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Lorna with her mother Esther in Whitechapel, 1950

In this photograph, Lorna Brunstein is held by her mother outside Fishberg’s jewellers on the corner of Black Lion Yard and Whitechapel Rd. It is a captivating image of maternal pride and affection that carries an astonishing story. The tale this tender photograph carries is one of how this might never have happened and yet, by the grace of fortune, it did.

I met Lorna upon her return visit to Whitechapel where she grew up the early fifties. Although she left Black Lion Yard at the age of six, it is a place that still carries great meaning for her even though it was demolished forty years ago.

We sat together in a crowded cafe in Whitechapel but, as Lorna told me her story, the sounds of the other diners faded out and I understood why she carries such affection for a place that no longer exists beyond the realm of memory.

“My relationship with the East End goes back to when I was born. I have scant memories, it was the early years of my childhood, but this was the area where I spent the first six years of my life. I was born in Mile End maternity hospital in December 1950.

Esther, my mother came to London in 1947. She was liberated from Belsen in April 1945 and she stayed in their makeshift hospital to recuperate for a few months. She had been through Auschwitz and lost all her family, apart from one brother who survived (though she did not know it at the time).

In the summer of 1945 she was taken to Sweden, to a place she said was beautiful – in the forest – where she and many others were looked after. It was while she was in Sweden that she and her brother Perec discovered via the Bund ( Polish Jewish workers Socialist party) that they had both survived. Esther was the youngest of three and Perec was the middle child. Their surname was Zylberberg,  which means silver mountain. He was one of the boys who was taken to Windermere from Theresienstadt at the end of the War. They each wrote letters and confirmed that the other had survived. Esther had last seen Perec in March 1944.

After a few months in Windermere, he went to London and his sole mission was to get Esther over. That was all she wanted to do too, but it took two years from 1945 to 1947 for a visa to be granted. So not much has changed really. She was seventeen years old, had lost her mother at Auschwitz and her teenage years yet she was not allowed to come into the country unless she had a job, an address, and the name of a British citizen to be her guarantor and sponsor.

Maurice Regen (Uncle Moishe as I knew him) was an eccentric yet kind man. He came to London in the twenties from Lodz, which was my mother’s hometown. He and his wife were elderly, they had no children and lived in Romford. He said, ‘She can live in our house, so she will have an address, and she can be our housekeeper, that will be her job, and she won’t be dependent on the state.’ That was how my mother came over. My Uncle Perec met her and I think Uncle Moishe was probably there at Tilbury too.

She lived in Romford but she met Stan, my father, at the Grand Palais Yiddish Theatre in Whitechapel where she was acting — her Yiddish was brilliant – and he was the scenic designer. He was an artist from Warsaw. He fled at the beginning of the War and was put in a labour camp in Siberia after spending fourteen months of solitary confinement in a prison in the Soviet Union. His story was pretty horrific too. He was an only child, and he lost everyone, his entire family. He was thirteen years older than my mother.

Stan also came to London in 1947. At the end of the War, he ended up in Italy. The Hitler/Stalin pact was broken while he was in Siberia and he was freed when the political amnesty was declared, so he joined up with the Polish Free Army under General Anders — as many of them did — and fought at the Battle of Monte Casino. Afterwards, he was in Rome for two years, studying scenic design at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts.

So my mother and father met in 1947 or 1948. I do not know exactly when. They got married in 1949 and I was born in 1950. They lived in a little flat in Black Lion Yard in Whitechapel until they moved to Ilford.

Rachel Fishberg – known as Ray – was really significant in my life and my parents’ life, my mother in particular. Ray was an old lady who became a surrogate grandma to my sister – who is four years younger – and me. We remember her with such affection. The Fishbergs were jewellers and were reasonably wealthy among Jewish people in the East End at that time. Ray ran her husband’s and his father’s jewellery shop, on the corner of Whitechapel Road and Black Lion Yard. I remember going back and visiting it when I was six, after we moved out.

My parents had no money, so grandma Ray Fishberg said they could live in the flat above the shop. At the time, they had nothing. My father could not live on his art and he took a diploma in design, tailoring and cutting at Sir John Cass School of Art in Aldgate. He designed and made children’s clothes on a sewing machine in the room we lived in and sold them in the market, and that was how we got by. Grandma Ray let them live there – probably for nothing – and, in fact, she paid for their wedding. When they got married in 1949 in Willesden Green, she paid for the wedding dress.

In 1957, when I was six, we moved to Ilford because my parents did not want to stay in the East End. She gave them the deposit for their first house. She was a lovely lady and she enabled them to have a start a life. This is why I feel so connected to this place, even though my memories of actually living here are scant.

I have this one memory of being in a pram, or maybe a pushchair, and feeling the sensation of the wheels on the cobbles in Black Lion Yard, going to the dairy — my mother said it was Evans the Dairy at the end of the Yard — to get milk.

Apparently, I went Montefiore School in Hanbury Street and I remember my mother talking about Toynbee Hall, where there were meetings, and taking me in the pram to Lyons Corner House in Aldgate where there was this chap, Shtencl, the poet of the East End.

He was quite an eccentric person who wandered around the streets and my mother told me he called into Lyons Corner House when she was sitting there with me as a baby. She said he stroked my head and said, ‘Sheyne, sheyne,’ which in Yiddish is ‘beautiful.’ My mother was in awe of him because his Yiddish was so brilliant and Yiddish was the language so dear to her heart. I was anointed by him even though I have no memory of him.

