St. Martin, Ludgate with St. Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1900

At this time of year, when dusk gathers in the mid-afternoon, a certain fog drifts into my brain and the city itself grows mutable as the looming buildings outside my window merge into a dark labyrinth of shadows beyond. Yet this is as nothing compared with the smog of old London – in the days before anyone dreamed of the Ultra Low Emission Zone – when a million coal fires polluted the atmosphere with clouds of filthy black smoke carrying noxious fumes, infections and lung diseases. In old London, the city resounded with a symphony of fog horns on the river and thousands of people coughing in the street.

Looking at these glass slides of a century ago, once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute, the fogs and smogs of old London take on quite another meaning. They manifest the proverbial mythic “mists of time,” the miasma wherein is lost all of human history, save the sketchy outline that some idle writer or other jotted down. Just as gauzes at the pantomime conjure the romance of fairyland, the hazes in these pictures filter and soften the images as if they were faded memories, receding into the past.

The closer I examine these views, the more I wonder whether the fog is, in some cases, an apparition called forth by the photographic process itself – the result of a smeary lens or grime on the glass plate, or simply an accident of exposure. Even so, this photographic fogging is no less evocative of old London than the actual meteorological phenomenon. As long as there is atmosphere, the pictures are irresistibly atmospheric. And old London is a city eternally swathed in mist.

St Paul’s Cathedral from the north-west, c. 1920

Pump at Bedford Row, 1911

Cenotaph, 1919

Upper Thames view, c. 1920

Greenwich Hospital from the Park, c. 1920

City roadworks, 1910

Looking north across the City of London, c. 1920

Old General Post Office, c. 1910

View eastwards from St Paul’s, c. 1910

Hertford House, c. 1910

New River Head, c. 1910

The Running Footman public house, c. 1900

Unidentified building, c 1910

Church Row, Hampstead, c. 1910

Danish Ambassador’s residence, Wellclose Square, Wapping c. 1910

Church of All Hallows, London Wall, c. 1890

Drapers’ Almshouses, Bromley Street, c. 1910

Battersea Bridge, c. 1910

32 Smith Grove, Highgate, in the snow, 1906

Unknown public building, c. 1910

Training ship at Greenwich, c. 1910

Flooded moat at the Tower of London, c. 1910

The Woodman, 1900

Bangor St, North Kensington, c. 1910

Terrace of the Houses of Parliament, c.1910

Statue of Boudicca on Westminster Bridge, c. 1910

Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

You may also like to take a look at

The Nights of Old London

The Ghosts of Old London

The Dogs of Old London

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours

Monument to Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, Westminster Abbey, c.1910

What could be more appropriate to the season of spooks and spirits than a virtual tour of the tombs of old London, courtesy of these glass slides once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute?

We can admire the aesthetic wonders of statuary and architecture in these magnificent designs, and receive an education in the history and achievements of our illustrious forbears as a bonus.

In my childhood, no festival or national occasion was complete without a visit to some ancient abbey or cathedral. Yet while ostensibly we went to pay our respects, my interest was always drawn by the stone tombs and ancient monuments.

It is a human impulse to challenge the ephemeral nature of existence by striving to create monuments, even if the paradox is that these attempts to render tenderness in granite will always be poignant failures, reminding us of death rather than life. Yet there is soulful beauty in these overwrought confections and a certain liberating consolation to be drawn, setting our personal grief against the wider perspective of history.

Tomb of Sir Francis Vere, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Monument to William Wilberforce, Westminster Abbey, c.1910

Memorial to Admiral Sir Peter Warren,  Westminster Abbey, c.1910

Monument to William Wordsworth in Baptistery, Westminster Abbey, c.1910

St Benedict’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey,  c.1910

Chapel of St Edmund, Westminster Abbey, c.1910

Tombstone of Laurence Sterne, St George’s Hanover Sq, c.1910 – Buried, grave-robbed and reburied in 1768, subsequently removed to Coxwold in 1969 due to redevelopment of the churchyard.

Hogarth’s tomb, St Nicholas’ Churchyard, Chiswick, c.1910

Sir Hans Sloane and Miller Monuments in Old Chelsea Churchyard, c. 1910

Stanley’s Monument in Chelsea Church, c. 1910

Sanctuary at All Saint’s Church, Chelsea, c. 1910

Shakespeare’s memorial, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Colville Monument in All Saint’s Church, Chelsea, c. 1910

Tomb of Daniel Defoe at Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, c. 1910

At the gates of Bunhill Fields, c. 1910

Tomb of John Bunyan, Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, c. 1910

North Transept of Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

North Ambulatory, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Ambulatory, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Monument to John Milton, St Giles, Cripplegate, c. 1910

Offley Monument, St Andrew Undershaft, c. 1910

Pickering Monument, St Helen’s Bishopsgate, c. 1920

Plaque, Christ Church, Newgate, 1921

Tombs in Temple churchyard, c. 1910

King Sebert’s Tomb, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Monument to Historian John Stow in St.Andrew Undershaft, c. 1910

