Elwin Hawthorne, Artist
Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd, 1935
Elwin Hawthorne (1905–54) was the nephew of the artist Henry Silk, with whom the family of six shared a small house in Rounton Road, Bow. When Elwin left school at the age of fourteen he worked as an errand boy, yet he developed an interest in painting. He worked in the bedroom he shared with his two brothers, even though his mother declared she “expected something better for him than to spend so much time on artwork.”
Evening art classes brought Elwin under the influence of John Cooper, who recognised his talent and included fourteen pictures by the young artist in the East London Art Club exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1928, which led to two paintings being hung in the Tate.
In the Daily Mail, Elwin confessed “One is under a handicap working in a cottage without any sort of studio conditions, but I have tried to interpret the sort of life I understand.” Fellow artist, Cecil Osborne was the first to suggest that the ‘Sunday morning look’ of sparsely populated streets imparted a surreal atmosphere to Elwin’s paintings, yet he was always uneasy with figures.
Elwin’s surname acquired an ‘e’ at the Whitechapel Gallery and, when he took part in the East London Group show at the Lefevre Galleries, his attempt to correct this drew short shrift from one of the directors, who insisted “For goodness sake, don’t change it now!” Previously, Elwin painted on cleaning cloths that he bought at Woolworths for sixpence but income from sales permitted him to spend money on better paints and canvas.
After meeting Walter Sickert, Elwin signed up for weekly art classes for £20 a year at the grand old man’s studio in Highbury Fields. This led to him becoming Sickert’s studio assistant, squaring up images onto canvas and even laying the colours on in some cases. Elwin’s work for Sickert mirrored his own practice of basing paintings upon photographs squared up onto canvas.
In 1930, Elwin signed a contract with the Lefevre for a monthly retainer of eight pounds. Thus, in his mid-twenties, Elwin Hawthorne with an ‘e’ became the first of the East London Group to call himself a professional artist. His debut solo show in 1934 coincided with one by Vanessa Bell with a foreword by Virginia Woolf in the catalogue. Largely, the comparison was to Elwin’s advantage, as the Sunday Referee wrote, “Mrs Woolf ’s mystical flutings on the theme of her sister’s paintings simply bewilder,” while proposing, “In Mr Elwin Hawthorne, we have an outstanding, possibly great artist in the making.”
Elwin’s apogee came when one of his paintings was hung in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1933. The outcome of this success was that Elwin was able to marry fellow artist, Lilian Leahy, and move to a comfortable suburban house in Dagenham in 1937.
The Second World War ended Elwin’s exhibiting career. He worked for Air Raid Precautions and St John’s Ambulance but, after dragging injured children from an Anderson Shelter that had been bombed and performing a leg amputation, he could no longer continue. Conscripted into the army, Elwin was quickly released as being temperamentally unsuited.
After the war, Lefevre refused to renew Elwin’s contract, suggesting he take a job instead. So he became a wages clerk at Plessey in Dagenham, leaving at seven-thirty each morning and then teaching art in schools part-time, returning home at eleven each night. Before long, Elwin began to suffer from headaches and doubt the value of his work as a painter.
In 1953, he used his painting Almshouses, Mile End Road as a shelf in the coal bunker. After his death, Lilian rescued Elwin’s painting, filling in the screw holes with wood filler and painting over the damage.
Cumberland Market, 1931 (Private collection)
Grove Park Rd W4, 1935 (Private collection)
Whipps Cross, 1933 (Gabriel Summers)
The Mitford Castle, 1931 (Private collection)
Bow Rd, 1931
Victoria Memorial Buckingham Palace, 1938 (Private collection)
Demolition of Bow Brewery, 1931 (Private collection)
The Guardian Angels, 1931 (Louise Kosman, Edinburgh
Ilfracombe, c.1931 (Private collection) – discovered rolled up in the coal bunker
Elwin Hawthorne with his painting of the Bryant & May Factory, 1929
Walter and Harold Steggles, Lilian and Elwin Hawthorne (right), c.1937 (Walter Steggles Bequest)
Click here to buy a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR
First Signs Of Life
First Snowdrops in Wapping
Even now, in the depths of Winter, there is plant life stirring. As I travelled around the East End over the past week in the wet and cold, I kept my eyes open for new life and was rewarded for my quest by the precious discoveries that you see here. Fulfilling my need for assurance that we are advancing in our passage through the year, each plant offers undeniable evidence that, although there may be months of winter yet to come, I can look forward to the spring that will arrive before too long.
