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In 1930, basketmaker and artist Henry Silk sits alone in his sparsely furnished room in Rounton Rd in Bow surrounded by few personal possessions. He glances in the mirror and realises that he is no longer young. Yet the pair of medals from the Great War laid on the table remind him how lucky he is to be alive.

He wakes in the camp bed in the early morning and the empty green room is flooded with light as dawn rises over the rooftops of the East End and washing flaps on the line. Weaving baskets suits a contemplative nature and, when Henry returns from the kitchen with a cup of tea, he sits at the table with the pink cloth and studies the objects upon the surface in the morning sunlight.

The forms and colours of these familiar things fascinate him. His pipe, his purse and his pocket knife that he carried for years are as commonplace to him as his own hands. Each day, Henry paints a picture to catalogue his personal possessions, comprising the modest landscape of his existence. It is a whole life in a handful of paintings.

Henry Silk and his sister

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Viscountess Boudicca

Ten years ago today, on August 3rd 2016, Viscountess Boudicca was decanted from her council flat in Bethnal Green to Uttoxeter. Last week, she paid a rare visit to London, her first in seven years, en route to visit her mother in Braintree. We met at the Bishopsgate Institute and it provided the opportunity for Viscountess to give me an account of her Uttoxeter years. Regrettably, she has encountered a similar level of grief there on account of her difference – harassment from neighbours exacerbated by lack of sympathy or any support from the authorities –  just as in Bethnal Green. Yet throughout it all she retains an heroic level of moral courage and resilience, thanks in no small part to her colourful private life involving Guy Fawkes, Henry VIII and Erik Hosebonde.

“The trouble with Uttoxeter is that I gave notice to quit a month after I arrived, September 2016, and the woman from the council said, ‘I knew that we made a terrible mistake. We had another of ‘your kind’ and we had problems with them.’ So I said, ‘Why the hell did you force me up here?’ but then she said, ‘Tower Hamlets won’t reverse the decision.’

The problem was that all my neighbours, they came round about seven o’clock one night with a petition. They said, ‘We want you to go.’ The reason that they gave was that ‘You’re a raving pouf! We don’t like your type. You’ve come into our town and taken our place’. They were bigoted country bumpkins. So I said, ‘You can send me back to London if you’ll pay for it. I’m not going to be intimidated by you.’ Then I got all the hate notes and, if I go into a shop, they make sure I am the last to be served.

One bloke who lived opposite didn’t have any money, he was waiting for Universal Credit. He said, ‘I’m starving, my friends won’t help me.’ I said, ‘I thought you country people stick together.’ But they said, ‘Why should we help him?’ So I thought, goodness, everything about this place gets on my wick.

I cooked him dinner for a month until one day as he arrived, when they was all outside, I asked him, ‘How’s it going?’ and he said, ‘Mind your own business, you pouf or I’ll kill you.’ Then they all laughed, they thought it was highly funny. So I said, ‘I didn’t see you lot helping him.’ This is how it’s been going on. It has never been a home and it never can be because of what they do.

But I have my ghosts who come and see me. As you know, when we went to the Tower of London in 2016, I met Guy Fawkes and he said, ‘I’ve missed you, where have you been?’ Previously in the January of  2014, I had visited Hampton Court. I felt I needed to go there because Henry VIII’s face appeared to me in the bathroom mirror. He normally appears as a skeleton with a hood wrapped round him but I saw him in the flesh. After that he visited regularly and made me sign paperwork to confirm that our vows had been renewed.

Henry is the kind of person who will do something and think later, it’s hit first and regret it after, but we get on extremely well. He has his moods and starts like everyone else, and when the neighbours are playing up he has made himself known. When I had my Tarot cards read, I discovered that I was Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour. I gave birth to Edward VI but our happiness was short-lived because I died sixteen days afterwards. He thinks of me now like an old pair of slippers, comfortable.

Two days after I arrived in Uttoxeter, he appeared. Guy Fawkes was the resident ghost and he was already there, but Henry decided he would come too. The problem was that including my three husbands, Henry, Guy and Erik (My first husband), I have eight in total. At first, they hated the sight of each other but I spend time with them all and when I die they will come with me. It’s like I am a passport to another world. Henry is stuck between the two worlds at the moment because the women whose heads he chopped off put a curse on him.

In the year 873, I married Erik Hosebonde in a pagan wedding in February. I grew up with him in Sweden. After we married, we used to come to England on raids to Norfolk. We did reconnaissance in 874. The longship would drop us off and we would spend a week surveying the area and making sure there were no rocks along the coastline. They would come at night to raid the Anglo-Saxon stronghold, looting and burning so the souls of those they killed would not return. My first life ended on the 6th May 878.

Since I left London, I have learnt to mistrust people because of their behaviour but, because I have my ghosts, I feel that I am on the outside of life and occasionally I have these out of the body experiences. I lie on the floor and I see my body drift away and it usually goes off to Hampton Court with Henry. The neighbours in Uttoxeter are either throwing stones or telling me to go and die. There’s so much hatred towards me. If it wasn’t for the ghosts I would have ended it. They give me strength. Henry, Guy and Erik are all hot-headed, and they’ll say, ‘Stick two fingers up to them.’

I have had so many horrendous times but I treat people as I would like to be treated because I believe that if I treat people fairly, and not prejudge them, then they might do the same to me.”

Viscountess Boudicca with Henry VIII and Edward VI at Hampton Court

Viscountess Boudicca and Henry VIII at the supermarket

Henry VIII and Viscountess Boudicca at the television studio recording Henry’s Christmas message

Erik Hosebonde and Viscountess Boudicca in the ninth century

Erik Hosebonde and Viscountess Boudicca arrive by longship in Norfolk by night with Erik’s twin brother in the background

Follow Viscountess Boudicca on Instagram @fawkesboudicca

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Fred & Marie Iles with Smudge

Fred Iles was born half a mile from his allotment in Stepney and his wife Marie grew up in Garden St that once stood where the allotment is today. They were married in St Dunstan’s, just across the road, and lived fifty yards away in Rectory Sq. As for Smudge, she is a local too and gave birth to two litters in the allotment shed.

Fred grows potatoes, cabbages, strawberries, gooseberries, runner beans and nasturtiums to draw the bees in his allotment, which is a small enclosure at the heart of Stepney City Farm. Surrounded by on all sides by other plots, this is a secluded corner sheltered from the wind where Fred can pass his time gardening peacefully in the company of his cat.