Tomb of Edward III, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Queen Elizabeth I’s Tomb, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Monument to Charles James Fox, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Poets’ Corner with David Garrick’s Memorial, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Memorial to George Frederick Handel, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Monument to Francis Holles, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Tombstone of the Kidney family, c. 1910

Cradle monument to Sophia, Daughter of James I, Henry VII’s Lady Chapel, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Tomb of Sir Francis Vere, Chapel of St John the Evangelist, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Tomb of John Dryden, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Wellington’s Funeral Carriage, St Paul’s Cathedral,c. 1910

Robert Preston’s grave stone, St Magnus, c. 1910

Tomb of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey, c. 1910

Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

You may also like to take a look at

The Nights of Old London

The Ghosts of Old London

The Dogs of Old London

The Signs of Old London

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours

Roger Clarke tells the tale of Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen and Mesmerist, and Curse of Vicky’s Ticker

Once I held it in my hand, I was aware of the weight of it. I was standing in a small downstairs room at Bonhams in South Kensington holding a Victorian gold pocket watch. Yet the weight I felt was not that of the precious metal or the intricate mechanics of its system, but of the significance of those whose hands through which the watch had passed: Queen Victoria, two celebrated psychics, a newspaper editor who went down in the Titanic and the thief who stole it fifty years ago.

Here is the entry in Bonham’s catalogue:

LOT 19: AN 18K GOLD KEY WIND OPEN FACE POCKET WATCH, Circa 1840 (£500–700)

Two engraved inscriptions: ‘Presented by Her Majesty to Miss Georgiana Eagle for her Meritorious & Extraordinary Clairvoyance produced at Osborn House, Isle of Wight, July 15th 1846′ and ‘Presented by W.T Stead to Mrs Etta Wriedt through whose mediumship Queen Victoria’s direct voice was heard in London in July 1911.’

I first came across the name of Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Mesmerist, while researching my book A Natural History of Ghosts – and as a Shoreditch resident myself – I was naturally intrigued by her. Dalston was a Victorian nexus of young female psychics, including the infamous Florence Cook in the eighteen seventies, and there was a very famous Dalston spiritualist group at the time many of whose members worked on the railways – two recently-built spurs (now the overground) had opened up the area and were instrumental  in making Dalston popular for séances.  It was a new territory, opening new doors into the other world. However it seems an even younger East London psychic proceeded Miss Cook by several decades amongst the furniture-making factories and leather-working rooms of Shoreditch.

Georgiana Eagle was born on November 28th 1834 and baptised at St Leonard’s Church. Her grandfather owned a pub in the parish and the family were of Huguenot descent. She lived with her father Barnardo Eagle in Holywell Place. He was a professional stage magician and the family led a nomadic existence as travelling players. In 1839, he was describing himself as ‘The Royal Wizard of the South’ and in the Birmingham Journal of November 23rd of that year claimed he had performed for ‘His late Majesty and Queen Adelaide, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, The Duchess of Kent and numbers of the nobility.’

After the death of her mother, eight-year-old Georgiana stayed with her father while the rest of her siblings were packed off to live with their grandparents in 36 Coleman St. She was a willing participant in her father’s stage act of ‘Hundred feats of mighty magic’. He was a sceptic who revealed deception and his show, The Mysterious Lady, which was devoted to exposing the clairvoyance claims of mesmerists – proved immensely popular. Little Georgiana was the star and she performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House when Prince Albert was still alive, receiving the gift of the gold watch from the monarch. Victoria’s journals show she gave similar watches to other children of Georgiana’s age and I believe Georgiana had it engraved after that event at Osborne House in 1846. This is the ill-fated watch that was subsequently stolen from the College of Psychic Studies in September 1962.

One morning last year, I received a call from a relative in the antiques business who was monitoring sales of objects connected to the Isle of Wight where we both grew up. He had learnt about the sale of a watch. I went in one day in January for a viewing and sat in a small windowless, fortified room as a young man brought it in. There was absolutely no doubt about it. This was Vicky’s Ticker – the watch given to Georgiana by Queen Victoria which has not been seen or heard of since 1962. It had been discovered among the effects of a jeweller from Manchester at his decease by his relatives, who had no idea of its tainted provenance.

There is a contemporary mention of Victoria’s gift of the watch to Georgiana in the Northampton Mercury in 1849. ‘On Monday last, a theatre suddenly upreared its tawdry head in the market square, decorated with pictures representing Miss Georgiana Eagle in trunk hose and flesh tights, in the act of receiving a splendid gold watch from Her Majesty Queen Victoria.’

A remarkable thing happened. In 1850, Barnardo Eagle advertised private clairvoyance sessions  ‘to the nobility and gentry’ in Brighton. At a meeting in Edinburgh in November 1852, around sixty people were invited to experience Georgiana’s powers of mediumship and mesmerism. Whether this conversion was heartfelt or genuine, we will probably never know.  It could have been simply that Barnardo was commercially savvy and he saw the wind was blowing in favour of psychics. Yet his journey from sceptic to believer is the reason that the watch is so precious to the College of Psychic Studies.