My mother and father talked a lot about Black Lion Yard. They said, on Sunday mornings at the entrance to Black Lion Yard where the pavement was quite deep, employers and potential employees in the tailoring ‘shmatte’ trade would gather and connect. That was what my father was doing then. He would stand there on a Sunday morning to get work.

Those were the founding years of my life. I have a deep affection for this place because for my parents – even though they wanted to leave for a better life – it was where they found sanctuary. My father used to say, ‘Thank goodness I’m here, I’ve finally found a place where I am able to walk down the street without having to look over my shoulder.”

Black Lion Yard, early seventies, by David Granick

Steps down to Black Lion Yard by Ron McCormick

Lorna aged eight

Esther & Stan Brunstein in the seventies

Esther Brunstein

Stan Brunstein

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The Gentle Author’s Tour of the City of London: Meet me at 2pm on EASTER MONDAY on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral for a tour of sightseeing and storytelling, rambling through the alleys and byways of the Square Mile in search of the wonders and the wickedness of the City. (Also booking for Spring Bank Holiday Monday 4th May)

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Contributing Writer Delwar Hussain writes a memoir of his mother and her sewing machine

Arful Nessa with her sewing machine table

Rather than the sound of Bow bells, I was born to the whirring of sewing machines in my ear. Throughout most of my childhood, my mother did piecework while my father worked in a sweatshop opposite the beigel shop on Brick Lane, stitching together leather jackets for Mark & Spencer. The factory closed down long ago.

Initially my mother’s industrial-grade Brother sewing machine was in the kitchen, in between the sink and the pine wood table. But it took up too much space there and was also considered dangerous, once ambulatory children started populating the house. It was decided that it would be moved to one of the attic rooms on the top floor of our home, following the custom of the Huguenot silk weavers of the past. There the machine lived and there my mother would be found hunched over it, during all hours of the day and often late into the night. She says it was most hard on her back and shoulders, which would ache from the work.

“The men used to work in the factories. I preferred to do it at home because it was less work compared to what they did. They had to work harder,” she explains, “I began before the children were born. I wasn’t doing much at home, so I thought I should try it and earn a little money. Other women were working as machinists then and an old neighbour who had lived on Parfett St taught me how to operate the machine. I couldn’t do pockets, but I did pleats, belts and hems on skirts for women who worked in offices. I took in work for a factory on Cannon St Rd that made suits and another on New Rd that made blouses.”

For a while my mother sewed the lining into jackets and winter coats, working for a short Sikh man who had a clothes shop on Fournier St. He had quick steps and a bunch of heavy keys dangling from the belt on his trousers. The man still owes her money, she recalls. He would give her wages in arrears, promising to pay, but it never materialised. Following him, she worked for another man, who also did not pay. “Where would you go looking for them today?” my mother asks, “Everyone we used to know around here has left. So much has changed.”

I remember the almost-sweet smell of the machine oil, the thick needles, bundles of colourful nylon yarn, piles and piles of skirts in all shades and sizes, the metal bobbin cases and the sound of the sewing machine. When the foot peddle was down, the vibration could be felt throughout the house. Strangely, this provided a sense of comfort – the knowledge that my mother was upstairs and everything in the world was as it should be.

When I was around twenty, my brothers and sisters and I colluded with each other to get rid of the sewing machine. It had lain dormant in the attic room ever since my mother gave up taking in piecework some years previously. The work had slowly become more irregular and less financially rewarding. “When I first started, I was able to earn around seventy-five pence per skirt, then towards the end, when there were many more women working, it dropped to around ten pence per coat.” These were also the days when much of the manufacturing in East London was being shipped out to parts of the world where there was cheaper labour, including Bangladesh and Turkey.

With my mother’s working paraphernalia left as it was, the space resembled Rodinsky’s room – he was the mythical recluse who once lived a few doors down from us in the attic of 19 Princelet St and who had disappeared one day, leaving everything intact. I had an idea to turn our attic into a study, installing my PC which my mother had bought for me from the money she had saved from sewing. With a separate monitor, keyboard and large hard drive, it was almost as big as her Brother sewing machine.

She had always been a hoarder, so we knew that getting rid of it was going to be a delicate and difficult matter. We had given her prior warnings, but these had fallen on deaf ears. Then one night, when she had gone to bed, my siblings and I crept upstairs and, with a lot of effort, detached the head of the sewing machine from the table. Huffing and puffing, we carried it down three flights of stairs and delicately dumped it at the end of our street. We did the same with the table base.

Of course, she discovered the machine was missing the next day and was incredibly upset. She had “spent one hundred and forty pounds on it,” she said. “It still worked,” she said, “why had we not told her, she could have given it to someone at least, instead of it being thrown away” and “what had she done to deserve children who were so wasteful.” After that,  I forgot all about the Brother sewing machine that once lived in our attic.

Recently, I returned from a research trip to Dhaka. I am currently writing a book about the people of that city and had interviewed garment workers about their lives and fears. I came home and was speaking to my mother about it when the subject of her earlier life as a machinist came up. And then she announced her revelation.

My mother and our Somali neighbour had managed to rescue the sewing machine from where my brothers, sisters and I had thought we had discarded the thing. The two women had somehow managed to shuffle the table base along, scraping hard along the pavement. But instead of bringing it back to the house, they took it to the neighbour’s, where it was to stay in the garden until they decided what to do with it. The machine head on the other hand was far too heavy for them to carry and they abandoned it.