Hellebores in Shoreditch
Catkins in Bethnal Green
Catkins in Weavers’ Fields
Quince flowers in Spitalfields
Cherry blossom in Museum Gardens
Netteswell House is the oldest dwelling in Bethnal Green
Aconites in King Edward VII Memorial Park in Limehouse
Cherry Blossom near Columbia Rd
Hellebores in Spitalfields
Spring greens at Spitalfields City Farm
The gherkin and the artichoke
Cherry blossom in Itchy Park
Soft fruit cuttings at Spitalfields City Farm
Seedlings at Spitalfields City Farm
Cherry blossom at Christ Church
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Pearl Binder, Artist
“City and East End meet here, and between five and six o’clock it is a tempest of people.”
At the outbreak of war, it is salutary to recognise the close connections between the East End and Ukraine. Many thousands of the refugees who fled here, escaping pogroms against Jewish people in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, came from this region. Here is just one of those stories.
This is Aldgate pictured in a lithograph of 1932 by Pearl Binder, as one of a series that she drew to illustrate The Real East End by Thomas Burke, a popular writer who ran a pub in Poplar at the time. Among the many details of this rainy East End night that she evokes so atmospherically with such economy of means, notice the number fifteen bus which still runs through Aldgate today. In her lithographs, Pearl Binder found the ideal medium to portray London in the days when it was a grimy city, permanently overcast with smoke and smog, and her eloquent visual observations were based upon first hand experience.
This book was brought to my attention by Pearl Binder’s son Dan Jones who is also an artist. He explained that his mother came from Salford to study at the Central School of Art and lived in Spread Eagle Yard, Whitechapel in the nineteen twenties and thirties. It was an especially creative period in her life and an exciting time to be in London, when one of as the first generation after the First World War, she took the opportunity of the new freedoms that were available to her sex.
In Thomas Burke’s description, Pearl Binder’s corner of Whitechapel sounds unrecognisably exotic today, “It is in one of the old Yards that Pearl Binder has made her home, and she has chosen well. She enjoys a rural atmosphere in the centre of the town. Her cottage windows face directly onto a barn filled with hay-wains and fragrant with hay, and a stable, complete with clock and weather-vane; and they give a view of metropolitan Whitechapel. One realises here how small London is, how close it still is to the fields and farms of Essex and Cambridgeshire.” From Spread Eagle Yard, Pearl Binder set out to explore the East End, and these modest black and white images illustrate the life of its people as she found it.
Her best friend was Aniuta Barr (known to Dan as Aunt Nuta), a Russian interpreter, who remembered Lenin, Kalinin and Trotsky coming to tea at their family home in Aldgate when she was a child. Dan described Aunt Nuta announcing proudly, “Treat this bottom with respect, this has sat upon the knee of father Lenin!” He called her his fairy godmother, because she did not believe in god and at his christening when the priest said, “In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost…”, she added, “…and Lenin”.
Pearl Binder’s origins were on the border of Russia and the Ukraine in the town of Swonim, which her father Jacob Binderevski, who kept Eider ducks there, left to come to Britain in 1890 with a sack of feathers over his shoulder. After fighting bravely in the Boer War, he received a letter of congratulation from Churchill inviting him to become English. Pearl lived until 1990 and Nuta until 2003, both travelling to Russia and participating in cultural exchange between the two countries through all the ups and downs, living long enough to see the Soviet Union from beginning to end in their lifetimes.