Those who were shocked by Barnardo’s apparent betrayal of his rational beliefs blamed him for dragging his eighteen year-old daughter along with him. It did not go well for either of them. By 1853, he had abandoned the profession and reverted to the family occupation, buying the licence to the Brown Bear Tavern near the British Museum. His infant daughter Rosabel died and was buried in a public grave, indicating the family’s reduced state at this time. Yet by 1855 they were back on the road, offering clairvoyance once again.

There was a late resurgence in their fame. The hiatus appears to have restored their public reputation now belief in psychic phenomena had became widespread. Then tragedy struck when Barnardo died onstage during his act. A few weeks later – while her father was barely cold in the ground – Georgiana married a Drury Lane scene-painter.  She was now performing as Madame Card, Wizard Queen and Mesmerist and living happily with her husband in Cheltenham, until he was committed to a lunatic asylum in Sussex where he died seven months later.

She married a music professor from Islington and they toured together. He accompanying her act with musical numbers and they were reviewed quite favourably by the Evening Standard. Georgiana was by now an accomplished hypnotist and ‘performed with a dexterity that is scarcely surpassed by any other male conjurer’ Unfortunately, the music professor – a volatile character who got in trouble with the law over his temper – also died young and Georgiana was widowed for a second time by the age of forty-seven. She married a draper twenty-five years her junior, and eventually died in Muswell Hill of ‘senile decay’ in March 1911.

Within months of Georgiana’s death, the watch fell into the hands of the newspaper editor W.T. Stead who gave it to Etta Wriedt, a medium who used it to channel the spirit and voice of Queen Victoria in London in July 1911. When Stead drowned on the Titanic, Wriedt presented the watch to the London College of Psychic Studies.

The colourful history of this little timepiece might tempt the credulous to believe it has a curse attached to it – though why that should be, I have no explanation. I attended the ceremony marking the return of the watch at the College of Psychic Studies and afterwards talked with a throng of interested parties.  ‘We think you were guided,’ suggested a couple of mediums but naturally I could not say.  Yet it is very strange that I should write on the subject for Spitalfields Life and then find it.

I do not feel my business with Georgiana Eagle has quite finished yet.

Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Mersmerist of Shoreditch

Inscription of July 1846

Inscription of July 1911

St Leonard’s Church where Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Clairvoyant Mesmerist, was baptised

Dalston became a nexus for female psychics in the eighteen seventies due to improved transport links

Barnardo Eagle, the Royal Wizard of the South (Courtesy of Senate House Library)

Advertisement for a performance by Barnardo and Georgiana Eagle in Plymouth

Georgiana Eagle commonly performed under the stage name of Madame Gilliland Card (Poster courtesy of British Museum)

Etta Wriedt used Vicky’s Ticker to channel the spirit and voice of Queen Victoria in London in 1911

Journal of Spiritualism, Psychical, Occult & Mystical Research (Courtesy London College of Psychic Studies)

Roger Clarke wishes to thank Vivienne Roberts, College Curator & Archivist at the London College of Psychic Studies for her research

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours

The temperature is plunging and I can feel the velvet darkness falling upon London. As dusk gathers in the ancient churches and the dusty old museums in the late afternoon, the distinction between past and present becomes almost permeable at this time of year. Then, once the daylight fades and the streetlights flicker into life, I feel the desire to go walking out in search of the dark nights of old London.

Examining hundreds of glass plates – many more than a century old – once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute, I am in thrall to these images of night long ago in London. They set my imagination racing with nocturnal visions of the gloom and the glamour of our city in darkness, where mist hangs in the air eternally, casting an aura round each lamp, where the full moon is always breaking through the clouds and where the recent downpour glistens upon every pavement – where old London has become an apparition that coalesced out of the fog.

Somewhere out there, they are loading the mail onto trains, and the presses are rolling in Fleet St, and the lorries are setting out with the early editions, and the barrows are rolling into Spitalfields and Covent Garden, and the Billingsgate porters are running helter-skelter down St Mary at Hill with crates of fish on their heads, and the horns are blaring along the river as Tower Bridge opens in the moonlight to admit another cargo vessel into the crowded pool of London. Meanwhile, across the empty city, Londoners slumber and dream while footsteps of lonely policemen on the beat echo in the dark deserted streets.

Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

Read my other nocturnal stories

Night at the Beigel Bakery

On the Rounds With the Spitalfields Milkman

Here are Rodney Archer’s memories with Phil Maxwell’s black and white photos from the eighties and Clive Murphy’s colour pictures from the nineties.

One day, when I went round to enjoy a cup of tea and shot of rum with Rodney in his cosy basement kitchen in Fournier St, he told me about Joan, the Cat Lady, who made it her business to befriend all the felines in Spitalfields during the nineteen eighties.

Rodney: Joan went all around the neighbourhood feeding the cats regularly and she had names for them. You’d see her crouching, looking through the corrugated iron surrounding Truman’s Brewery, waiting for the cats to come and then they suddenly all appeared. I think once I saw her there and I asked her what she was doing, and she said ‘I’m waiting for the cats to appear.’