This disclosure had to be investigated. My mother and I immediately knocked on our neighbour’s door, and asked if it was still there. The neighbour led us to the garden where, hidden behind wooden boarding and tendrils of ivy, we found the sewing machine my mother had spent so many years working on.

Considering it had endured years outdoors, it looked like it was still in relatively good health. Bits of it, such as the bobbin winder and the spool base were slightly rusty, but the address of the showroom on Cambridge Heath Rd where my mother bought it was clearly labelled and the motor looked in working condition.

She is still upset with my brothers and sisters and me for throwing it away. This confused me. “Why would you want to hold onto something that is a source of oppression?” I asked, high-mindedly. “The machine helped to feed and educate my family,” she answered quietly.

My mother then reminded me that my aunt, her sister, also had a Brother sewing machine and made skirts for many years from her kitchen in Bethnal Green. We went to speak to her. She no longer works as a seamstress and has resorted to keeping her dismembered machine on the veranda of her ground floor flat. The table now stores pots and pans, baskets containing seeds and drying leaves. The head was in the bottom drawer of a metal cabinet next to it, wrapped up in a Sainsbury’s shopping bag. My aunt still has some of the cloth which she would make into skirts and she showed me the pleats on a piece of salmon-coloured material.

“Most of the women in this block worked for different factories and one of them taught me how to do it. I worked for a Turkish man on Mare St for around seven years. I would get started around 7am after the morning prayer at 6am. I can’t remember where the skirts were being sold, but they were for well known shops in the West End. In one day, I could work on fifty or sixty pieces. Some days I made around a hundred. I received around forty or fifty pence per piece and could earn around three hundred pounds per week. But it was all irregular, nothing was fixed. My children would help by cutting the loops off when they got home after school. There is no work anymore, but I kept the machine in case I needed to fix things. It still works.”

While I took notes, sitting on the chair she would sit on whilst working, I could hear dregs of conversation between the two sisters, comparing the quality of oranges in Bethnal Green market to Asda and Iceland, as well as recalling what happened to other women whom they both knew that had worked as seamstresses. This industry, now gone, is a piece of the thread that joins the past with the present in the East End and, in turn, unites the people who have come to make this part of London their home.

My aunt with her sewing machine in Bethnal Green

Arful Nessa

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Arful Nessa, Gardener

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Champion Pie Man – W.Thompson, Pie Maker of fifty years, outside his shop in the alley behind Greenwich Church

Charles Spurgeon the Younger, son of the Evangelist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, took over the South St Baptist Chapel in Greenwich in the eighteen-eighties and commissioned an unknown photographer to make lantern slides of the street traders of Greenwich that he could use in his preaching. We shall never know exactly how Spurgeon showed these pictures, taken between 1884 and 1887, but – perhaps inadvertently – they became responsible for the creation of one of the earliest series of documentary portraits of Londoners.

Hokey-Pokey Boy – August Bank Holiday, Stockwell St, Greenwich

Knife Grinder – posed cutting out a kettle bottom from a tin sheet

Rabbit Seller

Toy Seller – King William St outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich

Ginger Cakes Seller – King St, near Greenwich Park

Sweep

Shrimp Sellers – outside Greenwich Park

Crossing Sweeper (& News Boy) – Clarence St, Greenwich

Sherbert Seller – outside Greenwich Park

Third Class Milkman – carrying two four-gallon cans on a yoke, King William’s Walk, Greenwich

Second Class Milkman – with a hand cart and seventeen-gallon churn

Master Milkman – in his uniform, outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich

Chairmender – Corner of Prince Orange Lane, Greenwich

Kentish Herb Woman – Greenwich High Rd

Muffin Man

Fishmongers

Try Your Weight – outside Greenwich Park

Glazier

News Boy (& Crossing Sweeper) – delivering The Daily News at 7:30am near Greenwich Pier

Old Clo’ Man – it was a crime to dispose of infected clothing during the Smallpox epidemics of  the eighteen-eighties and the Old Clo’ Man plied a risky trade.

Blind Fiddler – outside Crowders’ Music Hall Greenwich

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Pedro da Costa Felgueiras will tell you that he is a lacquer and paint specialist, or japanner – but I think he is an alchemist. In his secret workshop in a Hoxton backstreet, Pedro has so many old glass jars filled with mysterious coloured substances, all immaculately arranged, and such a diverse array of brushes, that you know everything has its purpose and its method. Yet even as Pedro begins to explain, you realise that he is party to an arcane universe of knowledge which defies the limits of any interview.

Pedro showed me Cochineal, the lush red pigment made from crushed beetles – very expensive at present due to floods in Asia. Pedro showed me Shellac, which is created by the Kerria lacca beetle as a coating to protect its eggs and, once harvested, is melted down and stretched out in huge transparent sheets like caramel – and is commonly used to make chocolate bars shiny. Pedro showed me Caput Mortuum, a subdued purple first produced by grinding up Egyptian mummies – Whistler was so horrified when he discovered the origin that he buried the paintings in which he used this pigment in his back garden. Pedro showed me his broad Japanese lacquer brush, of the kind made from the hair of pearl divers, selected as the finest and densest fibre. Pedro showed me his fine Japanese lacquer brush made from the tail of a rat, as he delighted to explain, once he had put it in his mouth to wet it.

