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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

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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.

Follow CHERRY’S CACHE

I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.

Click here for details

If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.

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

Last City of London tour of the season tomorrow. Click here to book

Commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of Cable St

Portrait of Beattie Orwell by Phil Maxwell

It was my delight to accompany photographer Phil Maxwell to visit one hundred and five year old Beattie Orwell (1917-2023) and sit beside her in her cosy flat while she talked to me of her century of existence in this particular corner of the East End.

A magnanimous woman who delighted in the modest joys of life, Beattie was nevertheless a political animal who was proud to be one of the last living veterans of the Battle of Cable St – a formative experience that inspired her with a fiercely egalitarian sense of justice and led to her becoming a councillor in later life, acutely conscious of the rights of the most vulnerable in society.

In spite of her physical frailty, Beattie’s moral courage granted her an astonishing monumental presence as a human being. To speak with Beattie was to encounter another, kinder world.

“I am Jewish and both my parents were East Enders, born here. My father’s parents came over from Russia. On my mother’s side, her parents were born here but her grandfather was born in Holland. So I am a bit of a mixture!

My father Israel worked as a porter at the Spitalfields Market and my mother Julia was a cigar maker at Godfrey & Phillips in Commercial St. I grew up in Brunswick Buildings in Goulston St, until I got bombed out. It was horrible, we had a little scullery, too small to swing a cat. My mother had one bedroom and, the three children, we slept in a put-you-up. I had two sisters Rebecca & Esther. Rebecca was the eldest, she very clever at dressmaking. When she was fifteen, she could make a dress. We needed her because my father died when he was forty-four, he had three strokes and died in Vallance Rd Hospital. I was only thirteen. He used to take me everywhere, he was marvellous. He took to me to the West End to visit my aunt, she was an old lady with a parrot and lived on Bewick St. We used to have a laugh with the parrot.

We moved to City Corporation flats in Stoney Lane and I went to Gravel Lane School. It was lovely school, they taught us housewifery. We had a little flat in the school and we used to clean it out, then go shopping in Petticoat Lane to buy ingredients to make a dinner, imagining we were married. The boys used to do woodwork and learnt to make stools and things like that. I loved that school. When I was twelve it closed and I went to the Jewish Free School in Bell Lane. It  was very strict and religious. When the teacher wanted us to be quiet, she’d say, ‘I’m waiting!’ It was good, I enjoyed my school life.

I left when I was fourteen and I went to work right away, dressmaking in Alie St. I used to lay out material. I do not know why but I must have heavy fingers, I could not manage the silk. It used to fall out of my hands. I only lasted a week before I left, I could not stand it. Then I went to work with my sister at Lottereys in Whitechapel opposite the Rivoli Picture Palace, they used to make uniforms for solders. I went into tailoring, men’s trousers, putting the buttons on with a machine. We worked long hours and it was hard work. By the time I got married I was earning two pounds and ten shillings a week. I never earned big money. I worked all the way through the war. I gave all the money to my mother and she gave me a shilling back. I used to walk up to the West End. It was threepence on the trolley bus.

I was nineteen in 1936. I was there with all the crowds at the Battle of Cable St. I am Jewish and I knew we must fight the fascists. They were anti-semitic, so I felt I had to do it. I was not frightened because there were so many people there. If I was on my own I might have been frightened, but I never saw so many people. You could not imagine. Dockers, Scottish and Irish people were there. It was a marvellous atmosphere. I was standing on the corner of Leman St outside a shop called ‘Critts’ and everyone was shouting ‘ They shall not pass!’ I was with my friend and we stood there a long time, hours. So from there we walked down to Cable St where we saw the lorry turned over. I never saw the big fighting that happened in Aldgate because I was not down there, but I saw them fighting in Cable St near this turned over lorry. From there, we walked down to Royal Mint St, where the blackshirts were. They were standing in a line waiting for Oswald Mosley to come. So I said to my friend, ‘We’d better get away from here.’