‘My darlings,’ she really did call them, ‘My darlings,’ and it was wonderful in a way that she had this love of cats and spent her life encouraging them and feeding them and keeping them alive. I could never quite work it out, but she had a bag, like one of those trolleys you carry, full of cat food. Now, either she’d taken the tops off the tins or something, since I noticed – because she had a kind of witchlike aspect – that although she put her hands right into the tin to feed them and then just threw it down, I never saw any cat food on her hands. It was like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Over the years, I would chat to her but she was someone that you had to have some time for, because once she began she went on and on. The Cat Lady was strange – she spent all her money on the cats – she was like a character out of Dickens. She was almost a street person, except she had a place to live. And she did get benefits and she wasn’t an alcoholic or anything, she was very doughty, she had a bit of a moustache.

She was the kind of woman that, a hundred years ago, people would have been fearful of in a way. There was something awesome about her, because she had her own aura and she was there to feed the cats, and the cats were much more important to her than people. I’d talk about my cat to her and I think once she stopped by my door, and I opened it, and my cat sat looking at her.

The Gentle Author: I’ve heard she had this mantra, “Cats are better than rats.” Were there a lot of rats at that time?

Rodney: I think there were. When the market was still going and you had all the fruit and vegetables, the rats would come out to feed. I never saw that myself, but you might see a rat running along the curb. A lot of people said they were looking forward to the market closing because the area would be cleaner and neater, but I regretted that the market left and there weren’t cabbages everywhere.

The Gentle Author: Can you remember when you first saw the Cat Lady?

Rodney: I think I first saw her on the corner of Fournier St and Brick Lane. She had a huge physical endurance, but I think she must have been exhausted by her journey every day, because she would often stop for quite a long time, and she’d just be there looking around. I suppose she might have been looking for the cats. That’s why you could catch up with her and ask her how she was doing.

One day I just spoke to her, maybe I’d seen her around, and I said, ‘Are you feeding the cats?’ And she told me, and I said had a cat and so we talked about cats and the wisdom of cats and that kind of thing. And afterwards, I’d see her quite often. She didn’t talk much to me about her life – but she was the Great Mother of all the cats in Spitalfields.

Phil Maxwell photographed Joan, the Cat Lady, in the eighties

The cat lady on Brick Lane in the late nineteen eighties.

Phil: The woman in this photograph was always dressed in a head scarf and large coat. Usually she would pull a shopping bag on wheels behind her. She was the Cat Lady of Spitalfields. She knew where every cat and kitten lived in the wild and made it her task to feed them every day. Her bag was full of cat food which she would serve on newspaper at designated spots around Spitalfields.

Phil: The Cat Lady pauses for a second beside the Seven Stars pub on Brick Lane. She has just left some food in the ‘private road’ for some cats.

Phil: The Cat Lady floats past Christchurch School on Brick Lane – with her eyes closed, she contemplates the next cat awaiting a delivery.

Phil: The Cat Lady waits outside her favourite cafe in Cheshire St. Now a trendy boutique, in the nineteen-eighties you could buy a cup of tea and a sandwich for less than a pound at this establishment.

Phil: The Cat Lady ‘kept herself to herself’ and avoided the company of others

Phil: It must be about twenty years since I last saw the Cat Lady of Spitalfields. She devoted her life to feeding the stray cats of the area. I have no idea where she lived and I never saw her talking to another person. She seemed to live in her own separate cat world. Even though I was sitting opposite her when I took this photograph, I felt that she had created a barrier and would be reluctant to engage in conversation. It was impossible to make eye contact. I’m pleased I photographed her on the streets and in her Cheshire St cafe. She would not recognise Cheshire St and Brick Lane today.

Clive Murphy’s portrait of Joan Lauder

At Angel Alley, Whitechapel, 5th March 1992

Feeding the cat from The White Hart in Angel Alley, 5th March 1992

In Gunthorpe St, 5th March 1992

Buying cat food at Taj Stores, Brick Lane, 3rd August 1992

In Wentworth St, 3rd August 1992

Calling a cat, Bacon St, 3rd August 1992

The cat arrives, Bacon St, 3rd August 1992

Alley off Hanbury St, 2nd August 1992

Hanbury St, 26th November 1995

At Aldgate East, 3rd August 1992

At Lloyds, Leadenhall St, 3rd August 1992

Walking from Angel Alley into Whitechapel High St, 3rd August 1992

Beware Of The Pussy, 132 Brick Lane, 26th November 1995

Clive visits Joan in her Nursing Home, 1995

Clive: The women I have loved you could count upon the digits of one hand – my mother, her mother, our loyal companion Maureen McDonnell, the poet Patricia Doubell and the demented, incontinent Joan Lauder, the Cat Lady of Spitalfields who, in 1991, when I first spoke to her was already my heroine, a day-and-night-in-all-weathers Trojan, doggedly devoting herself to cats because human beings had for too long failed her.

She looked at me with suspicion when I suggested we tape record a book. Only my bribe that half of any proceeds of publication would fall to her or her favoured charities and enable the purchase of extra tins of cat food persuaded her at least to humour me. I could swear I saw those azure eyes, set in that pretty face, dilate.

I had entrapped her with the best of intentions as she, I was to learn, often entrapped, also with the best of intentions, the denizens of the feral world to have them spayed or neutered in the interests of control. But to the end, her end, I don’t think she ever trusted or respected me. I once found her surreptitiously laying down Whiskas in my hallway for my own newly-adopted cat which I named Joan in her honour. And she once spat the expletive ‘t***’ at me in a tone of total dismissal. To be called a foolish and obnoxious person was hardly comforting, given that I believe my own adage ‘in dementia veritas’ holds all too often true.

Black & white photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell

Colour photographs copyright © Estate of Clive Murphy

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours

Years ago, I became enraptured by a hundred-year-old collection of four thousand lantern slides. They were once used for educational lectures by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute in Spitalfields. When Stefan Dickers became archivist there, he discovered the slides in dusty old boxes – abandoned and forgotten since they became obselete. Yet over the last decade, it has become apparent that these slides, which were ignored for so long, are one of the greatest treasures in the collection.

When I was first offered the opportunity of publishing these lantern slides which have been unseen for generations, I was overwhelmed by the number of pictures and did not know where to start. The first to catch my fancy were the ancient signs and symbols, dating from an era before street numbering located addresses and lettered signs advertised trades to Londoners.

Before long, I grew spellbound by the slide collection because, alongside the famous landmarks and grand occasions of state, there were pictures of forgotten corners and of ordinary people going about their business. It was a delight to discover hundreds of images of things that people do not usually photograph and I was charmed to realise that the anonymous photographers of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society were as interested in pubs as they were in churches.

The more I studied the glass slides, the more joy I found in these arcane pictures, since every one contained the rich potential of hidden stories, seducing the imagination to flights of fancy regarding the ever-interesting subject of Old London. Once I had published The Signs of Old London, I realised there were many other such sets to be found among the slides, as a result of the systematic recording of London which underscored the original project by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, a hundred years ago.

I do not chose not to clean them up or remove imperfections and dirt, or standardise the colour to black or a uniform sepia, either. Instead, I cherish the subtle variations of hues present in these slides and savour the beautiful colour contrasts between them, when laid side by side. There is a melancholic poetry in these shabby images, in which their damage and their imperfections speak of their history, and I have come to glory in the patina and murk.

In the Inns of Court

At Eltham Palace

At Euston Station

The Anchor at Bankside

Crocodiles at the Natural History Museum

Reading Room at the British Museum

Chelsea Pensioner

In Fleet St

In Fleet St

St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell

Between the inner & outer dome of St Paul’s

Along the Embankment

The Old Dick Whittington, Clothfair, Smithfield

Firemen take a tea break

Lightermen on the Thames

Flood in Water St, Tower of London

The White Tower, London’s oldest building

Glass slides courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

Take a look at these sets of the glass slides of Old London

The Signs of Old London

The Markets of Old London

The Pubs of Old London

A few places are available for my course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Richard Fuest, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details

Dennis Gents Hair Stylist, note the razor blade sign

Ron’s Gents Hairdressers, Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, is still there but has changed from ‘Hairdresser’ to ‘Barber.’

His & Hers, ‘Executive Mood’ and ‘Avant Garde Mood’ hairstyles offered

June’s Ladies Hair Stylist. STE was the code for Stepney Green, letters were replaced by numbers around 1966.

Dave & Syd Strong, Gent’s Hairdresser

Gent’s Hairdresser moving into Ladies’ Hairdressing

Gent’s Hair Stylist, Puma Court, Spitalfields, run by Kyriacos Cleovoulou from 1962 until 2005.

Apples, Hair Stylist

Peter, Individual Gents Hair Stylist

The Saloon, customers peering out from the left of the window

Gentlemen’s Hairdressing Salon, Carter Lane, City of London

Mario’s Men’s Hairstylist

Hairdresser at 10 Laystall Street, Clerkenwell, with a plaque commemorating Giuseppe Mazzini as ‘the apostle of modern democracy inspired young Italy with the ideal of independence, unity and regeneration of his country.’

The Pleasant Gent’s Hairdresser is still going in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell

Photographs copyright © A London Inheritance

Follow A LONDON INHERITANCE, A Private History of a Public City

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HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 6th & 7th February 2027

This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.

“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author

COURSE STRUCTURE

1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.

SALIENT DETAILS

The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 6-7th February, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.

Lunch will be catered by Richard Fuest and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £350.

Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours

The poet Andy Stroman sent me these reminiscences of his childhood in Whitechapel in the nineteen-fifties

Andy Stroman aged four on the doorstep in Milward St

My brothers Paul, Howard and myself occupied one bedroom at 17 Milward St, Whitechapel, behind the London Hospital. We had three single beds and Paul was the furthest away from the door while Howard was in the middle. I was nearest to the door.

On Saturday, we would have a lie-in while Howard went to work at Burlington Cameras in Burlington Arcade up in the West End. Paul used to sleep with his head almost upside down so his nose was pointing in the air. I would wake up and lob a pillow at Paul shouting, ‘Wake up coconut shy!’ Paul’s head was pointing just like a coconut at the fairground. By this time it was half past twelve in the afternoon. Then we would both get up and have our cereal and make our way to the  municipal public baths on the Mile End Rd not far from Stepney Green Station.

I used to look forward to our once-a-week hot bath where I could have a sing-song and talk to Paul who was in the next cubicle. As you might have gathered we had no bath at home just a little sink in the scullery, and our only source of heating was one coal fire in the television room. The latter was our main source of evening entertainment and, if cowboy films were on and the cowboys shooting their guns off, the large mice would come out of their holes and frantically dance round the room. In that little telly room on a Friday night we used to each have our little tray of five or six monkey nuts in the shells.

There was my Mum, Auntie Rae, Paul and myself. My dad being a cab driver was out working and my oldest brother Howard out having fun up in the West End. An outside toilet in the backyard was a haven for peace, although I got frightened going out there at night so used to run out the back door and into the toilet and vice versa.

I kept getting repeated sickness, particularly in the chest, and you can guess how cold our house was in the wintertime. It used to be freezing in our bedroom and we had a bucket in the centre of the room to catch the drips that came from the ceiling.

Once, my Uncle Davey came to visit us when I was in bed. He entered with my Mum, looked concerned and said something in a quiet voice to my Mum. I heard a little bit of it. He said, ‘His feet are sticking out towards the door and the angel will come along and pull him out towards Heaven. We need to move his bed so his feet don’t point out like this.’ All three beds in the room were rearranged so my feet were pointing inwards and my head was near the window so I could breathe fresh air.

I do remember my Baba (my grandmother Milka from Vilna in Lithuania) singing to me before sleep when I was nervous. Sadly, she died before I was two and my mother took the death very badly, as all of us did. Milka was a social worker for women of the street who came to see her with their problems.

I used to wake up in winter to see ice had formed on the window panes and in summer I heard the fights coming from the pub on the corner, the Oxford Arms. My favourite was hearing ‘I’m a better man than you are, Paddy.’ Bang! ‘Oh no, you’re not.’ Bang! It was there my Mum would send me as a boy with an empty bottle and some money to get a full bottle of Guinness. A man would lift me up in the air, and I would pass the money and the empty bottle to the barmaid, and in return be given a new bottle and then run home.

When I used to visit my grandmother’s best friend Byla at 15 Milward St at the behest of my Mum, it felt even colder in there, though I loved to go and listen to her stories about Poland. How she washed clothes in the river for her grandparents and herself. There were many poor peasants in the village.

We used to sit in the scullery, the same type of scullery we all had. When Byla had finished talking she would slowly open a drawer and give me a Cadbury’s bar of Dairy Milk chocolate. I still remember the sound of her Big Ben clock with its black face and yellow numbers and hands, loudly ticking on the mantelpiece.

Byla was so thin but so clever. She lived alone and walked with a stick. She spoke with a wobbly voice and both her eyes were bloodshot. Her house was the last house in Milward St to be demolished. The social worker came from the Jewish Hospital in Stepney Green to make her sign the papers so she ended up in care. She was put in a North London care home where I pleaded with the manager to return her to Whitechapel. Byla was not pleased with me and made me say ‘sorry’ to the manager, which I did, though I only saw her one more time because after six weeks she had died.

Mum and Dad, Howard, Paul and myself on holiday. I am the baby.

With Mrs Gerson at Alice Model Nursery, Stepney Green 1956. I am holding the flowers which I presented to the Queen Mother.

My elder brother Howard took this of me when he grew obsessed with photography and developing pictures at home

My Auntie Rae on the left and my Mum on the right

My dear Baba – May she rest in peace – Milka Cohen, one of the cleverest and kindest women I ever met. She was a social worker for women of the street who came to see her with their problems.

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I am proud to publish these excerpts from CHERRY’S CACHE by Cherry Gilchrist, a graduate of my writing course. Cherry set out to research and bring alive the lives of her forebears and her account of Ned Despard is a fascinating example of this. Ned was a man who through his sense of decency found himself fatally at odds with the spirit of his age.

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Ned Despard by George Romney

I wanted to learn all that I could about my cousin Colonel Edward Marcus Despard (1751-1803), an Irishman of Huguenot descent whom I shall call ‘Ned’. My role here is to draw your attention to his story and celebrate my discovery of him as a relative. I will begin with the end.

On Monday February 21st, 1803, Ned was executed. A crowd of some twenty thousand people gathered to watch him go to his death on a scaffold erected on what is now the South Bank, condemned as a conspirator against King and Country. He asked permission to make a final speech and spoke passionately on the subject of justice and equality. He was then executed, by hanging and decapitation, on a charge of treason.