“I find it very difficult to get excited about new paints,” he confided to me in his hushed yet melodious Portuguese accent, as the epilogue to this catalogue of wonders, “modern colours are brighter, but they will not last, they will flake away in twenty-five years.”

“Sometimes I feel I was born a hundred years after my time.” Pedro mused, “My earliest memories are of Sunday church, and of the gold and coloured marble, which I found quite overwhelming. But everybody else wanted new things – because they were surrounded by old things, they wanted plastic.” Growing up in Queluz just outside Lisbon, it was the Baroque palace covered in statues that cast its spell upon Pedro and when he discovered the statues had been made in Whitechapel, then he knew he had found his spiritual home. “I don’t know why I ended up here,” he admitted, “I had the desire to do something with my life and I would not have been able to do that if I stayed in Portugal.”

“When I first came to Spitalfields I used to walk around and look at the old houses, and now I have ended up working in many of them.” he continued, thinking back, “In London, I was fascinated by the junk markets and I bought things, and I wanted to restore them – it all came from that.” Pedro undertook a B Sc in restoration and was inspired by the work of Margaret Balardi who inducted him into the elaborate culture of japanning. “The first thing she taught me was how to wash my brush,” Pedro recalled with a grin.

“In the eighteenth century when they imported lacquer ware from the East, they started imitating it and used European techniques to do it. At first, they imported the ingredients from Japan but they couldn’t do it here and people died of it because it is poisonous,” Pedro explained, adding that he studied lacquer work in Japan and can do both Eastern and European styles. “I keep everything clean and I don’t touch it,” he assured me.

In the centre of the workshop was a fine eighteenth century lacquered case for a grandfather clock that had been cut down for a cottage when it went out of fashion in the nineteenth century. Pedro was painting the newly-made base and top, using the same paints as the original and adding decoration from an old pattern book. To reveal the finish, he wiped a damp swab across the old japanning and it instantly glowed with its true colour, as it will do again when he applies a new coat of shellac to unify the old and the new.

Using old manuals, Pedro taught himself to mix pigments and blend them with a medium, and now his talent and expertise are in demand at the highest level to work with architects and designers, creating paint that is unique for each commission. In the eighteenth century, every house had a book which recorded the paint colours used in the property and Pedro brought some of these out to show me that he makes for his customers today, with samples of the colours that he contrived to suit. There is a tangible magic to these natural pigments which possess a presence, a depth, a subtlety, and a texture all their own.

“I remember when it was a hobby and now it has become a job.” said Pedro, gazing in satisfaction around his intricately organised workshop,“You have to be diligent without cutting corners. It’s all about time. You grind the pigment by hand and it takes hours. It’s hard work. You can’t expect to paint a room in a week. It takes three days for the paint to dry and it will change colour over time – it’s alive really!”

Pedro paints a lacquer table to a design by Marianna Kennedy.

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Street Scene by Barnett Freedman (Click this image to enlarge)

When I first saw Street Scene by Barnett Freedman (Reproduced courtesy of the Tate Gallery), I thought I half-recognised the location as either Whitechapel or Bethnal Green and I delighted in the painting as an evocation of the streetlife of the Jewish East End in the early twentieth century.

Surely that is The George in Bethnal Green Road in the background? In particular, the two ostentatiously dressed woman in their contrasting outfits recalled for me the custom of people to promenade along Aldgate to Whitechapel at weekends in their finery, window shopping and greeting friends, enjoying their social life in public. Indeed, Pearl Binder included a similar pair of young women togged up to the nines in one of her lithographs of Aldgate in the twenties. I also wondered if the shabby old street musician with his violin was a Russian immigrant who had arrived like Barnett Freedman’s parents at the end of the nineteenth century.

Barnett Freedman was born in Lower Chapman St, Stepney Green in 1901. A sickly child who endured extended hospital stays, he was confined to bed between the ages of nine and thirteen, yet managed to educate himself, learning to read, write, play music and draw and paint while sequestered in a hospital ward.

By the age of sixteen, Barnett was earning his living as a draughtsman to a monumental mason for a few shillings a week, while for the next five years he spent his evenings undertaking classes at St Martin’s School of Art. Before long, he moved to an architect’s office, creating attractive drawings from his employer’s rough sketches and, taking the opportunity offered by a surge in demand for the war memorials to hone his skill as a letteringh artist.

With remarkable tenacity and self-belief, Barnett applied over three successive years for a London County Council Scholarship that would enable him to study at the Royal College of Art under the direction of Sir William Rothenstein. Experiencing rejection on each occasion, Barnett summoned the courage to present his portfolio in person to Rothenstein who recognised his talent and applied to the London County Council Chief Inspector himself on behalf of the young artist. As a consequence, a stipend of £120 a year was granted, enabling Barnett to begin his studies full time in 1922.

At the Royal College of Art, Barnett’s talent flourished among fellow students including Edward Bawden, Raymond Coxon, Henry Moore, Vivian Pitchforth and John Tunnard. Yet even after graduating in 1925, he continued to struggle to support himself and in 1929, ill-health prevented him working for a year. This situation as resolved when William Rothenstein took Barnett onto the staff of the Royal College in 1930. In the same year, he married fellow illustrator, Claudia Guercio, and, during the thirties, enjoyed an increasingly  successful career as an illustrator and commercial artist.