We went back through Cable St to the place where we started. From there, the news came through ‘They’re not passing.’ We all marched past the place where Fascists had their headquarters  – they threw flour over us, shouting – to Victoria Park where we had a big meeting with thousands of people. I had never seen anything like it in my life and I used to go to all the meetings. I never went dancing. My mother used to say, ‘I don’t know where I got you from!’ because I was only interested in politics. I am the only one like this in the whole family. I still know everything that is going on.

I used to go to Communist Party socials in Swedenborg Sq, off Cable St, and – being young – I used to enjoy it. Then I joined the Labour Party, the Labour League of Youth it was called. We used to go on rambles. It was lovely. We went to Southend once. I always used to march to Hyde Park on May Day and carry one of the ropes of our banner. I met my husband John in Victoria Park when I was with the Young Communists League, although I was not a member. They had a Sports Day and my husband was running for St Mary Atte Bowe because he was a Catholic. I met him and we went to a Labour Party dance. We got married in 1939.

We managed to get a flat in the same building as my mother, at the top of the stairs. They were private flats and I remember standing outside with a banner saying, ‘Don’t pay no rent!’ because the owners would not do the flats up. They did not look after us, it was horrible thing for us to have to do but it worked. I laugh now when I think about it. I was always brave. I am brave now.

We got bombed out of those flats while my husband was in the army. I had a baby so they sent me to Oxford where my husband was based with the York & Lancasters. We had a six-roomed house for a pound a week. My mother and sister came with me and they looked after my baby while I went to work in munitions. I was a postwoman too and I used to get up at four in the morning and walk over Magdalen Bridge.

I came back to the East End to try to get a flat here and I got caught in one of the air raids, but I knew this was where I had to live. My mother used to get under the stairs in Wentworth St when there was a raid and put a baby’s pot on her head. The war was terrible.

They sent my husband to Ikley Moor and it was too cold for him, so we came back for good. I managed to get two horrible little side rooms in Stoney Lane, sharing a kitchen between four and a toilet between two. I had no fridge, just a wooden box with chicken wire on the front. I used to go the Lane and buy two-pennorth of ice and put the butter in there. I had to buy food fresh everyday. There was a black market trade in fruit. These flats had been built for the police but the police would not have them, so they let them out to other people. All the flats were named after royalty, we were in Queens Buildings. I watched them building new flats in Cambridge Heath Rd but, before I could get one of them, I was offered a lot of horrible flats. Yet when I got there we were overcrowded, until we got a three bedroom flat at last, because I had two girls and a boy. I lived sixty-seven years there.

My husband never earned much money so I had to carry on working. He had twenty-two shillings a week pension from the army. He did all kinds of things and then got a job in the Orient Tea Warehouse. In 1966, when he was going to be Mayor of Bethnal Green and they would not give him time off, he went up to the Hackney Town Hall and got a job in the Town Clerk’s Office. He was always good at writing, he had lovely hand writing.

I became a councillor and I loved it. Our council was the best council, they were best to the old people. We used to go and visit all the old people’s homes. I never told them I was coming because I used to try and catch them out. We checked the quality of food and how clean it was. I organised dinners in York Hall for all the old people and trips to Eastbourne, but it has all been done away with – they do nothing now.

I was a councillor for ten years from 1972 until 1982. I had to fight to get the seat but I always loved old people, my husband was the same. He was known as the ‘Singing Mayor’ because he used to sing in all the old people’s homes. From when I was forty-two, I used to go round old people’s homes on Friday nights and I still do it. We have dinners together, turkey, roast potatoes and sausages, with trifle for afters.”

Beattie Orwell (1917-2023)

Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell

Police disperse anti-fascist protestors at the Battle of Cable St, 4th October 1936

Commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of Cable St, Solidarity on the Streets an exhibition documenting East Enders’ enduring resistance to racism and fascism opens today at Four Corners in Bethnal Green and runs until 31st October, Wednesday-Saturday 11am-6pm.