The evidence against him was flimsy at best and false at worst. He received small mercy in that his sentence of being ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’ – the last man in legal history to receive this sentence – was repealed at short notice to remove the barbaric ‘drawing and quartering’. Even though he had loyal friends, such as his old comrade-in-arms Horatio Nelson, they could not commute his sentence further.

Ned was condemned as a dangerous revolutionary, the charge against him being that he was planning to kill the King and overthrow the government. Yet this was a man who had been loyal to the British Crown through thick and thin, though since returning to London, he had kept company with radicals and was certainly interested in ideals of equality and reform. And in those days, that proved enough to hang him.

He was singled out for infamy at a time when Britain was gripped with paranoia about a possible revolution. The government feared that the French Revolution of 1789 might be replicated on British soil. Youthful idealism for revolution, embraced by the Romantic poets Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, was no longer acceptable.

Ned had served the British Government faithfully, fighting bravely as a comrade alongside Nelson in campaigns in the Caribbean and Central America, where they managed to recapture Fort Immaculada from the Spanish. Both men suffered disease and hardship in the process.

Afterwards, Ned proved himself as a responsible and conscientious governor in Honduras, and only came back to England when he was completely out of funds, trying to reclaim the expenses owed to him, which he had subsidised out of his own pocket, including providing hurricane relief to the population.

He married Catherine Gordon, a black woman from Jamaica, a bold act at the time, especially when he returned to London with her. Mixed marriages, as opposed to concubinage, were certainly not the norm at the turn of the nineteenth century. One of the reports against him sneered that when Ned was seized from home to be taken to court, he had been ‘found in bed with a black woman’ without mention that she was his lawful wife. Even some of the Despard family and their descendants spoke of her being a housekeeper rather than acknowledging her true position.

In fact, Catherine was an educated woman, her mother had been a ‘free woman’, so neither she nor her daughter was a slave. And Catherine was capable of mixing in upper circles of society. She petitioned for her husband tirelessly during the years he was kept in prison pending his final trial. One of her letters survives, a plea that he should be kept in better conditions.

During his time as First Commissioner & Governor in what is now Honduras, Ned insisted on fairness for all the peoples of his colony, irrespective of their status or colour. He had some awkward folk to deal with – Baymen guarding their plantations and Shoremen with semi-legal trade. There were Maroons, who were runaway slaves, plus Irish convicts and people of assorted ethnicities, including indigenous peoples, all with their different desires and objectives.

Ned’s insistence that there should be equality between people of different colour and race did not go down well with everyone in the colonies. Ironically, when challenged about this, he said that as British law did not discriminate between races, neither would he in its territories.

So were these his Huguenot values coming to the fore, carried through the generations? And did these values later inform Ned’s gallows speech with which I leave you?

‘Fellow Citizens, I come here as you see, after having served my country, faithfully, honourably, and usefully served it, for thirty years and upwards, to suffer death upon a scaffold for a crime of which I protest l am not guilty. I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty of it than any of you who may be now hearing me. But, though His Majesty’s Ministers know as well as I do, that I am not guilty, yet they avail themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to truth, to Liberty, and to Justice. Because I have been a friend to the poor, and the oppressed. But, Citizens, I hope and trust, notwithstanding, my fate, and the fate of those, who no doubt will soon follow me, that the principle of Freedom, of Humanity, and of Justice, will finally triumph over Falsehood, Tyranny, and Delusion, and every principle hostile to the interests of the human race.’

A mahogany plantation in Honduras

Published account of the trial of Ned Despard

Account from the Aberdeen Press & Journal of Catherine Despard being refused admission to visit her husband

Ned Despard at the gallows

The execution of Ned Despard

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Commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of Cable St today

Max Levitas (1915-2018)  by Phil Maxwell

Max Levitas became an East End hero when he was arrested in 1934, at the age of nineteen years old, for writing anti-fascist slogans on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. “There were two of us, we did it at midnight and we wrote ‘All out on September 9th to fight Fascism,’ ‘Down with Fascism’ and ‘Fight Fascism,’ on Nelson’s Column in whitewash,” he told me, his eyes shining with pleasure, still fired up with ebullience at one hundred and two years of age, “And afterwards we went to Lyons Corner House to have something to eat and wash our hands, but when we had finished our tea we decided to go back to see how good it looked, and we got arrested – the police saw the paint on our shoes.”

On September 9th 1934, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was due to speak at a rally in Hyde Park but – as Max was always happy to remind you  – he was drowned out by the people of London who converged to express their contempt. It was both fortuitous and timely that the Times reprinted Max’s slogans on September 7th, two days before the rally, in the account of his appearance at Bow St Magistrates Court, thereby spreading the message.

Yet this event was merely the precursor to the confrontation with the Fascists that took place in the East End, two years later on 4th October 1936, that became known as the Battle of Cable St, and in which Max was proud to have played a part – a story he told as an inspirational example of social solidarity in the face of prejudice and hatred. And, as we sat in a quiet corner of the Whitechapel Library, watching the rain fall upon the street market outside, it was a story that I was eager to hear in Max’s first hand account, especially since he was one of last left of those who were there.

Politics had always been personal for Max Levitas, based upon family experience of some of the ugliest events of the twentieth century. His father Harry fled from Lithuania and his mother Leah from Latvia in 1913, both escaping the anti-semitic pogroms of Tsarist Russia. They met in Dublin and married but, on the other side of Europe, Harry’s sister Sara was burnt to death along with fellow-villagers in the synagogue of Akmeyan, and Leah’s sister Rachel was killed with her family by the Nazis in Riga.

“My father was a tailor and a trade unionist,” Max explained in the lively Dublin brogue that still coloured his speech, even after eighty years in the East End. “He formed an Irish/Jewish trade union and then employers blacklisted him, making sure he could never get a job,” Max continued with a philosophical grin, “The only option was to leave Dublin and we lived in Glasgow from 1927 until 1930, but my father had two sisters in London, so we came here to Durward St in Whitechapel in 1931 and stayed ever since.”

With this background, you can appreciate the passionate concern of Max – when he was nineteen and secretary of the Mile End Young Communist League – at a time when the British Government was supporting the Fascist General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. “Even after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, the British Government was developing arms with Germany,” Max informed me, widening his eyes in condemnation and bringing events into vivid reality that I had viewed only as history until he filled them with personal emotion.

“I was working as a tailor’s presser in a small workshop in Commercial St at the time. Mosley wanted to march through Whitechapel because it was where a large number of Jewish people lived and worked, and I knew the only way to stop him was to have unity of the people. I approached a number of unions, Jewish organisations and the Communist League to band together against the Fascists but although they agreed what I was doing was right, they wouldn’t support me.

But I give credit to the huge number of members of the Jewish and Irish communities and others who turned out that day, October the fourth, 1936. There were thousands that came together in Aldgate, and when we heard that Mosley’s intention was to march along Cable St from Tower Hill into Whitechapel, large numbers of people went to Cable St and barricades were set up. The police attempted to clear Cable St with horses, so that the march could go ahead, but the people of Cable St fought back and the police had to give in.

At three o’clock, we heard that police had decided that the march would not take place, because if it did a number of people would be killed. The Fascists were defeated by the ordinary people of Stepney, people who emptied buckets of water and chamber pots out of their houses, and marbles into the street. This was how they stopped Mosley marching through the East End of London. If he had been able to do so, more people would have joined him and he would have become stronger.”

Max Levitas spoke of being at the centre of a definitive moment in the history of the East End, ninety years ago, when three hundred thousand people came together to form a human chain – in the face of three thousand fascists with an escort of ten thousand police –  to assert the nature of the territory as a place where Fascism and racism are unacceptable. It was a watershed in resistance to Fascism in Europe and the slogan that echoed around Stepney and Whitechapel that day was, “No paseran” – from the Spanish Civil War, “They shall not pass.”

After the war, Max became a highly  respected Communist councillor in Stepney for fifteen years and, a natural orator, he remained eloquent about the nature of his politics.“It was never an issue to forge a Communist state like in the Soviet Union,” he informed me, just in case I got the wrong idea,“We wanted to ensure that the ordinary working people of England could lead decent lives – not to be unemployed, that people weren’t thrown out of their homes when they couldn’t pay their rent, that people weren’t homeless, as so many are today, living with their parents and crowded together in rooms.”

Max’s lifelong political drive was the manifestation of a tenacious spirit. When Max arrived in Whitechapel Library, I did not recognise him at first because he could have passed for a man thirty years younger. And later, when I returned his photos to his flat nearby, I discovered Max lived up five flights of stairs and it became obvious that he walked everywhere in the neighbourhood, living independently even at his astounding age. “I used to smoke,” Max admitted to me shyly, when I complimented him on his energy.” I stopped at eighty-four, when my wife died – until then I used to smoke about twenty cigarettes a day, plus a pipe and cigars.” Max confessed, permitting himself a reckless grin of nostalgia.

“My mother and father both died at sixty-five,” Max revealed, turning contemplative,“I put that down to the way they suffered and poverty. My father worked around the clock to keep the family going. He died two years after my mother. At that time there was no National Health Service, and I phoned the doctor when she was sick, asking him to come, and he said, ‘You owe me some money. Unless you pay me, I won’t come.’ I said, ‘You come and see my mother.’ He said, ‘You will have to pay me extra for coming plus what you owe.’ But she died before he came and I had to get an ambulance.”

It was a story that revealed more of the personal motivation for Max’s determination to fight for better conditions for the people of the East End – yet remarkably, in spite of the struggle of those around him and that he himself had known, Max was a happy man. “I’m always happy, because I can say that my life was worth living, ” he declared to me without qualification.

Max Levitas wanted to live as long as possible to remind us of all the things he had seen. “I believe if racists marched through the East End today, people would stop them in the same way,” he assured me with the unique confidence granted only to those who have known one hundred and two years of life.

Max in 1945

Max campaigning in Stepney in the nineteen sixties