Fred had a good crop of strawberries this year and, while boney old Smudge patrolled the territory, Marie searched among the runner beans and discovered the first pickable specimens of the season.

“We never had a garden of our own. My grandfather Edmund lived with us when I was a child, he had come up to London from Bristol originally with two children and he ended up with four sons and three daughters. He was a great pigeon fancier and our backyard was all pigeon lofts where he kept three hundred pigeons – that’s a lot of pigeons. He was very successful at it and when he was dying he called me into his bedroom and showed me his box of medals and asked me to take one. I picked the silver one because it had a picture of a pigeon on it. There were gold ones I could have picked but I was too young to understand. He told me that Iles is a French name and that my ancestor fought in Napoleon’s army and was brought over to Bristol as prisoner of war and then stayed.

I was born in 1926 just half a mile from here in Hartford St, in a little cobbled yard called Wades Place. My father William was a seaman in his younger days and he went all over the world. I don’t know how he learnt about classical music but he was very knowledgeable and he used to play the Gounod’s Faust and Viennese waltzes on his harmonica for me.

I was here for part of the Blitz. It started on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm. I was in the yard and I heard the roar of the aeroplanes. I was thirteen and I thought it was our planes coming back, but it wasn’t. My father took me inside and we sat under the stairs which we thought was the safest place. I couldn’t see anything but I could hear the sound of the anti-aircraft guns and the engines of the planes and, at my age, I found it very exciting.

By the time they came back to bomb the docks, we had an Anderson shelter in the garden and we sat there listening to the sound of bombs dropping. My father decided it was too much and sent me and my mother and my sister to his brother in Oxford. He worked in the Morris factory which, at that time, was building  aeroplanes and he got me job at fifteen making cowling panels for the side engines of Hawker Hurricanes. It was exciting work but it was miserable waiting in the cold for the bus to go to work at seven in the morning.

I got called up to the army on D-Day, June 6th 1944 and I was eighteen years old on my birthday, 30th June. They summoned me for 20th July, the day they tried to assassinate Hitler, so I had three weeks freedom before they put me in the army. By the time I’d learnt to shoot a gun, for some unknown reason they put me in the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers. I was posted to the anti-aircraft guns around London and then they sent me to an experimental laboratory in Shoeburyness where they were working on radar. I found I had an easy time for three and a half years until I was discharged in 1947.

I went to the Labour Exchange and the man said, ‘There’s not much going but I like the look of you so why not come and work on this side of the counter? And when a good job comes in you can get it.’ I worked there for six months, and my father was unemployed and he came in and signed on the dole. After six months, the London Electricity Board came along and I worked there for twenty-six years, at first in the office and then as a meter fixer.

When I started here at the allotment, it was quite hard. It was still a bomb site and I had to clear the bomb damage before I could plant anything. There were just six of us pensioners then and I needed something to do in my spare time. They retired me at sixty in 1986, but I started my allotment here four years before that. Smudge turned up on the allotment one day, fifteen years ago. And I thought ‘poor old cat’ and decided to feed it, so she made the allotment her home and now I have to come and feed her every day.”

Fred aged five with his sister Phyllis and cousin Rosamund in 1931, taken by Griffiths in the Roman Rd

Fred in uniform at eighteen  years old, 1944

Fred and his pal Gimlet in Shoeburyness

Fred stands at the base of the aerial in Shoeburyness.

Fred (left) enjoys a pint with Bernard & Jack at Shoeburyness in 1946

Fred (top left) with pals on the beach at Shoeburyness

Fred & Marie get married at St Dunstan’s Stepney, 1st August 1953

Fred & Marie on their wedding day.

Fred in the seventies.

Fred & Marie with their prizewinning dog Rufus, in July 1984 at Stepney City Farm – when Rufus won the dog with the waggliest tail and best mongrel.

Fred grew some magnificent hollyhocks on the allotment in the nineties

“Smudge turned up on the allotment fifteen years ago. And I thought ‘poor old cat’ and I decided to feed it, so she made the allotment her home and now I come every day to feed her.”

Fred and Smudge

Gooseberry time in Stepney

Fred & Marie Iles celebrated their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary in 2018

Stepney City Farm runs a Farmers’ Market every Saturday from 10am – 3pm, selling food from local producers at affordable prices.

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Marie Iles, Machinist

Vera Hullyer, Parishioner of St Dunstan’s

Ian Lowe, Blacksmith

Huge thanks to Farokh Talati, Head Chef at St John Bread & Wine, for so generously baking this magnificent Apple Strudel for the guests on The Gentle Author’s Tour of Whitechapel this Sunday. Click here to book for a Whitechapel Tour

At this time of year, the canopy of trees over-arching Arnold Circus is an awe inspiring sight to behold, as if a forest clearing had been magically transported and placed at the centre of a maze of city streets. From within the tiny park you see the towering red brick mansion blocks framed by trees, imparting an atmosphere of lyrical romance entirely in tune with the Arts & Crafts ethos of Britain’s first Council Estate.

Yet, if you wander further within the Estate, you come upon satellite gardens contrived by the residents using old baths, canes and twigs as a means to create temporary vegetable plots among the yards between the buildings. The idiosyncratic forms of these curious contraptions hung with glinting things offer a sympathetic complement to the regularity of the architecture and it makes your heart leap to see cherished home grown vegetables nurtured so tenderly in unexpected circumstances.

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Winter Light at Arnold Circus

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Apart from memorable excursions outside London as an evacuee, Marie Iles lived her entire life within a quarter mile of Stepney and it suited her very well. Those wartime experiences taught her the meaning and importance of home, yet living close to Stepney City Farm she still enjoyed a reminder of the rural world she grew to love as a child.

A natural storyteller, Marie laid out the tale of her formative years for me with confidence and eloquent precision. Blessed with independent thought from an early age, Marie quickly learnt to stand up for herself and to appreciate the moral quality of people’s actions, whilst she was suffering enforced exile from her beloved Stepney amidst the tumultuous events of a world war.

It was the meeting with her husband Fred Iles that provided the sympathetic resolution of Marie’s dislocated early years and resulted in an enduring relationship which sustained them both for over sixty-five years.

“I was born on 9th August 1930 in Fair St, Stepney, while we were living upstairs in two rooms in my nan’s house, and when I was four or five we moved to Garden St. But I usually lived with my nan – whom everyone knew as Aunt Kit – because I loved her so much.  I had a happy childhood playing in the streets, games like Hopscotch and Knocking Down Ginger. We was always running around and the police would pick us up and take us to Arbor Sq Police Station and give us bread and jam.