Pearl left the East End when she married Dan’s father Elwyn Jones, a young lawyer (later Lord Elwyn Jones and member of parliament for Poplar), and when they were first wed they lived at 1 Pump Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, yet she always maintained her connections with this part of London. “Mum was trying to fry an egg and dad came to rescue her,” was how Dan fondly described his parents’ meeting, adding,“I think the egg left the pan in the process,” and revealing that his mother never learnt to cook. Instead he has memories of her writing and painting, while surrounded by her young children Dan, Josephine and Lou. “She was amazingly energetic,” recalled Dan,“Writing articles for Lilliput about the difficulties of writing while we were crawling all over the place.”
Pearl Binder’s achievements were manifold. In the pursuit of her enormous range of interests, her output as a writer and illustrator was phenomenal – fiction as well as journalism – including a remarkable book of pen portraits Odd Jobs (that included a West End prostitute and an East End ostler), and picture books with Alan Lomax and A.L.Lloyd, the folk song collectors. In 1937, she was involved in children’s programmes in the very earliest days of television broadcasting. She was fascinated by Pocahontas, designing a musical on the subject for Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. She was an adventurous traveller, travelling and writing about China in particular. She was an advocate of the pearly kings & queens, designing a pearly mug for Wedgwood, and an accomplished sculptor and stained glass artist, who created a series of windows for the House of Lords. The explosion of creative energy that characterised London in the nineteen twenties carried Pearl Binder through her whole life.
“She was always very busy with all her projects, some of which came about and some of which didn’t.” said Dan quietly, as we leafed through a portfolio, admiring paintings and drawings from his mother’s long career. Then as he closed the portfolio and stacked up all her books and pictures that he had brought out to show me – just a fraction of all of those his mother created – I opened the copy of The Real East End to look at the pictures you can see below and Dan summed it up for me. “I think it was a very important part of her life, her time in the East End. She was really looking at things and using her own eyes and getting a feel of the place and the people – and I think the best work of her life was done during those years.”
A Jewish restaurant in Brick Lane.
A beigel seller in Whitechapel High St.
A Jewish bookshop in Wentworth St.
A slop shop in the East India Dock Rd.
Pearl Binder’s self-portrait
Pearl Binder ( 1904-1990)
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Charles W. Cushman’s London
American Photographer Charles Weaver Cushman (1896-1972) visited London only a couple of times and yet, alongside shots of landmarks such as Big Ben & Trafalgar Sq, he recorded these rare and unexpected images of markets and street vendors in Kodachrome. He bequeathed over 14,000 of his images to Indiana University, where the entire range of his work may be explored in the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection.
Aldgate huckster, April 30th 1961
Bell Lane, April 30th 1961
Petticoat Lane, April 30th 1961
Petticoat Lane, April 30th 1961
Petticoat Lane, April 30th 1961
New Goulston St, April 30th 1961
At St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, April 30th 1961
Liverpool St Station, June 26th 1960
Liverpool St Station, Sunday May 30th 1965
Finsbury Sq, May 30th 1965
St Giles Cripplegate, June 26th 1960
Moorgate, April 30th 1961
Sunday morning on London Bridge, June 26th 1960
Gas lamp cleaners London Bridge, May 29th 1965
Looking east from London Bridge, May 29th 1965
Smithfield Market, May 2nd 1961
Leather Lane, April 28th 1961
Leather Lane, April 28th 1961
Leather Lane, April 28th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Covent Garden, June 26th 1961
Buskers, Leicester Sq, May 14th 1961
St. Martin in the Fields, Trafalgar Sq, June 19th 1960
Photographs copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University
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Richard Dighton’s City Characters
In contrast to yesterday’s ‘Costume of the Lower Orders of the Metropolis’, I thought I would publish Richard Dighton’s ‘City Characters’ from 1824 in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Costume of the Metropolis
Despite the patronising pseudo-ethnographic tile, Thomas Lord Busby’s ‘Costumes of the Lower Orders of the Metropolis’ offer an evocative glimpse of London street life two hundred years ago.
Images courtesy Getty Research Institute
The Juvenile Almanack
On this frosty day in mid-January, I thought this might be a good moment to look forward through the year with this almanac from the eighteen-twenties, published by Hodgson & Co, 10 Newgate St. I am grateful to Sian Rees for drawing my attention to these wonderful images.
Images courtesy University of California Libraries
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