A Visit To Great Tom At St Paul’s
Click here to book your spring walk through Spitalfields
Click here to book your walk through the City of London
Click to hear the sound of Great Tom
Like bats, bells lead secluded lives hibernating in dark towers high above cathedrals and churches. Thus it was that I set out to climb to the top of the south west tower of St Paul’s Cathedral to visit Great Tom, cast by Richard Phelps at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1716.
At 11,474lbs, Great Tom is significantly smaller than Great Paul, its neighbour in the tower at 37,483lbs, yet Great Paul has been silent for many years making Great Tom the largest working bell at St Paul’s and, after Big Ben (30,339lbs), London’s second largest working bell.
To reach Great Tom, I had first to climb the stone staircase beneath the dome of St Paul’s and then walk along inside the roof of the nave. Here, vast brick hemispheres protrude as the reverse of the shallow domes below, creating a strange effect – like a floor of a multi-storey car park for flying saucers. At the west end, a narrow door leads onto the parapet above the front of the cathedral and you descend from the roof of the nave to arrive at the entrance to the south west tower, where a conveniently placed shed serves as a store for spare clock hands.
Inside the stone tower is a hefty wooden structure that supports the clock and the bells above. Here I climbed a metal staircase to take a peek at Great Paul, a sleek grey beast deep in slumber since the mechanism broke years ago. From here, another stone staircase ascends to the open rotunda where expansive views across the city induce stomach-churning awe. I stepped onto a metal bridge within the tower, spying Great Paul below, and raised my eyes to discern the dark outline of Great Tom above me. It was a curious perspective peering up into the darkness of the interior of the ancient bell, since it was also a gaze into time.
When an old bell is recast, any inscriptions are copied onto the new one and an ancient bell like Great Tom may carry a collection of texts which reveal an elaborate history extending back through many centuries. The story of Great Tom begins in Westminster where, from the thirteenth century in the time of Henry III, the large bell in the clocktower of Westminster Palace was known as ‘Great Tom’ or ‘Westminster Tom.’
Great Tom bears an inscription that reads, ‘Tercius aptavit me rex Edwardque vocavit Sancti decore Edwardi signantur ut horae,’ which translates as ‘King Edward III made and named me so that by the grace of St Edward the hours may be marked.’ This inscription is confirmed by John Stowe writing in 1598, ‘He (Edward III) also built to the use of this chapel (though out of the palace court), some distance west, in the little Sanctuary, a strong clochard of stone and timber, covered with lead, and placed therein three great bells, since usually rung at coronations, triumphs, funerals of princes and their obits.’
With the arrival of mechanical clocks, the bell tower in Westminster became redundant and, when it was pulled down in 1698, Great Tom was sold to St Paul’s Cathedral for £385 17s. 6d. Unfortunately, while it was being transported the bell fell off the cart at Temple Bar and cracked. So it was cast by Philip Wightman, adding the inscription ‘MADE BY PHILIP WIGHTMAN 1708. BROUGHT FROM THE RVINES OF WESTMINSTER.’
Yet this recasting was unsatisfactory and the next year Great Tom was cast again by Richard Phelps at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. This was also unsuccessful and, seven years later, it was was cast yet again by Richard Phelps at Whitechapel, adding the inscription ‘RICHARD PHELPS MADE ME 1716’ and arriving at the fine tone we hear today.
As well as chiming the hours at St Paul’s, Great Tom is also sounded upon the death of royalty and prominent members of the clergy, tolling last for the death of the Queen Mother in 2002. For the sake of my eardrums, I timed my visit to Great Tom between the hours. Once I had climbed down again safely to the ground, I walked around the west front of the cathedral just in time to hear Great Tom strike noontide. Its deep sonorous reverberation contains echoes of all the bells that Great Tom once was, striking the hours and marking out time in London through eight centuries.
