plant growing in the garden, including bulbs of a hyacinth called Gloria Mundi. Theo gave them to Ingrid who sent them to Alan Street who grew them for fifteen years, oblivious of what he had. The year after I identified them, Alan took a pot to the RHS and they were given an award, two hundred and fifty years after the variety had been lost.
I cannot say that what I do is much of a business, it is more a hobby that gives a little bit of income and the selling of the bulbs has financed the conservation scheme. Without my work, the National Collection of Hyacinths would have just disappeared. I have saved well over a hundred varieties of hyacinths from extinction.
I love hyacinths. There is their fragrance, there is their beauty. There is no other flower that can give you this range of colours at the end of March. If someone gave me a paint chart, I could match every colour on it with hyacinths. I would have a job to get black but I could get pretty close to it.
They are so fascinating. They are all evolved from just the one wild species growing from eight hundred to a thousand metres in the hills at the border of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. It is believed that the Romans may have brought them to Europe because there is a sub-species which grows on the Mediterranean coast of France. How did hyacinths get from the Levant to there, unless they were taken as bulbs by the Romans and gone feral?
The first recorded introduction of hyacinths to Europe was by the Flemish Botanist Carolus Clusius who was appointed Prefect of the imperial gardens in Vienna in 1573 by Ferdinand II. Ferdinand’s ambassador to Turkey was Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq and he brought back tulips, crocuses, cyclamen and hyacinths to the palace gardens – all the bulbs from the Levant. Unfortunately, Ferdinand died that year but Clusius got a job at the botanic garden in Leyden and took the bulbs with him. That was the start of the Dutch bulb industry.
Clusius may have introduced hyacinths to Britain when he visited in 1590 and John Gerard records growing them in his garden in London in 1597. Hyacinths would undoubtably have been included among the ‘florists’ flowers,’ along with tulips, carnations, auriculas and roses, grown competitively in the East End during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Victorian era, florists’ competitions were rampant up and down the country, and hyacinths always featured.
Hyacinths have formed my life. They have got me onto the RHS Bulb Committee, brought me lots of friends and won me worldwide recognition – probably got me into the Rotary Club too. To be honest, I could not imagine what my life would have been like without hyacinths. How did I ever live without them?”
Alan Shipp, National Hyacinth Collection, Waterbeach, Cambridge, CB25 9NB.
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Cockney Cats
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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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Schroedinger, Shoreditch Church Cat
Doorkins Magnificat, Southwark Cathedral Cat
The Cats of Spitalfields (Part One)
Cockney Ding Dong
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The illustrations of Charles Keeping burned themselves into my consciousness as a child and I have loved his work ever since. A major figure in British publishing in the last century, Keeping illustrated over one hundred books (including the entire novels of Dickens) and won the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie Medals for his superlative talent.
In 1975, Keeping published ‘Cockney Ding Dong,’ in which he collected songs he remembered sung at home as a child. Illustrated with tender portraits of his extended family, the book is an unusual form of autobiography, recreating an entire cultural world through drawing and popular song.
I visited the Keeping Gallery at Shortlands in Kent to meet Vicky and Sean Keeping who talked to me about their father’s work, as we sat in the family home where they grew up and where much of his work is now preserved and displayed for visitors. You can read my interview at the end of this selection of illustrations from ‘Cockney Ding Dong.’
Illustrations copyright © Estate of Charles Keeping
The Gentle Author – So why did your father create ‘Cockney Ding Dong’ ?
Vicky Keeping – We come from a family – he came from a family – where they all got together. They’d have their beer, they enjoyed their beer, and their Guinness – some of the women drank Guinness – and they would all sing and his Uncle Jack would play the piano. And everybody had their own song, so people would give their song and Dad loved that. We still know them all still, because we loved it, and people didn’t say, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to do it!’ They just got up and sang, and it was lovely and the songs were all from the music hall.
The Gentle Author – But he wasn’t a Cockney – where was he was from?
Vicky Keeping – He was from Vauxhall and he was born in Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth. He was very much brought up by the female side of his family. His father passed away when he was ten, he had a burst ulcer. He was a driver on the Daily Star.