Barnett’s lithographs for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, published in 1931, were one of many highlights during his long association with Faber and Faber, for whom he also illustrated works by the Brontës, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens, Edith Sitwell, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy. As a commercial artist, he undertook prestigious commissions for Ealing Films, the General Post Office, Curwen Press, Shell-Mex, British Petroleum, Josiah Wedgwood and London Transport, earning popular success.

Appointed as an official War Artist, along with Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden, Barnett accompanied the expeditionary force in the spring of 1940 before the retreat at Dunkirk, and was awarded a CBE for this work in 1946. Yet Barnett always retained his East End accent and once, when he hailed a taxi to the Athenaeum Club, the incredulous cabbie famously retorted, “What, you?”

Street Scene was painted between 1933 and 1939, and subsequently he reworked the image as a lithograph for Lyons Corner House. Barnett’s son Vince, who was born in 1934, recalled his father working on the picture in the first floor studio of the family home in a back street of Gloucester Rd, West London. Vince revealed to me that the building on the right of the painting was based their house, 11 Canning Place. “The fiddler was to be found at the Gloucester Road end of Canning Place just about every day, and was a figure of some threat to me at the age of four!” he recalled, “The small person on the right, with his nanny Miss Wiggle, is a reference to me!”

No wonder that I was unable to place the location of this painting precisely in the East End because it is not a literal scene at all but a composite of Bethnal Green and Gloucester Road. I often wonder if the East End itself is actually a place or a culture, and this painting proposes an answer to my quandary. Barnett Freedman employed diverse topographic elements create a portrait of a society he knew intimately, constructing an entirely subjective portrayal of his environment and personal heritage. Look in the left top corner of the painting and you will see the artist raising his hat to you, ambling happily along the pavement and eternally at home in his own East End  universe. Vincent Freedman summed up his father’s achievement in these words, “A huge optimism and compassion shows itself to me in all his work and life. Humanity was his central driving force.”

The Old George in Bethnal Green

Barnett Freedman’s house at 11 Canning Place, Gloucester Rd

Barnett Freedman in Hyde Park

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Philip Marriage’s photograph of Donovan’s Bags, Crispin St, in 1985

John Olney told me it all began with two brothers, Jeremiah & Dennis O’Donovan, who came to Liverpool from Dublin in the eighteen thirties at the time of the potato famine in Ireland. Dennis took a passage from Liverpool across the Atlantic to seek his fortune with the Hudson Bay Trading Company, while Jeremiah came to the East End and settled in Fireball Court, Aldgate.

It sounds like an adventure story of long ago, yet John imbues it with a vivid present tense quality because Jeremiah was his great-great-grandfather and, to a degree, the nature of John’s own life has been the outcome of these events. The brothers’ tale explains both how he came to be here and why Donovan Brothers continues today in the way it does as a family business.

I was touched by John’s story because it was the first I have heard of the Irish in Spitalfields recounted to me by a descendant. Of the different waves of immigration that have passed through, the Irish are the least acknowledged and the people who have left the least evidence visible today. Yet anyone who walks through Spitalfields knows the building in Crispin St with the fine old signwriting that says “Donovan Brothers – The noted house for paper bags,” this was where the business began that still runs today at the New Spitalfields Market in Leyton.

John and I sat talking in the office of the Market Tenants’ Association in the grey light of early morning, watching as the wholesale fruit & vegetable market wound up for the night and the car park emptied out. There is an innate modesty to this gracious man with a strong physical presence and a discreet, withheld quality that colours the plain telling of his stories. You can tell from his glinting eyes that John’s family possesses an intensity of meaning for him, yet he adopts a quiet unemotional tone while speaking of it which serves to communicate a greater depth of feeling than any overt emotion.

“So you’ve come to hear about the fields…” he said, thinking out loud. By “the fields” John meant Spitalfields, using a term of reference I had not heard before. In its archaic colloquial tone, it spoke eloquently of his relationship to the place where his family dwelled continuously from the eighteen thirties and where he began his lifelong involvement with markets.

“My mother was a Donovan” declared John, outlining his precise connection to the line of descent, “She was one of eight, five boys and three daughters. We were a very close knit family, and it was so exciting for a boy of seven or eight, when I first entered the Spitalfields shop and sat on the counter. My uncle would sit outside with the chicken seller at the corner of Leyden St and reminisce about old times. It was history that was being spoken, you didn’t have to read it in books. My uncle used to end up at the bottom of Whites Row where there used to be a barbers and I would sit outside on the curb with my sweets – and that’s how it was in the old days.

My grandfather Patrick Donovan was one of nine children, he started the business and then the brothers came in and that’s how Donovan Brothers came about. I always knew I had a job to go to in the family business. You did everything. If there was a job there, from sweeping up to serving, you did it. It was second nature. Our motto was politeness cost nothing, I would always say, ‘Good Morning, Mr So & So,’ and my uncle would say to the customer, ‘The boy will take it out for you.’

We ran it as a family business and if there was a problem we dealt with it at once between us. The eldest was my grandfather, the governor, and when he died my uncles took over. The governor tells you what to do but everyone else asks. To everyone that works for me today, I am the governor, but in the family my elderly uncles are still the governors. Like in all family businesses, you could count upon one another. There’s no one person shouldering all the problems at any one time.

Every one of my uncles ran a different market. We were involved in Covent Garden, Borough and Stratford Market as well as Spitalfields. I would go out and make the deliveries. Whichever market I was in, it was always the same, whenever I walked through, traders would come up to me with orders and say ‘Tell your father.’ No-one knew who I was. I was ‘the boy’ and I still am to my uncles, and this makes a family. Because although we do retire as such, there’s no retirement from the family business. You are born on the job. You die on the job.”