Policemen arrest a protestor at the Battle of Cable St, 4th October 1936. Courtesy Topical Press Agency/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Protestors stand by a barricade with the slogans ‘Remember Olympia’ and ‘They Shall Not Pass,’ Battle of Cable St, 1936. Courtesy People’s History Museum

Fascist leader Oswald Mosley inspects his blackshirts in Royal Mint St prior to the Battle of Cable St, 4th October 1936. Courtesy Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Protesters on the barricade in Cable St, 4th October 1936. Courtesy People’s History Museum

Policemen arrest a protester in Royal Mint St, 4th October 1936. Photography by Planet News Ltd. Courtesy People’s History Museum

Moseley supporter in East London, 1976. Photograph copyright Paul Trevor

March after the racist murder of Altab Ali with banner designed by Dan Jones, Whitechapel, 14th May 1978. Tom Learmonth. Courtesy Four Corners/Bengali Photo Archive

Procession behind the hearse of Altab Ali, 14th May 1978. Photograph copyright Paul Trevor

Demonstration by the Anti-Racist Committee of Asians in East London. Centre: Mala Sen, right: Chomok Ali Noor, to right and behind: Islam Uddin. Commercial Rd, June 1976. Photograph copyright Paul Trevor

Anti-racist demonstration with Barbara Beese and her son Darcus Howe, June 1976. Photograph copyright Paul Trevor

Anti-racist sit down protest to stop the National Front selling their papers at the top of Brick Lane, 16th July 1978. Aloke Biswas speaks through a megaphone, Patrick Kodikara stands on his left, Abdul Monnan holds a cup, Shams Uddin sits with arms raised and Dan Jones is clapping. Photograph copyright Paul Trevor

Police clash with teachers from Daneford School who were picketing the Inner London Education Authority to demand anti-racist action in their school, October 1985. Photograph by Lloyd Gee. Courtesy Four Corners/Bengali Photo Archive

Students and teachers from Daneford School march up Holloway Rd demanding anti-racist action in their school, November 1985. Photograph by Lloyd Gee. Courtesy Four Corners/Bengali Photo Archive

Reception for anti-apartheid activists Adelaide Tambo and Winnie Mandela at Daneford School, Bethnal Green, 1990, including Julie Begum, Jennifer Fear, Abdul Rob, Maya Alexander and Anne Knox.  Courtesy Four Corners/Bengali Photo Archive

Women Unite Against Racism protest outside London Borough of Tower Hamlets town hall against the British National Party, 1993. From left: Rhea, Jill, Amina, Ahea, Julie Begum, Georgie Wemyss and Danielle. Courtesy Four Corners/Bengali Photo Archive

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Often when I set out for a walk from Spitalfields, my footsteps lead me to the crossroads outside the Bank of England , at the place where Richard Jefferies – a writer whose work has been an enduring inspiration – once stood. Like me, Jefferies also came to the city from the countryside and his response to London was one of awe and fascination. Whenever I feel lost in the metropolis, his writing is always a consolation, granting a liberating perspective upon the all-compassing turmoil of urban life and, in spite of the changes in the city, his observations resonate as powerfully today as they did when he wrote them. This excerpt from The Story of My Heart (1883), the autobiography of his inner life, describes the sight that met Richard Jefferies’ eyes when he stood upon that spot at the crossroads in the City of London.

“There is a place in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory. It is in the shape of a triangle with a rounded apex. A stream of traffic runs on either side, and other streets send their currents down into the open space before it. Like the spokes of a wheel converging streams of human life flow into this agitated pool. Horses and carriages, carts, vans, omnibuses, cabs, every kind of conveyance cross each other’s course in every possible direction.

Twisting in and out by the wheels and under the horses’ heads, working a devious way, men and women of all conditions wind a path over. They fill the interstices between the carriages and blacken the surface, till the vans almost float on human beings. Now the streams slacken, and now they rush again, but never cease, dark waves are always rolling down the incline opposite, waves swell out from the side rivers, all London converges into this focus. There is an indistinguishable noise, it is not clatter, hum, or roar, it is not resolvable, made up of a thousand thousand footsteps, from a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels, of haste, and shuffle, and quick movements, and ponderous loads, no attention can resolve it into a fixed sound.

Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty-red iron clunking on pointless carts, high white wool-packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams, sunlight sparkling on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels, jingle, jingle, jingle! An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of colour, flecks of colour champed, as it were, like bits in the horses’ teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people winding like the curves on fast-flowing water. This is the vortex and whirlpool, the centre of human life today on the earth. Now the tide rises and now it sinks, but the flow of these rivers always continues. Here it seethes and whirls, not for an hour only, but for all present time, hour by hour, day by day, year by year.