Sean Keeping – Before that, his father had been a professional boxer between about 1912 and 1922. He had many professional fights. I know he definitely fought the British champion at the time and won! A chap called Ernie Rice.
His father came from a very poor family and he was orphaned. They had a watercress stall in Lambeth Walk but they died in the workhouse. His mother’s family were also Londoners from Lambeth who came from a nautical background – his grandfather had been a sailor in the Merchant Navy. In the eighteenth century, they had come up to London from the West Country. Like many families, they had not originated in London.
Vicky Keeping – His grandfather was very important to Dad, because he was a great storyteller and would tell stories from his voyages and the different people he met and he was – I suppose – a bit ahead of his time because he was welcoming to all and would speak very positively about the people he met around the world. Dad loved hearing his stories, so he learnt from his grandfather that storytelling was important. That came through to us as well – when we sat round the family tea table we were encouraged to tell stories.
Very sadly, Dad’s dad and Dad’s grandfather passed away in the same year – in 1934 – when Dad was ten. It left Dad and his sister Grace and their mum Eliza very poorly off, but they lived in this extended family with Dad’s granny who was a very strong influence. Dad idolised her and his aunties, and they thought he was the blonde blue-eyed boy and they loved him dearly.
Sean Keeping – They lived in a small terraced house in 74 Vauxhall Walk, which was right alongside the market, and Dad’s early influences were not just his family but also the characters in Vauxhall Market – those often crop up in his books.
Vicky Keeping – One of the things that Dad loved to do in the garden was to look through a little knot hole to see the Schweppes bottling plant and the workhorses and that was something that never left him, that memory of horses.
There was no obvious creativeness in his background, but Dad said his father used to come home – because he worked in print – and bring home paper, and Dad’s sister Grace used to write a story and Dad would illustrate it.
Sean Keeping – He was not a child who would have gone running around the streets, they were children who would sit at home writing a story and drawing. From a very young age, Dad showed a fantastic aptitude for drawing and we’ve got some drawings of his from when he was twelve and thirteen, and they are really fantastic – showing a London of working horses and working people, that’s what he was trying to depict in his drawings.
Vicky Keeping – He was called up in the Second World War but he worked for Clowes the printers when he left school at thirteen. He was not a particularly great scholar at school. One of the things was that he found difficult was that he was left-handed and the teachers would try to get him to write with his right hand.
Sean Keeping – Working for Clowes the printers, he would go around on a horse & cart delivering paper, and that was where he met one of the characters who had a great influence on him – Tom Cherry. Many of the burly-looking men driving a horse through London in Dad’s pictures – they’re Tom Cherry, and usually he drew a little boy sitting next to him which was Dad. Tom had a great influence, telling him stories about London and the people of London.
Vicky Keeping – Dad became a Telegrapher on a frigate and he was on the boat at D-Day. After the war, he tried to get into Art College but that was very difficult, so he worked collecting pennies from gas meters. He worked for the Gas Light & Coke Company and he would go around on a bicycle, with a big sack on his shoulder with all the pennies in it, going from door to door in North Kensington. He used to tell us funny stories. At that time, North Kensington was a poor area and I think he got a lot out of the characters he met there, but he hated working for a company, for a boss, and he decided he wanted to do something better.
He went to night classes at the Regent St Polytechnic but, because he left school at thirteen with no formal qualifications and had been through the war, it was very difficult for him to get in at first. He tried and tried, and eventually he spent time in a psychiatric hospital due to his experiences in the War. I think it was also to do with his father. When his father and his grandfather died in the same year, they were laid out in the front room and – as a ten year old – Dad had to go and kiss them. That had a profound effect on him. He spent six months in a psychiatric hospital and two weeks of those were in a deep sleep. Yet he talked about the great characters he met there and there was a Psychiatrist, Dr Sargent, who knew Dad should go to Art College and he supported him in writing letters – and eventually that’s what happened.
Sean Keeping – When Dad went to Art College, he had to fight hard to get a grant because, at that stage, his mother had been widowed for a number of years and she had a job cleaning, so there was not a lot of money around. But eventually, he got a grant to go to Regent St Polytechnic. Right after the war, there were two types of students – those that had just come out of the forces who were much more mature and those who had come directly from school. So it was an interesting mix of people and mix of cultures.