Above the nave
Looking west with St Brides in the distance
Spare clock hands
Looking east along the roof of the cathedral
Up to the clock room
The bell frame for Great Paul in the clock room
Great Paul
Looking up to Great Paul
Looking across to the north west tower from the clock room
Looking along Cannon St from the rotunda
Looking south to the river
Looking across to the north west tower
Looking down on Great Paul
Looking up into the bell frame
Looking up to catch a glimpse of Great Tom, St Paul’s largest working bell
Great Tom cast by Richard Phelps in Whitechapel in 1716, engraved in 1776 (Courtesy of The Ancient Society of College Youths)
Great Tom strikes noon at St Paul’s Cathedral
Remembering Helen Taylor-Thompson
Click here to book your spring walk through Spitalfields
Click here to book your walk through the City of London
On International Women’s Day, we remember the inspirational Helen Taylor-Thompson (1924-2020) who co-founded Europe’s first AIDS hospice at the Mildmay Hospital in Shoreditch.
Helen Taylor-Thompson
What would you do if your local hospital was cut? Would you shrug your shoulders? Would you sign a petition? Would you go on a march?
Helen Taylor-Thompson did something more effective than any of these things, she took over the hospital and reopened it herself. Yet it was not such a radical act as you might assume, since the story of the Mildmay Hospital in the East End is that of a succession of strong women driven by a passion to care for the sick and the outcast, ever since the eighteen-sixties when it was established to minister to those in Shoreditch suffering from the cholera epidemic.
Catherine Pennefeather recruited eleven women to work with her and opened the first mission hospital in a warehouse in Cabbage Court in the Old Nichol in 1866, as a memorial to her husband, the Irish evangelist William Pennefeather. Working among people living in the most deprived conditions, Catherine insisted upon a personal approach that respected the dignity of everyone that came into her care, however degraded they might have become by their circumstances. In 1890, a foundation stone was laid for a purpose-built hospital which opened in 1892 and the Mildmay Hospital served the people of the East End continuously until it was shut by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1982.
Demonstrating heroic independence of spirit, Helen Taylor-Thompson refused to let the noble history and tradition of care that the Mildmay represented be broken. She reopened it in 1985 and three years later in 1988 – when Mildmay inaugurated Europe’s first dedicated HIV clinic – the prescience of her action in saving the hospital became fully apparent.
At the clinic, it was Helen who delivered the circumstance in which Princess Diana came to the Mildmay and kissed a patient who was dying of AIDS upon the cheek – a powerful gesture that reverberates in the collective memory to this day and which contributed to overcoming the ignorance and prejudice which surrounded the disease at that time. It was an event that occurred within a climate in which staff of the Mildmay were shunned in the neighbourhood and even refused haircuts at local barbers out of misplaced fear of infection.
A pioneer by nature, Helen Taylor-Thompson was a descendant of the missionary Dr David Livingston and the daughter of the Chairman of the African Inland Mission. At eighteen, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive during World War II, working in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), and her wish to be parachuted into occupied France to work with the Resistance was only frustrated when, as she was under twenty-one, parental consent was required but secrecy forbade her asking. Yet her experience in Special Operations became an invaluable asset when she faced her biggest challenge in Shoreditch. “I’ve had quite a life haven’t I?” she confessed to me in bemusement, looking back.
A quarter of a century after it reopened, the Mildmay Hospital built a brand new hospital for itself and Helen Taylor-Thompson remained undiminished in her fervour to be of service to humanity, applying herself to an ambitious educational project Thare Machi, designed to prevent HIV infection among people in the poorest countries. But, when I met her, I managed to persuade her to reveal the untold story of her involvement with the Mildmay Hospital and it proved to be an inspirational tale.
“The Mildmay was a little general hospital, much loved, with just a few wards and an A&E department. In the seventies, the District Health Authority had tried closing it but they were frightened to do so because it had such a good reputation. Other small hospitals were closing locally and many people felt the Mildmay had had its day, yet I believed it was still valuable because it was a Mission hospital and it worked with the most vulnerable people. I was chairman of the Hospital Advisory Council which I had formed to support the Mildmay and, when I saw that it was next in line to close, I got the community behind me to fight and we marched to Trafalgar Sq, and I clambered up among the lions and pleaded for the Mildmay not to close. It was fun but it didn’t do any good. They said, ‘It’s got to close,’ and it did. So then, a whole lot of people said, ‘We must go out in Glory,’ but I didn’t. I said, ‘We will fight for it and get it back.’