All these men and women that pass through are driven on by the push of accumulated circumstances, they cannot stay, they must go, their necks are in the slave’s ring, they are beaten like seaweed against the solid walls of fact. In ancient times, Xerxes, the king of kings, looking down upon his myriads, wept to think that in a hundred years not one of them would be left. Where will be these millions of today in a hundred years? But, further than that, let us ask – Where then will be the sum and outcome of their labour? If they wither away like summer grass, will not at least a result be left which those of a hundred years hence may be the better for? No, not one jot! There will not be any sum or outcome or result of this ceaseless labour and movement, it vanishes in the moment that it is done, and in a hundred years nothing will be there, for nothing is there now. There will be no more sum or result than accumulates from the motion of a revolving cowl on a housetop.

I used to come and stand near the apex of the promontory of pavement which juts out towards the pool of life, I still go there to ponder. London convinced me of my own thought. That thought has always been with me, and always grows wider.”

Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)

Archive photographs copyright courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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Petticoat Lane

Photographer Charles Chusseau-Flaviens came to London from Paris and took these pictures, reproduced courtesy of George Eastman House, before the First World War – mostly likely in 1911. This date is suggested by his photograph of the proclamation of the coronation of George V which took place in that year. Very little is known of Chusseau-Flaviens except he founded one of the world’s first picture agencies, located at 46 Rue Bayen,  and he operated through the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century. Although their origin is an enigma, Chusseau-Flaviens’ photographs of London and especially of Petticoat Lane constitute a rare and precious vision of a lost world.

Petticoat Lane

Sandys Row with Frying Pan Alley to the right

Proclamation of the coronation of George V, 1911

Crossing sweeper in the West End

Policeman on the beat in Oxford Circus, Regent St

Beating the bounds for the Tower of London, Trinity Sq

Boats on the Round Pond, Kensington Gardens

Suffragette in Trafalgar Sq

Photographs courtesy George Eastman House

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Dennis Anthony’s Petticoat Lane

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The door to Parliament

Look at all the doors where the dead people walked in and out. These are the doors of old London. Some are inviting you in and some are shutting you out. Doors that lead to power and doors that lead to prison. Doors that lead to the parlour, doors that lead to the palace, and doors that lead to prayer.

These are the doors that I found among hundreds of glass slides once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, many more than a century old, and housed today at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Looking at life through a doorway, we are all either on the way in or on the way out. Like the door to your childhood home that got sold long ago, each one pictured here is evidence of the transient nature of existence, reminding you that you cannot go back through the portal of time.

Yet there is a powerful enigma conjured by these murky pictures of old doors, most of which will never open again. Like the pauper or the lost soul condemned to wander the streets, we cannot enter to learn what lies behind these doors of old London. But a closed door is an invitation to the imagination and we can wonder and dream, entering those hidden spaces in our fancy.

London has always been a city of doors, inviting both the curiosity and the suspicion of the passerby. In each street, there is a constant anticipation of people popping out, regurgitated onto the street by the building, and the glimpse to be snatched of the interior before the door closes again.

I cannot resist the notion that every door contains a mystery and all I need is a skeleton key. Then we can set out to explore as we please, going in one door and out another, until we have passed through all the doors of old London.

The entrance to the Carpenters’ Hall

The doors of Lambeth Palace

Door in the cloisters in Westminster Abbey

The door to the chamber of Little Ease at the Tower of London.

In St Benet’s Church, Paul’s Wharf.

Back door of 33 Mark Lane

Back door to Lancaster House.

In Crutched Friars.

14 Cavendish Sq.

The door to 10 Downing St

39a Devonshire St.

The door to the House of Lords

Wren doorway, Kensington Palace.

The door to Westminster Abbey

St Dunstan’s in the West

The entrance to Christ Church, Greyfriars.

The door to St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield

Temple Church

The Watchhouse, St Sepulcre’s, Smithfield.

Door by Inigo Jones at St Helen’s Bishopsgate.

Prior Bolton’s Door at St Bartholomew the Great.

At the Tower of London

Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute