Crowden & Keeves’ Hardware
Click here to book your spring walk through Spitalfields
Click here to book your walk through the City of London
Richard Ince proprietor of James Ince & Sons, Britain’s oldest umbrella manufacturers, showed me this catalogue published by Crowden & Keeves in 1930 which had been knocking around his factory for as long as he could remember. Operating from premises in Calvert Avenue and Boundary St, they were one of the last great hardware suppliers in the East End, yet the quality of their products was such that their letterboxes and door knockers may still be recognised in use around the neighbourhood today.
The umbrellas were supplied to Crowden & Keeves by James Ince & Sons
You may like to read about these favourite hardware shops
At The Jewish Soup Kitchen
Click here to book your spring walk through Spitalfields
Click here to book your walk through the City of London
Originally established in 1854 in Leman St, the Jewish Soup Kitchen opened in Brune St in 1902 and, even though it closed in 1992, the building in Spitalfields still proclaims its purpose to the world in bold ceramic lettering across the fascia. These days few remember when it was supplying groceries to fifteen hundred people weekly, which makes Photographer Stuart Freedman’s pictures especially interesting as a glimpse of one of the last vestiges of the Jewish East End.
“After I finished studying Politics at university, I decided I wanted to be a photographer but I didn’t know how to do it,” Stuart recalled, contemplating these pictures taken in 1990 at the very beginning of his career. “Although I was brought up in Dalston, my father had grown up in Stepney in the thirties and, invariably, when we used to go walking together we always ended up in Petticoat Lane, which seemed to have a talismanic quality for him. So I think I was following in his footsteps.”
“I used to wander with my camera and, one day, I was just walking around taking pictures, when I moseyed in to the Soup Kitchen and said ‘Can I take photographs?’ and they said, ‘Yes.’ “I didn’t realise what I was doing because now they seem to be the only pictures of this place in existence. You could smell that area then – the smell of damp in old men’s coats and the poverty.”
For the past twenty-five years Stuart Freedman has worked internationally as a photojournalist, yet he was surprised to come upon new soup kitchens recently while on assignment in the north of England. “The poverty is back,” he revealed to me in regret,“which makes these pictures relevant all over again.”
Groceries awaiting collection
A volunteer offers a second hand coat to an old lady
An old woman collects her grocery allowance
A volunteer distributes donated groceries
View from behind the hatch
A couple await their food parcel
An ex-boxer arrives to collect his weekly rations
An old boxer’s portrait, taken while waiting to collect his groceries
An elderly man leaves the soup kitchen with his supplies
Photographs copyright © Stuart Freedman
You can read more about the Soup Kitchen here
You may also like to take a look at
My Spring Shirt
Click here to book your spring walk
I pulled this shirt out of my cupboard this week in advance of the arrival of spring. If you look closely, you will see the collar is wearing through but this does not diminish my affection for this favoured garment that I have worn for years now, bringing it out just for these few months at the end of winter. Although most of the clothes I own are of undecorated design, there is a gentle lyrical quality about this pattern that appeals to me.
When I wear this shirt with a dark jacket, the colours really sing and I feel am doing my bit in participating in the seasonal change. This contrast of formal clothing with a sprigged shirt can express dignified restraint while at the same time revealing an attachment to flowers, plants, gardens and nature – a contrast that I recognise in my own personality.
I love the conceit of having violets on my shirt when those in my garden are in flower and I enjoy the subtle tones of all the flowers portrayed, remaining as recognisable species while artfully stylised to make a pattern. The evocation of the natural world in this simple design touches a chord for me and, as with so many things that trigger an emotional response, I discovered that my passion for these floral patterns from Liberty goes back a long way.
When I came across the familiar photograph of my mother Valerie as a child, which you can see below, I did a double-take when I recognised the pattern on the dress. It was a Liberty print, very similar to my spring shirt which I hold in such affection. In that moment, I recalled that my grandmother Katherine bought fabric at Liberty in London and had it made up into dresses for my mother in the nineteen-thirties. This was a gesture which made such an unforgettable impression on my mother that for her whole life she carried her delight in these cotton dresses, which were so magical to her as a little girl in Somerset. Floral prints fed her innocent imagination, nurtured by ‘Songs of the Flower Fairies’ and performing as one of Titania’s attendants in a school play.
A generation later, I grew up with the received emotion of this memory – a story my mother told me when I was a child. I thought I had forgotten, but I realised it was through an unconscious recollection of the photograph of my mother in the Liberty dress that I was attracted to this flowery shirt, without understanding the origin of my desire at the time.
The story was confirmed when my Uncle Richard moved out of the old house where he and my mother grew up and, in my grandmother’s dressing table, I found a small leather pocket diary from the thirties recording her London trip with the entry, “Stayed at Claridge’s. Ordered carpet and sideboard at Harvey Nichols and bought materials at Liberty.” My grandmother was the daughter of a diminished aristocratic family who married my grandfather Leslie, a bank manager, and adopted an autocratic manner to ameliorate her loss of status. Consequently, my mother, with admirable resourcefulness, ran away from home at nineteen to escape my bossy grandmother and married my father Peter, who was a professional footballer – an act of social rebellion that my grandmother never forgave.
Nevertheless, the taste I acquired for these old-fashioned designs reflects the fondness my mother carried for that special moment in her childhood which she never forgot, when my grandmother showed maternal kindness to her little daughter in the gift of flowery cotton dresses. An act which came to represent everything about my grandmother that my mother could embrace with unqualified affection, and she encouraged me to remember the best of people too, a prerogative I claim in this instance as the sole living representative of these characters.
Today, I wear my shirt as the sympathetic illustration of a narrative which extends over three generations, culminating in my own existence upon this earth, and as I button my spring shirt, before walking out to celebrate sunshine and a new beginning, I am reminded that I alone carry these emotional stories now, clothing me in the humble affections of my forebears.
The Gentle Author’s mother ‘Valerie’ in the nineteen-thirties
Liberty of London
So Long, Bernard Kops
Poet, playwright and novelist, Bernard Kops, died on 25th February aged ninety-seven years.
Bernard Kops (1926-2024)
“It’s amazing I have lived so long, after all the drugs that I have taken in my life!” declared Bernard Kops with a certain genial alacrity when I visited him and his wife of seventy years, Erica, in Finchley. Yet once he told me his stories of growing up in Stepney Green in the nineteen thirties, I understood how those experiences might instill a keen will to live which perhaps, in part at least, accounted for his glorious longevity.
Bernard’s father left Rotterdam with his family in 1902, hoping to get to New York, but when he bought his ticket it only took him as far as London. The ticket office in Amsterdam explained that he could collect the second part of his ticket to New York from Mr Smith on arrival in London, but when he arrived in the Port of London and asked for Mr Smith everyone laughed at him. And thus it was that Bernard’s father’s dream of America was supplanted by the East End. Later, the relatives in Amsterdam implored Bernard’s father to return with his family prior to the outbreak of World War II, believing that Holland would remain neutral and Bernard remembered his father weeping because he could not afford the tickets to return. Yet those relatives were all killed by the Nazis and Bernard’s father’s impecunious situation was the salvation of his immediate family.
Such was the equivocal nature of Bernard Kops’ inheritance and, looking back from his perspective as the father of four children, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, it coloured all experience with a certain sentiment, cherishing the fleeting brilliance of life.
“I couldn’t have done anything without Erica,” he assured me, prefacing our conversation, when I visited him in the Victorian apartment block in Finchley where he lived for the last sixty years, moving there from Soho in the days when it was an enclave of writers and artists. Walking down the long passage in his modest basement flat, I found him in a peaceful room looking out onto the garden where we chatted beneath the poster for “The Hamlet of Stepney Green.” Bernard’s first play launched him as one of the new wave of young playwrights from the East End, alongside Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter, that came to define British theatre in the post-war era. “There were actors who couldn’t fathom what we were doing, but we brought the streets into the theatre,” Bernard explained, “I still think of myself as a street person, I come from a verbal culture where everybody was always talking all the time.”
Recalling his childhood, he said, “Everyone was starving in those days before the war. And when my sister Phoebe came home and she had got a job, we were all overjoyed. But then she came back from the sweatshop and said the boss has been feeling her up. ‘She’s not going back,’ said my mother. ‘We need the money,’ said my father. Because we were so poor, every day was a battle. My whole life was a drama.”
“I was different from my brothers and sisters, and I don’t know why,” Bernard confessed, still bemused by his literary talent, “My mother recognised it, she used to say, ‘He’s the one that’s going to take me to Torquay one day.’ That was her measure of success.” One of Bernard’s earliest memories was of hiding under the table to eavesdrop on the adults and his mother asking, “Where’s my Bernie?” which was the cue for him to jump out and delight her.
As a child, Bernard knew that it was not safe for him to stray up the Cambridge Heath Rd towards Bethnal Green because that was where the fascist blackshirts were. Yet on the day that war was declared, when Bernard’s mother gave him sixpence to seek his own amusement, he took a bus through the danger zone up to the West End where – at eleven years old – he discovered a vision of whole other world that he realised his mother had never seen. Then, walking down Brick Lane one day just after the war, a young man stopped Bernard and asked what he was mumbling under his breath and Bernard admitted he was speaking poetry. Realising that Bernard had never read any poetry, he gave Bernard a slim volume of Rupert Brooke published by Faber and Faber. “So I read Grantchester and I thought it was fantastic,” Bernard recalled fondly, “I went to the library and asked, ‘Have you got any more Faber and Faber books like this?’ The library gave me freedom.”
In common with generations of writers and artists from the East End, Bernard Kops educated himself using the collection at the former Whitechapel Library next to the Whitechapel Gallery. From here, Bernard took classes in drama at Toynbee Hall which focused upon improvisation – inventing plays – and it gave him the technique to launch himself as playwright. This was the move that eventually led him to live in Soho, enjoying the company of his literary peers, and he recalled returning from there to Hanbury St to visit Colin McInnes while he was writing Absolute Beginners, in which Bernard appears in a barely fictionalised form as “Mannie Katz.”
In summation,“I’m a poet basically,” he announced to me with a diffident smile.
All this time, Erica had been sitting across the room from us, encouraging Bernard by making small appreciative noises and completing the odd stray sentence in a story she has heard innumerable times. In a prolific career including plays, screenplays, poems, novels and autobiography, life did not run entirely smoothly for Bernard who succumbed to drug addiction and depression, yet overcame both afflictions with Erica’s support to reach a state of benign equanimity. “I said to her, the moment I met her, that I was going to marry her, and she thought I was absolutely mad,” Bernard confided, raising his voice and catching Erica’s eye provocatively. “And I haven’t changed my mind,” confirmed Erica with a nod from the other side of the room, folding her hands affectionately.
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East
Bernard & Erica
For You
May 2012
Bernard Kops
Portraits copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
You may also like to read about Bernard Kops’ close friend
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Cuttings
On Saturday, the East End Preservation Society sent this report to all those who contributed £100 or more to the legal fund for the successful campaign to Save the Bethnal Green Mulberry in 2021. I am publishing it today in case anyone who donated missed it and also so that readers may know how the work of the campaign has continued beyond the High Court verdict.
Nurses dancing around the Bethnal Green Mulberry
In 2021, the East End Preservation Society took Tower Hamlets Council to the High Court and saved the five-hundred-year-old Bethnal Green Mulberry Tree from being dug up by the developer Crest Nicholson. As a consequence, the developers sold the land to the Clarion Housing Group who have made two public pledges to ‘retaining the mulberry tree in its current location’ and ‘providing more genuinely affordable homes that meet local need.’
This splendid victory was largely due to the generosity of our supporters. To those who contributed £100 or more to the legal fund, we offered a cutting of a mulberry planted by David Garrick from a tree originally planted by William Shakespeare. This report is an account of our work over the last three years to fulfil this offer.
During this time, EEPS became subsumed into the ongoing campaign to Save Brick Lane, challenging the corporate development of the Truman Brewery. Members of the society are also central to the campaigns to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and to stop the redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station. We saved a pair of 1764 weavers houses in Club Row by getting them listed by Historic England and we prevented the demolition of the terrace in Vallance Rd, Whitechapel, which is the last surviving fragment of the Pavilion Theatre.
MULBERRY CUTTINGS
First Attempt
In spring 2021, when David Garrick’s Mulberry was pruned, we obtained 150 cuttings which were cultivated for us by an experienced tree nurseryman. These were set in compost and by the summer of that year, the buds on these cuttings were swelling which confirmed they were alive and gave us reasonable expectation they had rooted. On further investigation, we discovered that none had rooted and they all died.
Subsequently, the owner of Garrick’s Mulberry confirmed that the tree was suffering from a fungal infection which afflicted many mulberries across the country that year. We concluded that this infection was the explanation for the failure of the cuttings, especially since plenty of cuttings from other varieties of tree succeeded in the same nursery that year. The arborculturalist who cares for the Garrick’s Mulberry advised that it needed to be given a chance to recover and not pruned again until spring 2023.
Second Attempt
In spring 2023, when Garrick’s Mulberry was pruned again, we obtained 600 cuttings which were cultivated for us by the same tree nurseryman, employing four different methods to maximise the chances of a successful outcome. These methods included, in compost, in water and using hormonal rooting powder. The cuttings were tended closely through the spring and summer of 2023 but we were faced with the same outcome. The buds swelled confirming they were alive, but then none rooted and they all died.
Going back to the owner of Garrick’s Mulberry, the arborculturalist confirmed that infection was still present and that it was a poorly tree, which cannot be pruned again until spring 2025.
Third Attempt
We are deeply disappointed by the failure of these cuttings and regretful that we have been unable to fulfil our offer to our supporters, but we are not going to give up.
The tree nurseryman is completely baffled by this outcome after all the work he has put in, which he has generously undertaken without any remuneration in support of the cause. He is willing to try again in 2025.
We are also grateful to the owner of Garrick’s Mulberry who has patiently stuck with us and to volunteer Jill Wilson who has tirelessly driven back and forth, delivering pruned mulberry branches from the tree to the nursery.
We are planning to spend the next year seeking further advice in advance of our third attempt to ensure that we can maximise the chance of delivering these cuttings successfully in 2025.
We are in dialogue with a handful of experts who have successfully taken cuttings from historic mulberries and trees afflicted with infection. Our guide is Peter Coles of moruslondinium.org , author of the standard work ‘Mulberry’ published by Reaktion Books in 2019.
Most of all we are grateful to you for your generous support in saving the Bethnal Green Tree Mulberry and your patience with our struggle to deliver the cuttings.
Be assured, we will keep you informed of our progress.
With every good wish to you from
The East End Preservation Society
Click here to read my feature in The Daily Telegraph about the scandal of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
Read more here about the Bethnal Green Mulberry
The Bethnal Green Mulberry Verdict
The Fate of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
A Pack Of Knaves
A Sunday in Lent is a good time to contemplate human failing, as vividly illustrated by this Pack of Knaves engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-77). Do these characters remind you of anyone you know? If you recognise yourself here, reader beware. It not yet too late to repent and amend your ways.
Images courtesy University of Toronto
You may like to read these stories about Wenceslaus Hollar
So Long, Michael Myers
Michael Myers, Spitalfields’ oldest resident, died on 13th February just a few weeks short of his ninety-fifth birthday. Growing up in Petticoat Lane, Michael only moved a quarter of a mile to live in a flat above the Spitalfields Market, yet he found all of life here in this small neighbourhood.
His partner Deborah Ivy Aitken reflects upon a life well-lived in Spitalfields, accompanied with photographs by his friend Phil Maxwell.
Michael Myers (1929-2024)
Michael had a full and rich life, as one might expect of one who lived to be almost ninety-five. He was born in Southampton, accidentally. His father was working there for Gracie Fields at the time and Michael decided to enter the world when his mother went for a short visit.
He enjoyed a wonderful childhood surrounded by family, friends and neighbours in the old tenement that was Brunswick Buildings on New Goulston St. Petticoat Lane was his playground and the hawkers fascinated him – the plate juggler, the man selling ‘Codbury’s’ chocolate but saying it so fast shoppers thought it was Cadbury’s, and the escapologist in chains who was always about to escape when the market closed promptly at 2pm.
Michael still laughed about the time he saw a salesman put a roll of loo paper into a holder, turn the handle and out came five pound notes. Michael ran home and asked his mum for sixpence. When she asked what it was for he said, ‘I’m going to make us rich!’ He came back with the holder and asked his mum for a loo roll. Then he put it into the holder and told her to watch as he turned the handle, but out came toilet paper not bank notes. You can imagine the disappointment, yet it was one of his favourite childhood stories.
Although their parents were poor, Michael and his brother, Raymond, never went without. Michael had a light blue sports car which he peddled around the streets close to home. He had two paternal aunts who adored him too. One often taking him to Brighton where she lived in Brunswick Gardens and where he celebrated his bar mitzvah, the other returning from the New York World’s Fair in 1939 with a trunk of American toys. Michael had great tales of getting his first suit made – when the tailor was afraid to tell one of his aunts the price, knowing she would want to pay less.
During the war he was evacuated to Ely but two weeks later, after a rocket fell close by, his mother fetched him back to London. Eventually, most of the family including his granny moved to Oxford where his father worked in a munitions factory. In 1944, the family returned to Brunswick Buildings. There were many bomb sites in East London then and one day Michael received a deep cut to his leg from a jagged piece of metal when he and his friends were fooling around. Michael believed he was one of the first to get penicillin at the Royal London Hospital.
Michael’s favourite pastimes were films and music. He loved cinema when he was a boy and this passion grew into a huge collection of videos and DVDs when he was an adult, also amassing an enormous library of film books. His knowledge of cinema, especially from the 1930s to the 1960s, was vast. Many a quiet evening, I would pick up one of Leonard Maltin’s movie guides and quiz Michael on directors, actors and dates. I was thrilled once when I caught him out, but woke the next morning to find a note saying ‘an elephant never forgets’ along with a page number. My win was short-lived. It appears I had been reading the details of the remake and he had been giving answers about the original. Michael was interested in all genres of film but he particularly liked them in black and white. I watched a movie with him once and at the end I said, ‘I’m sure that film was in colour when I originally saw it,’ and he responded, ‘It was, I turned the colour off.’ He never tired of watching great films, such as Spring In Park Lane, The Third Man, The Fallen Idol and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Michael also loved comedy series like Dad’s Army, Bilko, Hancock’s Half Hour and The Three Stooges. Friends and family who watched these shows with Michael could not resist getting caught up in the antics and farce because Michael’s laughter was genuine and infectious. In everyday life he could be heard quoting the catchphrases, ‘Hey Moe’ and ‘Nuck, Nuck, Nuck.’
Michael’s other great passion was music, both listening and singing. His interests were mostly for classical, jazz, big band and the classic standards written by, but not limited to, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Rogers & Hart. His collection is as large as his film collection and one room in the house was designated the ‘Music Room’ where he spent happy hours listening and singing.
One of Michael’s first jobs was as an errand boy for Leslie Gamage at Gamages Department Store in Holborn. His most memorable errand was being sent by Mr Gamage to go to Claridge’s to collect a package from his wife. Off Michael went to Claridge’s and up to the suite where the Gamages lived. Mrs Gamage gave Michael an envelope to deliver to his boss. Being curious, Michael watched as the envelope was opened and discovered it contained a hankie for Mr Gamage’s breast pocket.
Eventually, Michael trained as a barber but he never stayed long in any salon. When he worked in an East London factory, he used to cut colleagues’ hair in the freight lift for extra pocket money. In the sixties, Michael did the ‘knowledge’ to become a black cab driver and, though he seldom talked about his life as a cabby, a few stories came forth. One was about a man he picked up who said to him, ‘Driver, when we get to the destination I am going to shoot you.’ It must have been very frightening for Michael but he made a plan. When they reached the destination, Michael jumped out of the cab and confronted him face-to-face, saying, ‘I have a wife and six children at home who rely on me. If you shoot me, they will have no one to look after them.’ Apparently, the man paid his fare and gave Michael a substantial tip.
Another time, an American got in his cab and asked to be taken to Tooting Common. As Michael was heading off in that direction the passenger pointed out that the journey seemed to be taking longer than he expected. It turned out he wanted to go to the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. When he retired at eighty, Michael received a very complimentary letter from the Carriage Office advising he had an unblemished record after driving for forty-three years.
In his early sixties, Michael began to pursue a musical career with a regular gig at the Comedy Cafe in Rivington St where he met some great comedians. Then, winning a big competition in 1991 at ‘Up the Creek’ in Greenwich gave Michael the boost he needed to seek more opportunities. He sang at weddings and parties as well as pubs and bars. He sang on New Year’s Eve at the Golden Heart on a few occasions and for years performed at the popular Workers’ Playtime at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club to great applause.
A highlight was when he sang at the premiere of the film, Gangster No. 1 in Leicester Sq and the after party at the Café de Paris. In attendance were many beautiful women and known gangsters. It was scary for Michael because – years before – his cousin, George Cornell, was shot by one of the Kray brothers at the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel. Incidentally, Michael did not know his cousin.
Michael was always up for a laugh, especially if he was the one causing the laughter. He wrote and recorded countless skits playing all the characters. He also liked magic tricks. I once arranged for a magician to teach Michael some tricks which he could entertain us with at a dinner party that evening, but unfortunately he forgot all the tricks. He loved Sandy Powell and Tommy Cooper and had hours of fun playing with the Charlie McCarthy doll I gave him.
After Brighton, Michael’s favourite places to visit were Paris and Nice. We had many holidays in Nice where Michael discovered another life passion, photo-bombing weddings. Inevitably, we could be found at the Hôtel de Ville on a Saturday where marriage ceremonies were on an assembly line. Michael had no qualms about stepping into any wedding party, often standing beside the bride, while I took his picture. Once in a small French village, he even climbed the church stairs with the father and the bride while I snapped away. These were his best comedic moments.
Throughout his life, Michael involved himself in community projects. I only found out recently that he and his neighbour, Mossy Joseph, were instrumental in getting the Grade ll listing for the Spitalfields Market Horner Building. He was the head of the Spitalfields Market Residents’ Association for years and campaigned vigorously against developments in the area.
Regardless of differences, Michael seldom made disparaging remarks about others. He did not like tittle-tattle or gossip. He treated everyone with kindness and respect. He was a gentleman in every aspect of his life.
I think if Michael were to give advice about life, it would be to keep enriching your pool of friends. His friendships with people of all ages attest to his ability to engage with others.
Michael always had a song on his lips. He will be greatly missed by our families, friends and acquaintances and mostly by his daughter, Annette, son-in-law, Marcel, our granddaughter, Gabrielle and me.
Deborah and Michael
Sandra Esqulant, landlady of The Golden Heart, with Michael
Deborah and Michael
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
Click here to watch videos of Michael singing
You may also like to read