I had only one or two people who agreed with me, but a solicitor said, ‘Legally they can’t close it without giving the Mission the option of taking it back.’ So I went to the MP Peter Shore and said, ‘I want you to work with me to get it back.’ Then I wrote a letter to Kenneth Clarke to ask if I could have it back, and I knew it would have to be on a lease and seven years was too short and I didn’t think they’d give me twenty-one years, so I requested ‘a long lease.’ And two months later, I got a letter back offering it to me on a peppercorn lease for ninety-nine years – with strings attached.
As a Christian, I put this down to prayer. I was at the top of the stairs and I thought, ‘I can’t do this on my own,’ and the phone rang at the foot of the stairs. The caller said, ‘You don’t know who I am but I am the father of one of the nurses and I wondered if you’d like some help.’ He was working for the GLC and he could use the photocopier after hours. I employed an accountant to do a feasibility study and the plan was that we were going to work with young people who had suffered chronic injuries in accidents and people with Multiple Sclerosis, because they weren’t being taken care of.
But the District Health Authority didn’t want us to reopen the hospital, they wanted to sell it and get the money. We were examined and they told me we were incapable of doing it. If we hadn’t made a go of it after a year, they were going to take it away from me. I still had to find the money, so I sold the Mildmay Convalescent Home for half a million and I discovered there was a thing called ‘free money’ – the money which the hospital had in 1948 when it was taken over by the NHS. It had been put into a trust to be used for the hospital. I had no idea how much there was but I said, ‘You’ve got to give me that money.’ – it was £365,000! So we just had enough for eighteen months. The hospital had been closed for three years and vandals had got in, so I said to the NHS, ‘You’ve got put it right for us.’ I realised that we needed to get in six months before the contract was signed, so that we could sign the contract and admit the first patient on the same day. Elizabeth Willcocks, the previous matron who was in retirement, agreed to come back for two years and we reopened.
Thirteen months later, we were asked if we would take some AIDS patients. At that time, they were treated like lepers. So I went to the Matron and the Medical Director, and they both said, ‘The Mildmay has always looked after the people that nobody else wants to look after.’ We had the top floor which had formerly been the children’s ward and we didn’t know what to do with it, so I took the proposal to the board and I said, ‘I want a unanimous answer,’ and they said, ‘Let’s get on with it!’
Then we had big trouble – bricks thrown through the windows and a lot of Christians saying we shouldn’t be doing it and homosexual groups saying, ‘Boycott them, they’re Bible Bashers!’ We decided, ‘We’ll take no notice, we’ll open up and we’ll show love and great care.’ In October 1988, we opened the first hospice in Europe dedicated to treating people with AIDS. We had so many, we turned the whole hospital of thirty-six beds over to them. We had found our purpose, and the government were good and supported us with money.
The press used to be on the roof of the building opposite with telephoto lenses because we had some quite well-known people as patients. You’d think it was a sad place because people were dying, but it was happy because the patients were so well looked after and the doctors made sure they suffered no pain. Princess Diana came regularly and there was a patient called Martin who was dying and had lost touch with his family for eleven years. I said to him, ‘Would you like to give her the bouquet?’ The BBC were there and he gave Diana the bouquet, and they filmed her as she kissed him. Within twenty minutes, his mother rang and wanted to come to see him, and the whole family were reunited and shortly afterwards he died.
The Chairman of the District Health Authority, who had interrogated me, came to see me privately and he said, ‘I wish I hadn’t voted against you reopening the Mildmay.’ I said, ‘I’m very glad you did because it put more pressure on me to make the hospital independent, without that maybe I’d never have been able to get it back?'”
The first Mildmay Mission operated from a warehouse in Cabbage Court in the Old Nichol in 1866.
Emily Goodwin, the first matron at the new Mildmay Hospital, 1892
Sister Louise Blakeney, First Theatre Sister, 1909.
Miss Mulliner & Dr Gauld in the hospital pharmacy, 1909.
Matron and sisters in the nineteen twenties.
In the hospital kitchens.
The Mildmay Hospital with extra wards in Nissen huts during World War II.
Mildmay staff in 1966.
Detail, showing the Milmay cat.
Miss Stockton, Elizabeth Willcocks (Matron), Sister Edwin and Dr Buxton at the Mildmay in 1964.
Portrait of Helen Taylor-Thompson copyright © Patricia Niven
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