John’s two sons and daughter work for Donovan Brothers now, ensuring the family business goes on for another generation. I think we may permit him to enjoy a certain swagger, coming in to work before dawn in all weathers and continuing his pattern of napping twice a day, at the end of the afternoon and in the late evening, thereby sustaining himself with superlative resilience through the extended antisocial hours that market life entails. The market is a world to itself and it is John Olney’s world.

Portrait of John Olney by Mark Jackson

The building in Crispin St retains its signwriting today

In Commercial St, nineteen sixties

John’s shop in the Spitalfields Market, nineteen eighties

John Olney outside his shop in the New Spitalfields Market, Leyton

Portraits of John Olney  © Mark Jackson

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Blackie, the Last Spitalfields Market Cat

A Farewell to Spitalfields

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I enjoyed the privilege of accompanying Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie into high security workshops to meet some of the most skilled craftsworkers in the creation of precious jewellery in Hatton Garden and Clerkenwell. These portraits were commissioned by The Goldsmith’s Centre

Russell Lownsbough, Designer, Wax-Carver & Goldsmith

Russell Lownsbough

Dave Merry, Hallmarking Expert at the Assay Office, Goldsmiths Hall – “I am responsible for training and apprenticeships at the Assay Office but I am also a maker and a sampler. We employ twenty-two people and test six thousand articles every day. An exciting part of my job is going out on raids with the police to shops where they are selling counterfeit jewellery.”

Dave Merry – “The phrase ‘up to scratch’ derives from the ancient practice of testing precious metals by rubbing them against a touchstone and applying aqua regia – known as ‘the acid test.’ I have had this stone for forty-seven years, since I was given it when I first walked in the door.”

John Taylor, Gemstone Cutter

John Taylor

Pete Rome, Gemstone Cutter

Pete Rome

Steve Goldsmith, Polisher

Steve Goldsmith

Niall Paisley, Diamond Setter – “I’ve been in the trade twenty-seven years, I started at sixteen. You learn a lot by heating stones, the hardness of the stones and the stress they will endure – diamonds can take any level of abuse whereas emeralds are brittle.”

Niall Paisley

Jennifer Bloy, Designer of Jewellery, Silverware & Objet d’Art – “I wanted to be a smith but they wouldn’t let me because I am a woman, so I started making reproductions – but then there was a job going as a designer in Hatton Garden and I got it. Because I worked as a maker, I know how things are made, so I can design for making.”

Jennifer Bloy – “I bought this stone, I love stones and I love colour.”

Ingo Henn, Master Goldsmith, Henn of London – “My great grandfather started in 1900, he was a stone cutter. He came from a family of fifteen and at twelve years old he was sent to be trained. When I was seventeen, I started as an apprentice in the family company but I have been designing since I was sixteen and I have been in London twenty-two years now. Any gemstone is valuable but it is not just down to its monetary value. The key is never to overpower a stone if the setting is too big or the design is too busy.”

Wayne Parrott, Master Engraver – “In 1908, the security engravers at the Bank of England earned more than the governors. I began at thirteen years old, attending evening classes at Sir John Cass College and I was taught by George Friend. Later, I returned to the Cass as a teacher and lectured for over forty years. We are all artists in what we do and I have produced countless designs.”

Wayne Parrott – “I specialise in designing seals.”

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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At Margolis Silver

The Fan Museum in Greenwich is the brainchild of Helene Alexander who has devoted her life with an heroic passion to assembling the world’s greatest collection of fans – which currently stands at over five thousand, dating from the eleventh century to the present day.

In doing so, Mrs Alexander has demanded a reassessment of these fascinating objects that were once dismissed by historians as mere feminine frippery but are now rightly recognised as windows into the societies in which they were made and used, and upon the changing position of women through time.

Folding fan with bone monture & woodblock printed leaf commemorating the Restoration of Charles II. 
English, c. 1660 
(Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan (opens two ways) with ivory monture. Each stick is affixed to a painted palmette.
 European (probably French), c. 1670s
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Ivory brisé fan painted with curious depictions of European figures.
 Chinese for export, c. 1700(Helene Alexander Collection)

Ivory brisé fan painted in the style of Hondecoeter.
 Dutch, c. 1700 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with bone monture. The printed & hand-coloured leaf has a mask motif with peepholes. 
English, c. 1730

Folding fan with ivory monture, the guards with silver piqué work. The leaf is painted on the obverse with vignettes themed around the life cycle of one man. European (possibly German)  c. 1730/40 
(Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with ivory monture & painted leaf. 
English, c. 1740s
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with ivory monture & painted leaf, showing Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens.
 English, c. 1750s

Folding fan with wooden monture & printed leaf, showing couples promenading. 
French, c. 1795-1800
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with gilt mother of pearl monture & painted leaf, signed ‘E. Parmentier.
’ French, c. 1860s

‘Landscape in Martinique’, design for a fan by Paul Gauguin. Watercolour & pastel on paper. French, c. 1887

Folding fan with blonde tortoiseshell monture, one guard set with guioché enamelling, silver & gold work by Fabergé. Fine Brussels lace leaf. 
French/Russian, c. 1880s
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with smoked mother of pearl monture, the leaf painted by Walter Sickert with a music hall scene showing Little Dot Hetherington at the Old Bedford Theatre. 
English, c. 1890