One day, I came indoors and my mum and dad had the wireless going and there was a quiet atmosphere, which was very unusual in our house, and I heard the voice of a man saying, ‘And England is at war with Germany.’ So I says to my mum, ‘Are we at war?’ and she says, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are the Germans coming?’ and she said, ‘Yes, but not to Garden St.’

The siren went when I was out shopping with my nan in the old street at the side of St Dunstan’s church and, all of a sudden, there was bombs dropping and aeroplanes. My nan said, ‘You run home to your mum quick,’ but I wouldn’t leave her. So she said, ‘Run!’ and I ran on the spot to show I was running. Eventually, we got home to Garden St and my mum, who had a phobia that  she might be taken ill or die with dirty feet, was saying, ‘Get a bowl of water, I’ve got to wash my feet.’ When the bombing eased up, my nan said, “I’ll take the two girls home where there is an Anderson shelter,’ and, as we came out, it was a terrifying sight – where there had been houses, there was just piles of bricks and rubble, and there was a horrible smell of smoke and, that night, the sky was red with the light of the fires.

We stayed at my nan’s a few weeks after that, until one day I was at my mother’s and she said, ‘You’re going on a holiday, you, Kitty and Johnny.’ We was excited! My mum pinned a label onto each of us with our name and address on it, and filled a carrier bag for each of us with our belongings. We went to school and there was a couple of coaches waiting, and my nan said, ‘Write to us and always say your prayers every night,’ and she put three sixpences in my hand. I thought, ‘I’ve got money and I’m going on holiday,’ and I was pleased. We all got on the coach together, me and Kitty and Johnny. Then, as we were going, I dropped my three sixpences in the excitement and it felt like the end of the world – not because of the money, but because my nan had given them to me.

We arrived at what I later found out was Denham. We was dropped at the corner of the street, and ladies came over and picked who they fancied. Johnny went with a Mrs Burrell, a lovely little country lady with red cheeks. Kitty and me, we went with Mrs Rook. She had a nice house, that was what we would call ‘posh,’ and she had a grown up son and daughter, Ken and Joyce, and her husband Mr Rook. Yet I hated it, I was so homesick and cried every night for a fortnight but my sister loved it. I asked her, ‘Why don’t you get homesick?’ She said, ‘Because you are here. Wherever you are, I am alright.’ I was her elder sister.

One morning, Mrs Rook said, ‘Why don’t you put on your coats and go out for a walk?’ And the first person we met was Mr Goddard, my headmaster from school in Stepney. He took hold of my hand and asked, ‘Have you got a nice place to stay?’ I said, ‘Yes, but I hate it I miss my home.’ So he said, ‘Look Marie, do you want me to tell your mother what you said and have her worrying about you?’ And I said, ‘ No, don’t tell her,’ and, after that, I was alright and I had a happy time. And that was when I first noticed flowers and the trees opening up. Once there was snow, and Mrs Rook sent me to Denham village for an errand, and I saw these flowers peeking up through the snow – crocuses – and I thought it was a little miracle, that flowers grew in the snow.

Then it seemed the bombing stopped and they took us back to London, and we was there for a while until they sent us off again. They put us on a train at Paddington and we stopped overnight at an army barracks and slept on the floor, and me and Kitty cuddled up under a blanket. Other kids were crying but I wasn’t homesick. In the morning, the soldiers gave us breakfast of ham and hard-boiled eggs and tea and bread and jam. We travelled on and we came to this little village near Rugby called ‘Crick.’ A Mrs Watts picked us out and she lived in Cromwell Cottage, a nice house, and she gave us three meals a day but this lady had no compassion whatsoever. She took us because she didn’t want to do war work. She turned us out at seven-thirty to go to school, and she used to go to the pictures in Rugby twice each week and we had to wait outside in the bitter cold until she came home.

When the summer comes and you’re playing outside, it doesn’t seem so bad. But, one day, we’d had our dinner and were going back to school, and I knew she had a basket of apples in the larder, so I decided to pinch one. We each took bites of the apple, sharing it between the two of us on the way to school. When we got in that evening, she says to me, ‘You thieving Cockney! You come from the slums of London and you don’t appreciate a good home.’ Now I was always a bit of a rebel – I think it was because of growing up with so many brothers – so I thought, ‘I won’t stand for this.’ So I said to Kitty, ‘We’re not going to stay here with this wicked lady.’

Down at the bottom of the hill, lived an old lady and her husband – they must have been seventy. I went there and knocked on the door and asked, ‘Could you take two evacuees?’ She said, ‘Who are they?’ I said, ‘It’s my sister and me.’ She said, ‘Alright, take the old pram and go and get all your things.’ So we went back to Mrs Watts. I said, ‘I’m leaving, I’m going somewhere else to live.’ And her husband, Jack Watts – he was one of the kindest men I ever met – he said, ‘Marie, stop and think what you are doing.’ But I never did, and that night we went down to the old lady and the old man. Talk about ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’! She never cooked, she just gave us a bit of toast sometimes. Then she decided to visit her son and daughter for a holiday, and left us alone there with the old man, her husband. He used to go into the woods all day and cut willow branches and make clothes pegs. Meanwhile, Micky – my little brother – came down because my mother was having another baby up in London. We never had a thing to eat, so we used to go to people’s allotments and pull up raw vegetables and eat them, carrots and even turnips.

There was this plum tree in the garden with this big green plum hanging on it, and before she went the old lady said, ‘I expect to see that big green plum still hanging there when I return.’ But as time went on it got riper and riper, and the day before she was due to return I couldn’t stand it no more. I picked the plum and we all had bites of it – me, Kitty and Micky. Unfortunately, when he knew the owner was due to come home, Micky wet the bed. I took the sheet off and tried to wash it myself but I left it on the line and, when she came home, she asked, ‘What’s this sheet doing on the line?’ And Micky said, ‘I wet the bed,’ and she beat him unmercifully and he hung onto my legs crying, ‘Marie, Marie.’

Once again, rebellion came to the fore, and I said to my brother and sister, ‘Come on, I’m going to walk back to London.’ It was only eighty miles. So, with what money we had, we bought some pears and we were walking up the road and we came to this little bridge and I thought, ‘I can’t walk all that way with these kids, they’re too little.’ I always had a little bag with me and I looked inside and found a stamped addressed envelope that my nan had sent me. It was a Monday, the first day of the school holidays, and I sat down and wrote my tale of woe to my nan, and I posted it and said, ‘Let’s go back.’ And, as the week went on, we seemed to forget about things.

On Friday morning, it was pouring with rain and we got up and came downstairs, and she’d cooked us a big bowl of porridge. She says to me, ‘You’ve written to your granny. You’ve got a letter, your brother’s coming down to pick you up and take you home.‘ I don’t think I ever felt as happy in all my life as I did that morning. Next morning was Saturday. We all got up, didn’t wash, and got all our things together and sat on the grass verge outside the cottage. Jimmy wasn’t on the first bus that came or the second and, by one o’ clock, I was beginning to think, ‘He’s not coming.’ We waited there all this time, and the old woman and old man never called us in to give us a drink or anything.

The four o’ clock bus came and, all of a sudden, I looked up and there was Jimmy coming down the hill. He had a navy blue suit and a red shirt and his tie was blowing in the wind. I said, ‘We’re ready! We’re ready!’ He said, ‘I’ve got to let the lady know that I’m taking you.’ So he went inside and she said, ‘I’ve had a terrible time with those children.’ And he brought us back to London, and back to my dad and my mum who was in hospital having a  new baby, Paul. So I went round to stay with my nan ’til my mum came home and I was beside myself with joy.

Garden St had got bombed and my mum and dad moved to Albert Gardens but my mum never liked it because it was number thirteen, so they moved again to an eight bedroom house – because by then I had seven brothers and one sister – at forty-six Stepney Green. Jimmy went into the army and got wounded in Normandy, Bobby went to Scotland in the army, Johnny was sent to Germany and Micky was sent to Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Then we got the rockets – the doodlebugs –  and that was almost as terrifying as the bombs. You’d hear the engine of a plane and then it stopped and you’d sit there in deathly silence and suddenly there’d be a big explosion. I know it’s a wicked thing to say but you’d think, ‘Thank God it’s not us.’

Then gradually, everyone came back home again to live in Stepney Green and, after everything settled down, I went to work in the rag trade as a machinist. And when I was nineteen, I met my lovely Fred. I was coming home from Victoria Park with my friend Betty and, as we walked past The Fountain pub in the Mile End Rd, there was a coach outside. My friend said, ‘Would you like a ride in a coach?’ And, all of a sudden, Fred appeared in the door of the pub with a pint of beer in his hand and called out to the driver, ‘These two girls are looking for a ride.’ I had never been in a pub but Fred said to me, ‘Hang on, wait ’til I’ve finished this pint and I’ll walk along with you.’ So I said to my friend, ‘Who does he think he is? We don’t know him.’ We carried on walking and I heard footsteps running behind us and I knew it was Freddie and his mate. He came alongside me and said, ‘I’ve got a camera. Would you like me to come round and take your photo?’ And my friend said, ‘Take no notice of him, he’s just making it up. He hasn’t got a camera.’ Freddie said, ‘Do you mind? I’m not speaking to you. I’m speaking to her.’

And when I turned and looked at him, I fell in love with him. They say there’s no such thing as love at first sight but there is. I arranged to meet him the next night on the corner but, when I arrived, he wasn’t there – I didn’t realise he was on the other side of the road, waiting to see if I’d turn up. So I went back home and my mum was looking out the window, and she saw what happened and she said to him, ‘You’re late, young man!’ And we courted for four years because we couldn’t get anywhere to live and then we got married at St Dunstan’s, Stepney, on 1st August 1953. We got two rooms at the top of a block of flats, Dunstan House, Stepney Green. The toilet was on the landing and the sink too, but we thought it was our little paradise.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t have children, our only regret in life. But my sister Kitty, and her son Alan and his wife Susan, they’ve always shared everything with us, and looked after us through thick and thin. And every year, we go to stay with Kitty and we have a really lovely old traditional Christmas. There’s nothing we like better than to go down memory lane together, it helps to keep us all close.”

Marie & Fred in their kitchen in Rectory Sq, Stepney.

Marie, Johnny and Kitty at Denham with Mrs Rook – “I loved the country life, especially when it was conker season and there were ripe apples. If my family had been there, I’d never have left.”

Marie’s sister Kitty, hop-picking with her grandfather after the war.

Marie hits a hole in one.

Marie & Fred’s wedding, 1st August 1953

On honeymoon in Ramsgate August 1953

Marie & Fred go Flamenco.

Kitty with her children, Marie and her mother in the fifties.

Marie and her dog Rufus when they lived in the prefab in Ashfield St.

Marie & Fred at a family wedding in the eighties.

Marie & Fred enjoy an adventure on the river.

The three evacuees grown-up – Johnny, Marie and Kitty.

Fred & Marie celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary on 1st August 2013

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Jack Hanlon gives a rare insight into the fascinating lost world of the Smithfield Meat Trades Institute…

The correct way to sharpen a knife

From the twenties until the eighties, Britain’s foremost technical college for butchers operated in an unassuming building on the corner of Saffron Hill just round the corner from Smithfield Market.

Opening in 1924 and becoming part of the London County Council’s broader technical education project, the Smithfield Meat Trades Institute provided a range of courses ‘for persons engaged in the various branches of the meat trades, and also youths desiring to enter these trades’. The Institute offered a three-year course for over-sixteens resulting in a diploma from the National Federation of Meat Traders, alongside a range of short courses for younger students, and evening classes – on topics such as the theory and practice of refrigeration – for meat industry professionals looking to enhance their skills after-hours.

In its early years, the Institute was at the forefront of formalising education in butchery at a time when the fading out of apprenticeships left a vacuum in the trade’s intergenerational transfer of knowledge and skill. Meanwhile technological developments including the rapid rise of the chilled and frozen meat industry, and a growing field of scientific knowledge about perishable foods, were altering the ways butchery and the meat trade operated.

As one industry commentator reflected in 1928, the previous decade had seen a significant shift in the industry’s means of recording and sharing knowledge: ‘The question of textbooks is a serious difficulty. Hitherto knowledge of the trade has been rather handed down by word of mouth rather than set down in black-and-white. The exigencies of organised teaching require that various practices be made clear on paper. This means that a collection of notes, which will subsequently be elaborated into text-books, is now being prepared and augmented daily [at the Smithfield Institute], together with a number of excellent diagrams.’

In the accompanying photographs of the Institute’s classroom these diagrams of carcasses in various stages of disassembly line the walls, accompanied by three dimensional models of skeletons. At the Smithfield Institute students enjoyed a range of teaching spaces: there were practical butchery classes in the cutting room, everyday business arithmetic and shop etiquette in a model butcher’s shop, and scientific demonstrations in a well-equipped laboratory.

In the interwar years the Institute’s students cut up the meat that would be used for catering in the LCC’s schools and colleges, providing a constant supply of carcasses for practice. Students might spend the morning doing a class in sausage-making before sitting down in the afternoon to study history, biology or accounting. The school’s laboratory was particularly prised, ‘equipped with microscopes and all the appliances necessary for bacteriology and the allied sciences’.

Although not formerly related, the Institute was intimately tied to the neighbouring Market from which it took its name. Many of its lecturers were retired meat traders. Ken Clements, a ‘commodity lecturer’ at the college in the seventies, recalls taking groups of his most committed students on extra-curricular early morning trips to the Market. After testing their knowledge, he would take them to the Cock Tavern for a ‘wozzer’ – a cup of tea with the addition of a shot of whisky (it was-a tea, now it’s a wozzer).

In the fifties, the Institute briefly became the National College of Food Technology, a name that appeared to signify an ambitious future. Yet its decline mirrored that of the Market. In the seventies, the Institute became increasingly reliant on day-release students from supermarkets, including Sainsburys and the Co-operative. But over the coming years these companies, alongside the chain butchers like Dewhurst, took their meat education in-house. Meanwhile, the rise of pre-packed meat led to a rapid decline of the high street butcher and the need for lengthy technical training in meat industry jobs, and the Institute closed in the eighties.

These photographs capture the Smithfield Institute in its heyday, from the twenties to the fifties. While early prospectuses specify male students only, this policy evidently shifted over the decades because there are several images of women taking classes at the college. There are also a few photographs which have been lightly etched and edited with ink and white paint, most likely as part of the process of creating ‘photogravure’ style prints, perhaps for newspapers, textbooks or promotional material.

Diagrams and skeletons were used as teaching aids in the art of butchery

Boys sharpening their blades in the cutting room

Female students study New Zealand lamb in the cutting room

A lone female student amongst a class of male butchers

Boys practice their knife sharpening skills

Female students study the anatomy of a carcass

Boys study the range of products to be derived from beef

Instruction in butchery skills

A retouched photograph of boys studying bones for photogravure reproduction

A retouched photograph of boys studying a carcass for photogravure reproduction

Images courtesy of London College of Communication Archive with permission from University of the Arts Archives & Special Collections Centre

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Can you spot Sheila Bell in this photograph of the residents of Great Eastern Buildings celebrating Victory in Europe Day at the Grey Eagle in Quaker St on 2nd May 1945? Look more closely, there she is sitting in the front row, to the left of the girl in a floppy hat. Sheila has a bow in her hair for this special occasion.

Unfortunately, this picture was not too much use when I met Sheila at Victoria Station recently to hear about her life at Great Eastern Buildings on the corner of Brick Lane and Quaker St. Yet, as Sheila began to tell her story, I quickly recognised the little girl in this photograph of a lifetime ago.

“My grandparents, George & Sarah Keppel, lived in Great Eastern Buildings and my great-grandparents, Emma & Frederic Lewis lived in the same flat before them – before that I do not know. My nan never went out to work, she stayed at home, cooked the dinner and kept the house, and my granddad worked down Spitalfields Market. He started off as a porter but he was a carpenter by trade, so he made the ladders for the guys in the market. He hired two rooms in the next block at the Buildings and did all his carpentry work there. I used walk in there and smell the fresh wood shavings. He had a black iron glue pot and he made me stir it. It looked like toffee but it did not smell like toffee, I can assure you.

My parents lived in the Buildings as well and, as soon as I was born, I was taken to the Buildings, as the fourth generation of my family there. My mother worked in Truman’s Brewery as a bottling girl, she wore a green overall, a white apron and clogs, and my father was a smoked salmon curer in Frying Pan Alley, opposite Liverpool St Station. We lived in flat number sixty-eight Great Eastern Buildings, on the second floor. I was brought up in those Buildings with Jewish, Irish and Maltese, and we all rubbed along very nicely.

There always used to be a lot of workmen in and out of the Buildings, fixing things, and my first memory was of playing with a load of sand and water. Me and my cousins used to make sandcastles in the builders’ sand. That was our life! We lived in two rooms. We shared a wash house with a mangle and three sinks, two normal-sized and one butler’s sink with two taps. There was no hot water and each of the four flats on the landing shared the wash house. If you wanted a bath you had to boil a kettle. We had a tin bath like everybody else and an outside toilet that we shared with the three other families. We took it in turns to clean the toilet on a weekly rota system.

I do not remember a gas stove but I do remember a black range. You could lift the lid with a poker and put coal in. The kettle was always on the hob and there was an oven to the side. On Sunday, my nan would black-lead the range and it used to gleam. It had a white hearth and she used to whiten it, that was her pride and joy. It was always done, and our two rooms were kept clean. One room doubled as a front-room-come-kitchen, -come-everything really. We had old armchairs in there and a settee made of Rexine, that looked like leather but it was plastic and, in the summer, it used to stick to your legs, so we had to put a blanket on it. We had an old piano, I think everybody in those days had a piano. There was a little sink in the corner for the bowl and jug which we kept in the bedroom. That was all you had plus a table and a cupboard.

In the bedroom,  we had a double bed and a single bed, if you had more than one child or if anybody came to stay. Unfortunately, that was how it was. We put up with because we did not know any different. I was the eldest and I had a younger brother. Now my nan had two rooms and my mum had two rooms, so my brother slept in the front room which meant mum and dad had the bedroom, my nan and grandad had the other bedroom and I slept in the other front room on a made-up bed. I used to lie on the floor and listen to the trains shunting in the goodsyard. Both flats were opposite each other across the same landing.

When I was fourteen, the flats were modernised by combining two, so then we had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a lounge. They put in electricity. It was amazing because I had only known gaslight since childhood. We did not know we were born! It was like a palace. I had my own room and my brother had his own room. It was our home and they did not move us out while they modernised, they just worked around us.

As children, we used to love to run through Wheler St Arch because it was always dark and gloomy with gas lamps – it was a dare really. We liked to go down Spitalfields Market and pick up the specks – the damaged fruit –  and we used to bring them home. We did not have any other fruit. At Christmas time, my granddad came home with a sack full of specks. All the family would get together round the piano. My Auntie used to play the piano fantastically, sitting on a crate of brown ale. My nan never went out all week but on a Saturday night she went with out her friend and they would go either to the Two Brewers on the corner or the Grey Eagle. On a Saturday night, when she did not go out, my nan and I, we would get our pillow and put it on the window sill, and sit with our cups of tea and wait for the pubs to turn out. There would be fights and it was entertainment for us.

My granddad used to have a stall at the top of Brick Lane on Sundays and sell nuts and bolts, and I took tea to him in a white enamel flask. The market was packed in those days and, by the time I got there, the tea would be splashed everywhere, so he only got one cup out of it.

My first job was for Durrants the printers opposite Mount Pleasant Post Office in Clerkenwell and I absolutely hated it. I was sixteen or seventeen and I used to come home black with ink. Then I went into the rag trade, machining at Universal Underwear – it was very highbrow, we made it for Marks & Spencers – just off Shoreditch High St. I loved it and stayed there for ten years. I did an apprenticeship and my first week’s pay was four pounds, nineteen shillings and eleven pence. I thought I was rich!

After three months, they put you on piecework and I used to earn a fortune. Twenty or thirty pounds a week was a lot of money in those days. I was a saver and there would be times when I only had a shilling and sixpence in my purse but that was fine. I have always put a bit by because you never know what might happen. My parents did the same and they taught me not to spend money on non-essentials. Then, if you really need that money you do not have to go to anybody, you have got it there. My mother was very independent and my parents never owed anybody any money. I only ever wanted to pay the rent and put food on the table.

When I was twenty-five, I left Great Eastern Buildings to get married. I met my husband Riaz at Queen’s Ice Skating Rink in Bayswater. It was a ritual, I used to go there every Friday. Every Saturday, we went to the cinema and, every Sunday, we went to the Mecca Ballroom in Leicester Sq. We had a fantastic social life. We moved to a rented two bedroom flat in Hackney Downs when we got married and my daughter was born in Lower Clapton Rd at the Salvation Army Hospital. My husband was an aircraft engineer at Gatwick and the travelling was too much for him, so they offered us a flat down there and we stayed thirty years.

I still miss the community spirit of Great Eastern Buildings. Nobody went without, the people in those Buildings would give you their last ha’penny even if they had nothing.”

The Grey Eagle photographed by Philip Marriage in 1967

Corner of Grey Eagle St today

Steven Harris, who also grew up in Great Eastern Buildings, managed to identify these people:

Little girl at front, right of centre, with floppy white hat is Joyce Gibbons (my Aunty Joyce).

Next to floppy white hat, toddler with bow in hair is Sheila Bell herself.

The lady to the left, with her arm up, may well be Franny Vigas.

Behind Franny, with the dark hair is Sarah Keppel (Sheila’s grandmother)

The shorter of the two men, just to Sarah’s right, is Sheila’s granddad, George Keppel.

To George’s right, with her back against the pub wall is Lily Bell (Sheila’s mother)

Further to the right, holding two children (you can just see her head against the pub window) is Bessie Lee, sister to Lily Bell. The two children were Lorraine and Ronnie Lee.

Staying at the back and just along from Bessie Lee and her children, are two dark haired women – they were sisters, Celia and Sarah Bawes.

One forward and three along to the right from Lily Bell is a blond girl with roundish face – that was Betty Wright (who was long standing friends with my Aunty Pat)

Third row back, a little to the left of the roll of honour, with her beret pulled down at a sharp angle and standing slightly alone, is Phyllis Greenslade.

To the extreme right of the photo, sitting next to the honours roll, is Pat Green.

Third row back, to the left of the central line of children, is George Hall (with finger in mouth).

To the left of George is, I believe, my very own nine-year-old dad – Eddie Harris!

George’s sister, Rosie, is the blond girl with big smile, one row forward and three along to the right of George.

Sheila Butt (nee Bell)

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David Carpenter

In the nineteenth century, artificial eyes were sometimes made of lead-based glass, so if the owner were to walk in extreme cold temperatures and then enter a warm room with a blazing fire, there was always a danger their eye might explode – a risk that, thankfully,  has been overcome these days through the prudent use of crystallite rather than glass.

This was just one of many memorable pieces of information upon the esoteric subject of glass eyes that I garnered when Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I visited David Carpenter, Chief Ocularist, at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in the City Rd. David and his team of four produce more than thirteen hundred eyes annually – each one hand-crafted and individually-painted – to replace those that get lost in the capital.

It may sound like an awful lot of eyes but David and his colleagues are so skilful that, if you were not looking for it, you would not notice the results of their handiwork. Such is their success in creating life-like eyes – David assured me – that you probably know people with artificial eyes but you do not even realise.

Yet there is far more to the work of an ocularist is than just technical expertise. “If people have to have an eye removed because they’ve had a tumour or a cancer, it’s akin to losing a limb,” David admitted to me quietly, “They put their life on hold – then, after surgery and the healing process, they come to me and I make the prosthetics. You give them an eye, but really you are giving them their life back. It can be a great moment when you give them their glass eye – often, they cry with joy and, sometimes, they give you a hug.”

As one who has wrought such transformations for the better in so many people’s lives – simultaneously a technician, an artist and a counsellor – David certainly carries his role lightly. “I make little model tanks, I made them as a kid and I’ve never stopped,” he confessed with a blush, revealing the early manifestation of his distinctive talent, “and when I applied for this job, I was able to show them to prove I could do modelling.”

“Let me get out my box of bits to show you,” David suggested enthusiastically, pulling a container from a cabinet that looked it might contain a sponge cake, only it actually contained a selection of glass eyes and pieces of rubber prosthetics attached to spectacles.

Glass eyes are not round like marbles – as I had naively assumed – but curved like sea shells, so they fit neatly under the lid and can move in tandem with their living partner. David makes a cast to ensure that the eye fits its owner perfectly and then paints the pupil with the patient in front of him, using his expert judgement to match it exactly. “An eye is more than just one colour, you’ll need to use two or three colours to get the effect you want,” he informed me, “You start with a little black disc and you paint lines outwards from the centre and these striations of different tones blend to create the colour of the pupil. In the States, they have tried to do this digitally but the effect is flat whereas building up the layers of paint creates a more three dimensional effect.” Then David pointed out how unravelled strands of red embroidery thread are used to create the impression of veins upon the white of the eye and grinned with pleasure as he studied the convincingly life-like result.

It was surreal to stand  in the workroom surrounded by lone eyes of every hue peering at us, yet this was David’s normal environment and the place where he is at home. “I just fell into it really,” he informed me with shrug and a gauche smile, picking up an eye and polishing it tenderly with his finger, “I was training as a dental technician, making teeth at a college in Hastings – because I planned to emigrate to Australia and work in dentistry – when I saw an advert for an apprenticeship on ocularistry. Once you have trained as a dental technician, the next step is to become maxillofacial technician – I can make noses, ears, fingers – in fact, any part of the body that might get accidentally severed.”

“I can’t make arms and legs though, there are other people who do that,” he qualified modestly, acknowledging his own limitations, “but I can reconstruct any part of the face that is missing including the eye.” And then he picked up the pairs of spectacles with realistic parts of facial anatomy, noses and eyebrows, attached and proudly explained they were particularly useful for older people who might otherwise mislay their replacement facial features.

“I’ve worked here for sixteen and a half years,” he said, turning contemplative suddenly and speaking as if to himself, “I’ve got patients that I first saw when they were little babies who are now grown up and still come back to see me – there’s some that are almost friends.”

Painting artificial eyes

David scrutinises his handiwork critically

A selection of prosthetic eyes

The white of the eye before the pupil is attached

A pupil before painting

The pupil in place

The finished eye emerging from the mould

Prosthetic attached to a spectacle frame

Polishing the eye

David Carpenter, Chief Ocularist at the London Eye Hospital

Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven

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‘I think I have a pronounced hunter-gatherer instinct’

portrait by Lucinda Douglas Menzies

When I visited Phillip Lucas in his 1725 house in Spitalfields that he has been renovating for more than a decade, we sat on two threadbare wing chairs, conversing over a sea of objects and piles of books which filled the room. In its profusion, the scene rivalled the opening sequence of Citizen Kane. Imagine my incredulity when Phillip confessed that he had just sent off most of the contents of his house to the sale room, testing my imagination to conceive how it had been before.

By profession, Phillip is a barrister but in his soul he is a collector. He bought his house to hold his collection of 1680-1730 furniture which he put in store ten years ago while he repaired the building, only to fill it from floor to ceiling with a whole new collection. I was quite overwhelmed when I considered that as well as the three hundred items Phillip sent for auction, he had enough the fill the house all over again in storage on top of what he already has in the house, which seemed more than sufficiently furnished to me.

Such is the true nature of a consummate collector like Phillip, who credibly rationalised his situation to me as an opportunity to edit and select his favourite items. While the afternoon flew away, I nodded my head in a mixture of sympathy, wonder and bewilderment as Phillip explained how it all came about.

“The first consciousness I had of the eighteenth century was through a school trip to 1 Royal Crescent in Bath and Wookey Hole Caves. The caves made no impression on me whatsoever but the drawing room at the Royal Crescent made a big impact and I bought a postcard of it which I still have.

I spent my teenage years going to antique fairs, buying eighteenth century tea caddies, and fell in with some antique dealers in Winchester. My parents were concerned that this might have an adverse effect. I spent my time hanging onto the coattails of these dealers, trying to sell them things and going around with them when they were buying.

At the age of five I had decided I wanted to be a lawyer and I could not be deflected from it, but the antique dealing side did not arise until the age of twelve. I realised then that the Law would have to take priority.

Around the age of sixteen, I grew very concerned about old buildings and I had a book of derelict houses in Scotland. So I spent a couple of summers going round these places, studying them and despairing for their future. Then I spent a summer visiting derelict buildings in Wales. It is disheartening to see what has happened to some of those places now. At this time, the idea crystallised that I what wanted to do was to save a Georgian house, restore it and formulate a collection as an experience for me, both to gather it and also live in those surroundings.

When I went to university, I had a modest grant which I spent on eighteenth century furniture and a blue sherpa van. While other students were going clubbing, I was driving to Shepton Mallet Fair and standing in the rain at five in the morning, buying and selling from the back of my van – at the same time as studying for a Law degree.

When I moved to London, I had a bedsit in Shepherds Bush and I started going to the big auctions and the antique shops. I was escorted around some of the most glamorous shops because I think they thought I was going to steal something. I must have looked about twelve even though I was in my early twenties.

I was seeing better quality objects in the London sale rooms. I ran out of space in my bedsit and the van became an overshoot for storage. I had a Georgian pianoforte in my bedsit at one point that took up most of the room. At Christies, South Kensington, I had a choice of either a painting by Wright of Derby or a portrait by Arthur Devis. So that was quite an exciting time.

My collecting started in the eighties with Neo-Classicism, inspired by the postcard of 1 Royal Crescent. I began with late eighteenth century tea caddies and I progressed to the early nineteenth century and Regency, which was very hot in the eighties. Then I discovered oak furniture and jumped back to early oak before moving through mahogany to walnut, where I settled. My current speciality is furniture between 1680 and 1730, the golden age of walnut. But I am still buying Regency things because I cannot resist them. I have had a recent revelation with Renaissance bronzes and I also collect early Georgian portraiture, particularly conversation pieces.

I am especially interested in domestic items that tell a story about an individual. I love personal inscriptions and things that might not have been intended to survive. Dennis Severs House is an inspiration to me and David Milne, the curator, introduced me to English Delft  -which was an expensive day.

My collection pulls me in different directions and I can unexpectedly discover a new area t any point. For years I have been trying to understand early bronzes but you generally look at them behind glass in poorly-lit museum cabinets. I always wondered what all the fuss was about and it was only when I stumbled across two early bronzes recently that I could handle them and look at properly. It was a light bulb moment and now I am reading as many books as I can on the subject.

I think I have a pronounced hunter-gatherer instinct. As well as enjoying these objects themselves, understanding and handling them, I love the excitement of the chase and a new discovery. A lot of it is the thrill of finding things. That is enough. It does not matter to me, if after a while, I sell them on.”

Interior photographs copyright © Charlie Hopkinson

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Cecile aged four

Although Cecile Moss lived in Old Montague St for fourteen years, this is the only photograph taken of her in Spitalfields, and it was taken for a precise purpose. A photographer came round to take it in 1955, the year Cecile arrived from Jamaica aged four years old, and the picture was sent back to her family in the Caribbean as evidence that she was attending a proper Catholic school with a smart uniform and therefore all was well in London. Yet in contrast to the image of middle class respectability which Cecile’s mother strove to maintain, the family lived together in one room in a tenement and the reason there are no other photographs is because they had no money for a camera.

Almost no trace survives today of the Old Montague St that Cecile knew – a busy thoroughfare crowded with diverse life, filled with slum dwellings, punctuated by a bomb site and a sugar factory, and lined with small shops and cafes. There, long-established Jewish traders sat alongside dodgy coffees bars in which Maltese, Somalis, Caribbeans and others congregated to do illicit business. In fact, Old Montague St offered a rich and stimulating playground to a young child filled with wonder and curiosity, as Cecile was.

The presence of black people proved a challenge to many East Enders at that time. “Sometimes, they knotted their handkerchiefs when they saw me,” recalled Cecile with mixed emotion, “and they’d say, ‘If you see a black person that’s good luck.'” Fortunately, Cecile’s mother’s professional status as a teacher proved to be an unexpected boost to Cecile in this new society and later Cecile became a teacher herself, an occupation that she pursues today from her home in New Cross Gate where she lives with her children and grandchildren. “Since the new overground train, I’ve spent a lot more time in the East End and I still have a lot of friends there.” she admitted to me when I visited her, “As you grow older, you tend to want to go back to your home.”

“We came to England from Jamaica in 1955, me, my sister Clorine and my mother, Marlene Moss, to Old Montague St in Spitalfields. She left my father and came over to live with her sister, Daisy. I was four years old and I didn’t know I was coming to England, I was traumatised. But I remember what I was wearing, I wore a double-breasted coat with a velvet Peter Pan collar and lace-up shoes. My mother was a teacher in Jamaica and she didn’t want us to look like refugees arriving in England. The voyage lasted ten days and we were met by my uncle at Southampton. It was very confined on the boat so that when I got off, I kept on running around.

We lived in a building where the Spitalfields health centre is today. We were 9b, above a shop where two elderly Jewish sisters lived. My mother cried for days because we had to share one toilet with three other floors, so it was really quite disgusting. I was told that I had come to get a doll. But it was an ugly chalky-skinned blond doll, and I was so angry and upset that I threw it away and smashed it, which made my aunt think I was a very ungrateful little girl. My mother,my sister and I all lived in one room. My sister was eleven and she remained silent, whereas my mum and I just cried a lot. I missed my family in Jamaica.

Because we were Catholics, we went to St Anne’s Catholic church and mother got talking to the priest. He told her she could teach in St Gregory, a Secondary Modern in Wood Close, doing supply work. When she started at the school she was shocked. One of the pupils was absent from the register and they said, ‘He’s gone down for GBH.’ My mother came back and asked my aunt, ‘What is this GBH?’ She said she was going introduce Shakespeare to the school but they said,’We don’t want you bringing any of your kind of rubbish here!’

I went to St Patrick’s school around the back of St Anne’s and my sister, because she had already passed the eleven-plus, went to Our Lady’s convent in Stamford Hill. Yet I only lasted two weeks at St Patrick’s because the kids hit me and pushed me over. I can’t remember if they called me racist names, but I know I was terribly unhappy. My mother took me away and sent me to Stamford Hill too. I was five years old, and she put me on the 653 bus and told the conductor where to let me off. The people on the bus would look after me and I never missed my stop. I felt safe. So we lived in the East End but we went to school in North London. That was unusual but, because my mother was a teacher, we were middle class, even though we lived in Old Montague St which was a slum. Old Montague St had quite a reputation for drugs. There were dark tenements with dark passages with dark dealings.

When my mum got a permanent job at St Agnes’ school in Bow, she took me away from Our Lady’s at seven years old. So I never went back to school in Spitalfields but I used to play out on the street a lot. Most of the children I played with were second generation Irish with names like Touhy, O’Shea, Latimer and Daley – that’s who I grew up with. There was an older Irish boy who looked out for me, he said I was part of the gang. He told us we mustn’t speak to the people on Brick Lane because they were Jewish. He was looked after by his grandmother. She was a character. Every Saturday night, she went to the pub on the corner of Chicksand St and filled a jug with port or whatever and stumbled back singing, ‘Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do.’ And my mother cried and said, ‘Look what we have come down to.’ One day, the old lady, she tied a skipping rope across the street to stop the traffic so that we could play. When the police came along, she said, ‘ The children have got nowhere to play.’ And we were all shocked, but later they opened a playground on the corner of Old Montague St and Vallance Rd.

I loved going to Petticoat Lane. Every Friday, my aunt would go and get a chicken – you could choose one and they would kill it for you. There were street entertainers, an organ grinder and man who lay on a bed of hot coals. Walking up  Wentworth St, there were all Jewish shops with barrels of pickles and olives outside. I was fascinated but my mother said, ‘That’s not our food.’ A lot of the stallholders were quite friendly to me and my mother because they thought we were the next wave of immigrants. There was a cafe I walked past with my mum, it was full of black-skinned men but I couldn’t understand what they were saying even though they were like us. They were Somalis. The men outside, they’d give me sixpence and put me on their knee. They liked to see me because they were away from their own children. I think we were some of the first West Indians here, there were no other black kids.

I spent a lot of time in the fleapit cinema on Brick Lane on Saturdays. But by the time I turned seven, my mum stopped me playing out. She forbade me, so my wanderings around Spitalfields stopped and I don’t mix with the kids on the street anymore. Instead I became more friendly with the kids I was at school with in Bow.

My aunt Daisy went back to Jamaica and my sister returned when she was eighteen. So it was just me and my mum in the end. We shared a bedroom and we had a sitting room, with the kitchen in the hallway. I was very embarrassed about where I lived and I didn’t bring friends home because it was a slum. All this time, my mother was not divorced, she was still married and it really held her back. She even had to ask a friend to his name down for her to be able to buy a television.

There was a hardware shop and other shops run by Jewish people, where they got on well with my mother. There was a bit of snobbishness because she was a teacher. It used to cushion me too, I was Mrs Moss’ daughter. When she complained, they used to say to her, ‘Never mind, we had it, now it’s your turn.’ Referring the racial prejudice, they meant it was something you put up with, then it would pass. And by the time I left Spitalfields, it was the Bengalis coming in, so it was quite profound what they said – it was a rite of passage at that time.

When I was eighteen, we moved out. Looking back on it, I’ve got to say it was a happy time. I knew when I’d forgotten Jamaica and made my transition to England. I played a lot on the stairs and I pretended to have a ‘post office’ there. One day my mother was there too, washing some clothes on the landing and she corrected my speech. ‘It’s not ‘spag-ETTEE,” she said, ‘It’s ‘spaghetti” And, I realised then, that was because I’d left Jamaica behind and I spoke Cockney.

Today I often teach immigrants, children for whom English is their second language, and I can say to them, ‘I know what you are going through.'”

Old Montague St 1965 by Geoffrey Fletcher

Cecile Moss

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