The Gentle Author – How did he set out to make an income as an illustrator?
Sean Keeping – Dad was not motivated by making a career or making money or even motivated – I think – by success. Dad was motivated by one thing and that was doing what he wanted to do – drawing pictures of things that he wanted to draw pictures of – so he never really thought about a career. But then he got a job on the Daily Herald, drawing the strip cartoon and that started to pay very well, and from that he was able to move out of the council flat that he lived in with his mother in Kennington and buy a small terraced house in Crystal Palace.
When they were looking for houses, once he was making money from the strip cartoon, they looked in two areas – one was Crystal Palace and the other was Chelsea. Now the idea that you might choose Crystal Palace or Chelsea to look for a house nowadays is an strange idea, but they decided on Crystal Palace!
(Transcription by Rachel Blaylock)
Visit The Keeping Gallery at Shortlands in Kent where you can see the work of both Charles & Renate Keeping preserved in their family home. Visits are by appointment arranged through the website and Shortlands is a short train ride from Victoria.
Fran May’s Brick Lane Market
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Shall we take a walk around Brick Lane with Photographer Fran May on a Sunday in 1976?
Photographs copyright © Fran May
You may also like to take a look at the earlier selection
In The Orchards Of Kent
BOOKING NOW THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER
When the green shoots are sprouting and the leaves unfurling, who can resist an excursion to view the cherry blossom at the National Collection of Fruit Trees at Brogdale in Kent? This is the largest collection of fruit in the world – as the guides proudly remind you – with two hundred and eighty-five types of cherry among over two thousand varieties of fruit, including apples, pears, plums, currants, quinces and medlars.
As if this were not remarkable enough, I was informed that this particular corner of Kent – at the edge of Faversham – offers the very best conditions in the world for growing cherries. They may have originated in the forests of Central Asia, travelling east and west along the Silk Road before they were introduced by order of Henry VIII nearby at Sittingbourne, but here – I was assured – they have found their ultimate home.
The constitution of the soil in Kent is ideal for cherries and the temperate climate, in which the tender saplings are sheltered from the wind by long hedges of hornbeam, produces a delicacy of flavour in the ripe fruit which cannot by matched by the climactic extremes of the Mediterranean.
It was with these thoughts in mind that I advanced up the track, lined with decorative blossom in those livid pink tones so beloved of mid-twentieth century town planners, before turning the corner of a long hedge to confront the orchard of cherries. There are two specimens of each variety regimented in lines that stretch into the distance. The cherry trees are upon parade, awaiting your inspection and eager to display their flamboyant regalia.
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John Claridge’s East End Portraits
Boy, E7 1961 – “He was the son of a friend of my father’s – Peter, an electrician who worked down the docks. To find out if anything was live, he’d stick his finger in the socket!”
Eaten up by the consumption of chocolate, this lad is entirely unaware of the close proximity of photographer John Claridge‘s lens. And, judging from the enthusiasm with which he is sticking the chocolate in his mouth, it looks like he took after his father when it came to poking fingers into holes.
These vibrant photographs reveal the range of John’s approaches to portraiture. “Most of the time I ask,” he admitted to me, “and sometimes people ask me to take their pictures, but at other times you just see something and grab it. I’ve no single way of doing it.”
“I talk to them and it is through talking that you can open a door,” he continued, ” if you’ve known someone for a while, it is very different from if they only have ten minutes to give me their soul. So I never set people up to look foolish, I treat them with dignity because I need to win their trust.”
Offering a variety of moods and contrasted energies, these portraits share a common humanity and tenderness for their subjects. In particular, John’s self-portrait fascinates me. He says he took it in a semi-derelict toilet “for the hell of it,” but, in retrospect, it is emblematic of his extraordinary project – he was a photographer in a world that was spiralling down.
The body of work from which these photos have been selected – of which I have published hundreds in weekly instalments over the last few years – is believed to be the largest collection of images by any single photographer covering this period in the East End. In their quality, their number, and their range, they will come to represent the eye of history – but it makes them especially interesting that they were taken by an insider. When he took these photographs, John Claridge was an East Ender looking at the East End. John was taking portraits of his own people.
Clocking Off, Wapping 1968 – “He was a neighbour and I arranged to meet him down at the warehouse after work.”
Boxer, E16 1969 – “A chap putting on his wraps at Terry Lawless’ gym in Canning Town. I walked in and I was talking to the guys – and I just took the picture.”
Man at Booth House Salvation Army, Whitechapel 1982 – “I printed this picture for the first time the other day. They guy is somewhere else, but I didn’t notice until this week the man with the camera taking the picture on the television.”
Children at the Salvation Army Care Centre, Whitechapel 1970s – “Some children were permanently in care and others were just there for the day. I can’t tell which these were. People only came in these places if there was a problem, if their dad was in the nick or their mum couldn’t take care of them.”
Worker at the Bell Foundry, Whitechapel 1982 – “You expect a man who works lugging bells around to be brawnier than this, but he’s got his cardigan on and he looks like a watchmaker.”
Antiques Dealer, E6 1962 – “He sold everything, penny farthings, paintings, cigarette cards … everything. I used to go down there and see him, and have cup of tea and poke around.”
My Dad in the Back Yard, E13 1961 – “He had a deck chair and he sat in the garden with a cup of tea. I said to him, ‘Just sit and don’t do anything,’ and he’d just laugh. Great times! There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about him.”
Mates in Wapping, 1961 – “I think we were going down to the Prospect for a drink. I was seventeen years old, so everyone’s seventeen. It was Sunday and everyone’s got polished shoes. I haven’t been in touch, but they’re still around – I haven’t seen them for years.”
Man and Mannequin, Spitalfields 1965 – “This was just off the market. He’s listening to a portable radio on earphones. It looks like he has a mate with him and their bellies are almost touching.”
Edward and Mrs Simpson, Spitalfields 1967 – “Another kind of portrait. I love the military jackets for sale and Edward’s got one on, while Wallace is hiding and pointing him out.”
Caretaker at Wilton’s Music Hall, Wapping 1964 – “It said, ‘Please ring for caretaker.’ So I rang for the caretaker. I said, ‘Are you the caretaker?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘May I take a photo of you?’ and he gave me this lovely smile.”
Self-Portrait, E14 1982 – “It was an old toilet in Poplar, in use but at the end of its day. The mirror was still there. People asked me if I ‘d done self-portraits, so I thought I’d do one down there for the hell of it.”
My Mates, 1961 – “We all went out from the East End for the day somewhere. It might have been Southend, Brighton or Clacton, but I remember it was freezing.”
Man in a Knitted Hat, E17 1964 – “This was at Walthamstow Town Hall. He’d finished his fight, had a shower, put his hat on to keep warm, and we were chatting over a cup of tea. He was a visiting fighter from the States and his shirt says, ‘The Big Apple.'”
Woman in Her Kitchen, E12 1969 – “She had no home and a young family, and was staying in a building that was derelict. The council didn’t want people to use it, so there was barbed wire outside. It was a shelter, and they asked me to go down and take pictures to show how people were living there.”
Tony Moore and Joe Gallagher, Wapping 1970 – “Tony was an ex-heavyweight boxer and Joe was my ex-father-in-law. They look like they’re about to sort somebody out.”
My Friend JB, E14 1972 – “We met when we were both fifteen years old and working at McCann Erickson. We were both Eastenders. He was an incredible designer. He had a wonderful sense of humour. He died of a heart attack. He looked like a villain, and one day we went to New York together, and were in Little Italy in a restaurant, and this guy came in and said, ‘I remember you!’ I said, ‘We’d better get out of this place.'”
My Son, Spitalfields, 1982 – “I went along on a home visit with the Salvation Army and I saw this picture on the sideboard. I said, ‘Is that your son?’ and she said, ‘Yes, he was killed in the war.'”
Headless Bear, E2 1964 – “I just came across it. He had his head burnt off. He was lying there at the edge of a bomb site.”
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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