Folding fan with tortoiseshell monture carved to resemble sunrays. Canepin leaf studded with rose diamonds & rock crystal, & painted with a female figure & putti amidst clouds, signed ‘G. Lasellaz ’92’. 
French, c. 1892
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with horn monture & painted leaf, signed ‘Luc. F.’
 French, c. 1900

Folding fan with ivory & mother of pearl monture, the painted leaf, signed (Maurice) ‘Leloir.’ 
French, c. 1900
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with mother of pearl monture & painted leaf, signed ‘Billotey.’ 
French, c. 1905
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Horn brisé fan with design of brambles & insets of mother of pearl. 
French, c.1905
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with Art Nouveau style tinted mother of pearl monture & painted leaf, signed ‘G. Darcey.’ 
French, c. 1905
 (Helene Alexander Collection)

Folding fan with tortoiseshell monture & feather ‘marquetry’ leaf. French, c. 1920

Visit The Fan Museum, 12 Crooms Hill, Greenwich, SE10 8ER

Mum with me in the yard at 38 Princelet St shortly after we left hospital

Mum came to join Dad in London in 1955, bringing my elder sister. I think she quickly became absorbed by motherhood and childbearing. She did not stay healthy because the house was so overcrowded. First she got asthma from the dust mites in the mattresses and then she got tuberculosis. Yet she remained a very generous woman and welcomed everybody. She tolerated our mad house and never said she wanted to live like other Sikh families. She never sought domestic comforts. She understood Dad’s beliefs and adapted to life in England in her own way. To look at Mum, you would think that she never left India. She just stayed in her Punjabi clothes, as if she had arrived yesterday.

She was always cooking in big pans for lots of people, brewing masala tea with milk on the gas ring. It seemed nothing ever boiled over. She had mastered it to an art, the size of the gas flame and the circumference of the pan. She made dals, cooked spinach, and roasted chicken at weekends. We kept a big sack of brown flour in a dustbin, twenty-five kilos, and she loved making chapatis in abundance. They were buttered with Anchor butter, wrapped in cloth to keep them soft and stacked one on top ofthe other in an aluminium pot with a lid. We always thought there was an endless bundle because they never ran out. On Friday someone would bring a freshly-killed chicken from the kosher chicken shop in Petticoat Lane or, as a treat, Dad would buy fish and chips from Alfies on Brick Lane. On Sunday and special occasions Mum would make prashad.

At the end of each week, Dad gave his unopened pay-packet to Mum. She kept it so if the family needed money in India she could get it. They never had a bank account, but had a way of hiding valuables in the house. They sent money through Grewal, the grocer in Artillery Passage, who had a means of exchanging it for rupees.

Mum spent quite a bit of time in hospitals before I was born and then with me in the baby clinic, where she met other women – English, Irish, Scottish, Jewish, Maltese, Pakistani and West Indian. They were all very poor and became friends because they came from big families. They were devoted to their own faiths and shared a strong sense of duty to their families. Every Friday while Mum was in Mile End hospital in Bancroft Road they gave each woman a bottle of Guinness for strength because they believed the iron was good for the blood. As a Sikh, Mum did not drink alcohol so she put the bottles in her bedside cupboard. It was like a drinks cabinet. The Irish women came and she gave them one each, and they all became close.

I remember these women visiting our house. They called her Mrs Singh and she corrected them, saying, ‘No, I am Mrs Kaur.’ They would ask, ‘Are you separated from Mr Singh?’ She was shocked that anyone would ask such a question but explained, ‘No, no, it’s our Sikh faith that men are called Singh and women are called Kaur.’ Singh means lion and Kaur means princess. Mum would then take the opportunity to talk about her faith and how this naming was initiated by the tenth guru, Guru Gobind Singh.

Mum cultivated these warm relationships. She never judged anybody and had a gift for bringing women together regardless of their appearance, way of life or who they were. I think she inherited that quality from her dad who was a wise man. I was the luckiest in the family to spend so much time at home with my parents. They taught me how to hold a family together.

Mum wanted to stay at home and Dad never sent her out to work. She valued the responsibility of keeping the house, caring for her children and others in the family. He valued and trusted her judgement in keeping the household in order. She loved walking us to Christ Church School and enjoyed the social life at the school gate. We came home for dinner every day because the school meals were tasteless, without any spices.

Once my cousins’ wives started coming over from the Punjab and staying with us, Mum took them to the clinic and they would spend time together. She demonstrated how to put a terry nappy on a baby with a safety pin, and how to boil nappies in a pan with Daz on the gas ring to get them nice and white again. She was a mother to them, these newly-wed women who came and stayed for a while. She taught them a few tricks of the trade.

When I was born in 1962, I already had my eldest sister from India, my second sister and my brother. There were always other children in the house, so often I did not know who was family and who was not. Dad had adopted one of our cousins from India and I just thought all these people were family. I called everybody brother or sister. Food was cooked in a large pan and we all ate chapatis together on the floor. It was a simple but hard-working life.

Our family

Mum with a friend in Trafalgar Sq

Dad’s pay packet

Suresh Singh & Jagir Kaur at 38 Princelet St (Photograph by Patricia Niven)

Click here to order a copy of A MODEST LIVING

In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh tells the story of his family who have lived in their house in Princelet St for nearly seventy years, longer I believe than any other family in Spitalfields. In the book, chapters of biography are alternated with a series of Sikh recipes by Jagir Kaur, Suresh’s wife.

Stanley Rondeau (1933-2026)

If you visited Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields on any given Tuesday, you would find Stanley Rondeau – where he volunteered one day each week – welcoming visitors and handing out guide books. The architecture is of such magnificence, arresting your attention, that you might not even have noticed this quietly spoken white-haired gentleman sitting behind a small table just to the right of the entrance, who came here weekly on the train from Enfield.

But if you were interested in local history, then Stanley was one of the most remarkable people you could hope to meet, because his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jean Rondeau was a Huguenot immigrant who came to Spitalfields in 1685.

“When visiting a friend in Suffolk in 1980, I was introduced to the local vicar who became curious about my name and asked me ‘Are you a Huguenot?'” explained Stanley with a quizzical grin. “I didn’t even know what he meant,” he added, revealing the origin of his life-changing discovery, “So I went to Workers’ Educational Association evening classes in Genealogy and that was how it started. I’ve been at it now for thirty years. My own family history came first, but when I learnt that Jean Rondeau’s son John Rondeau was Sexton of Christ Church, I got involved in Spitalfields. And now I come every Tuesday as a volunteer and I like being here in the same building where he was. They refer to me as ‘a piece of living history’, which is what I am really. Although I have never lived here, I feel I am so much part of the area.”

Jean Rondeau was a serge weaver born in 1666 in Paris into a family that had been involved in weaving for three generations. Escaping persecution for his Protestant faith, he came to London and settled in Brick Lane, fathering twelve children. Jean had such success as weaver in London that in 1723 he built a fine house, number four Wilkes St, in the style that remains familiar to this day in Spitalfields. It is a indicator of Jean’s integration into British society that his name is to be discovered on a document of 1728 ensuring the building of Christ Church, alongside that of Edward Peck who laid the foundation stone. Peck is commemorated today by the elaborate marble monument next to the altar, where I took Stanley’s portrait which you can see above.

Jean’s son John Rondeau was a master silk weaver and in 1741 he commissioned textile designs from Anna Maria Garthwaite, the famous designer of Spitalfields silks, who lived at the corner of Princelet St adjoining Wilkes St. As a measure of John’s status, in 1745 he sent forty-seven of his employees to join the fight against Bonnie Prince Charlie. Appointed Sexton of the church in 1761 until his death in 1790, when he was buried in the crypt in a lead coffin labelled John Rondeau, Sexton of this Parish, his remains were exhumed at the end of twentieth century and transported to the Natural History Museum for study.

“Once I found that the crypt was cleared, I made an appointment at the Natural History Museum, where Dr Molleson showed his bones to me,” admitted Stanley, widening his eyes in wonder. “She told me he was eighty-five, a big fellow – a bit on the chubby side, yet with no curvature of the spine, which meant he stood upright. It was strange to be able to hold his bones, because I know so much about his history,” Stanley told me in a whisper of amazement, as we sat together, alone in the vast empty church that would have been equally familiar to John the Sexton.

In 1936, a carpenter removing a window sill from an old warehouse in Cutler St that was being refurbished was surprised when a scrap of paper fell out. When unfolded, this long strip was revealed to be a ballad in support of the weavers, demanding an Act of Parliament to prevent the cheap imports that were destroying their industry. It was written by James Rondeau, the grandson of John the Sexton who was recorded in directories as doing business in Cutler St between 1809 and 1816. Bringing us two generations closer to the present day, James Rondeau author of the ballad was Stanley’s great-great-great-grandfather. It was three generations later, in 1882, that Stanley’s grandfather left Sclater St and the East End for good, moving to Edmonton when the railway opened. And subsequently Stanley grew up without any knowledge of Huguenots or the Spitalfields connection, until that chance meeting in 1980 leading to the discovery that he was an eighth generation British Huguenot.

“When I retired, it gave me a new purpose,” said Stanley, cradling the slender pamphlet he has written entitled The Rondeaus of Spitalfields. “It’s a story that must not be forgotten because we were the originals, the first wave of immigrants that came to Spitalfields,” he declared. Turning the pages slowly, as he contemplated the sense of connection that the discovery of his ancestry has given him, he admitted, “It has made a big difference to my life, and when I walk around in Christ Church today I can imagine my ancestor John the Sexton walking about in here, and his father Jean who built the house in Wilkes St. I can see the same things he did, and when I am able to hear the great eighteenth century organ, once it is restored, I can know that my ancestor played it and heard the same sound.”

There is no such thing as an old family, just those whose histories are recorded. We all have ancestors – although few of us know who they were, or have undertaken the years of research Stanley Rondeau had done, bringing him into such vivid relationship with his ancestors. It granted him an enviably broad sense of perspective, seeing himself against a wider timescale than his own life. History became personal for Stanley Rondeau in Spitalfields.

The silk design at the top was commissioned from Anna Maria Garthwaite by Stanley’s ancestor, Jean Rondeau, in 1742. (courtesy of V&A)

4 Wilkes St built by Jean Rondeau in 1723. Pictured here seen from Puma Court in the nineteen twenties, it was destroyed by a bomb in World War II and is today the site of Suskin’s Textiles.

The copy of James Rondeau’s song discovered under a window sill in Cutler St in 1936.

Stanley Rondeau standing in the churchyard near his home in Enfield, at the foot of the grave of John the Sexton’s son and grandson (the author of the song) both called James Rondeau, and who coincidentally also settled in Enfield.