Christmas With Dennis Severs
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I often wonder if those who visit the Christmas installation at Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St in spellbound silence today have any idea of what it was like when the creator was alive. The late Rodney Archer was a close friend of Dennis and, in this extract from Volume One of his Diary This Strange Re-collection of People (1980-88), Rodney spills the beans. Illustrated with archive photographs.
Christmas was for me the best time of the year to visit Dennis Severs in his house, which he shared with Mr & Mrs Jervis and their children in the Liberty of Norton Folgate. The hall was festooned with garlands of holly and ivy and mistletoe. No tinsel marred the scene! The smell of Christmas spices assaulted your nostrils as you entered the front door. Oranges stuck with cloves abounded and the warm hospitality of the Jervises’ was almost palpable.
Young boys in velvet waistcoats and knee britches and enchanting young girls in Kate Greenaway muslin dresses would greet you as you entered, offering rum punch circa 1730. Steven, who was eventually to run a restaurant from the ground floor of his house in Church St, had found the recipe in an old eighteenth century cookbook and Dennis was delighted. These children bearing punch were the sons and daughters of neighbours, friends and guests. If you were among the favoured, invited to one of Dennis’ private parties, you had to be prepared to join in and not rock the boat. Everything and everyone was highly organised.
As midnight struck, we were all hurried out of the drawing room and upstairs in the dark to the attic. This was the room in which the sitting tenant, who died within minutes of Dennis signing the contract to secure the house, lived and so promptly perished. It was also the room in which Dorian, the most beautiful of Dennis’ footmen, had his lodging. Towards the end of his brief life, when he was dying of AIDS, Dorian was forced to step into the cupboard when the tours came round to see the room inhabited – in the fiction of it – by Tiny Tim and his father, Bob Cratchet. I am not sure how the Jervises were connected to the Cratchets but what with the arrival of the Spinning Jenny in the early nineteenth century, hard times overtook the silk weavers of Spitalfields and perhaps Mrs Jervis had to take in a lodger? Eventually, Dorian was to move to Church St, two doors away from where I lived with my mother.
“Shhh, don’t talk any of you, shhh… Steven, Arlecchino, Quiet!” Dennis ordered like the matron in charge of a hospital ward. Think Hattie Jacques in ‘Carry on Nurse.’ “Where are Beyond & Ken? Not behind again?!” he asked, wondering if the two performance artists who attended the Hornsey School of Art had lost their way.
Beyond & Ken had lingered too long in the front room on the first floor, called somewhat grandly the ‘piano nobile.’ They were duly fetched and fixed in Dennis’ disapproving eye. All ready and inspected, we followed faithfully and quietly behind as he pushed open the door to his bedroom where we saw the four poster bed covered in red velvet. The bed and canopy had been made from pallets and refuse rescued from the nearby fruit and vegetable market – Dennis was an early recycler.
“Nothing here is real,” he cautioned as Judy (Edgar-in-Elder-St’s first wife) dared to touch a papier mache wig stand. In real life, the bed was Dennis’ own but for the purpose of the pantomime had become… “The bed of Ebenezeer Scrooge, just imagine it,” he said in an almost conspiratorial whisper. Dennis took himself very seriously in these moments and woe betide anyone who did not share his enthusiasm. I wondered why I often felt the need to come out of the illusion he had spent so long in creating. Perhaps, even though I was not a ‘Guardian’ reader, there was something in me that felt too manipulated in these moments? A kind of scepticism mixed with jealousy perhaps? After these many years, now Dennis has departed to join the great Ebenezeer in the sky, I ask his pardon if I did not always share his vision. It was complete but unrelenting and did not allow for one’s own response.
“Imagine,” he continued, “the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future flying overhead.”
Being dyslexic, Dennis had probably never read ‘A Christmas Carol,’ although he would have seen and loved that most famous version with the peerless Alistair Sim as the old miser and, of course, he would have remembered his mother, in the years before she fell ill, reading it to him in the far-removed and warm and sunny clime of California, in the town of Escondido where he had been born.
“You must imagine the snow falling on the rooftops and the frost on the windowpanes of Scrooge’s London house,” she might embroider, delighting her enchanted son, who would one day bring back to the land of its origin the very tale that had been exported so far across the world.
The tape of ‘A Christmas Carol’ would be playing in the background as we all stood, unable to hear it clearly, while Dennis in headmistress mode kept us quiet and I suspect, if we were honest, slightly resentful. Or did the others just feel, “Dear Dennis, he’s so eccentric, how wonderful!” ?
Finally, we were ushered into the drawing room on the ‘piano nobile’ floor where wine glasses and Christmas punch awaited. Dennis proposed a toast to Christmas,
“To Christmas, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields,”
to which we all added,
“And Dennis,”
“And Dennis,”
“And Dennis.”
Lionheart marred the occasion to my mind – I may have stood outside of it a bit but I never deliberately sabotaged the tale – Lionheart laughed and stabbed out with, “The Queen!” stressing Her Majesty in such a way that it was quite clear what queen he had in mind. There was little love lost between Lionheart and Dennis. There always existed between them that false bonhomie that just manages to control the very real dislike underneath.
Later on, I made moves to go. Phyllis, my mother, had already said goodnight amongst much gooing and gahing, cooing and cahing and was waiting for me downstairs. She was always a bit ambivalent about Dennis and the house he shared with the Jervis family. But she responded to his flattering ways and purred appropriately when stroked. Outside, on the way, home her tarter, or perhaps even her Tartar side, would emerge.
“Well, I’m glad that’s over for another year. I can’t bear those garlands made out of nuts. And, as for the Queen,” she added tetchily.
The garlands in question were draped across the panels in Mrs Jervis’ drawing-room and, from a distance, looked remarkably like the Grinling Gibbons’ carvings found in many a stately mansion and English country house. Up close, however, the illusion vanished and you saw that they were an ingenious hodgepodge of walnuts, almonds and brazil nuts sewn together of an evening by Dennis and his friends. Dennis would often have his most trusted fans around for a night in the smoking room. There, clad cap-a-pie in leather, they would celebrate the joys of friendship in a modern version of the eighteenth century Hellfire Club, sharing a pipe of marijuana and a working class lad or two.
“All is illusion and magic, that is the whole point,” he warned, his voice veering into a higher key as his eagle eyebeam struck the further side of the room, where Ian Gladly had been sighted examining a painting of Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy’ too closely. It looked real but how could it be?! Had Dennis raided the Tate Gallery? He was known for his daring.
“Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy?” – our host amazed nearly everyone by quoting John Keats. I was not amazed, though I was amused, because I had given Dennis the Keats quotation only a week before when he was complaining about the people who had not “got it” because their reading of ‘The Guardian’ and their critical eye got in the way. Duly chastised, Ian scurried away to refill his empty glass with the Christmas punch circa 1730.
“Dennis, I must go now too. Thank you for a wonderful evening,” I ventured, not realising that I was skating on very thin ice. Dennis replied with suave charm,“Thank you, Rodney, thank you for sticking it out for so long.”
For a moment, I did not feel the pain. I genuinely thought he was thanking me and then I realised that his was as much an attack as Lionheart’s had been. Maybe I had sounded rather grand, rather condescending? – I have that effect occasionally but, on this occasion, I chose my words carefully and was genuinely grateful. Perhaps, and this is more likely, he had picked up on my attitude at a much deeper level? Dennis was not an intellectual in any way. He was very much a creature of instinct, emotion and intuition. And he would sniff out any insincerity on your part and snuff you out immediately like a candle in an eighteenth century wall sconce. When riled he was a veritable tiger. He himself was, however, notoriously insincere. He liked to think of himself as very American and straightforward, but he could smile and be a villain with the best of us. In short, he was a ‘character.’
A group of us had gathered in the hall on the ground floor, fumbling for our coats in the Victorian room which opened off the room in which the Christmas goose sat proudly on its big eighteenth century platter, awaiting consumption.
“The wonderful thing about Denny,” Edgar-in-Elder-St drawled, “is he is a confidence man, a trickster. He sold to the English what was already theirs. It’s better than bottled water – and what a swizz that is – And we fell for it completely. We bought it!”
“Very American, that,” Lionheart added, as he struggled to find Arlecchino’s opera cape which had somehow gone missing.
“Lionheart, where ees my cape, I can’t pass thee market porters dressed as a ‘macaroni’, a kind of Yankee Doodle Dandy! I will be a laughing stocking.”
At this point Arlecchino’s eyes met those of Whitechapel, Dennis’ black and white cat, sitting at the bottom of the stairs and enjoying the festivities. Finally, we found the cape and Arlecchino’s costume was hidden from the amused and even scornful eyes of the market porters, through whom he imagined himself moving so perplexingly.
I had confided to Lionheart earlier that I found the house too much of a museum and a bit too Hollywood for my taste. I can say this without doing Dennis any harm at all because, in all these years, I have only met two other people who felt the same as I did. Dennis prided himself on being the real thing. The ‘real thing’ in terms of taste and decoration was distinguished by him as the ‘Joan Collins School of Decoration’ versus the ‘Queen Mother’s School of Decoration.’ There was even a television programme on the area in which Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, were seen wandering around Spitalfields and Brick Lane, past the Jewish Soup Kitchen for the Poor, along the Moorish Arcade in Fashion St, examining different facades and door fronts, lintels and fanlights, approving or disapproving as the Queen Mother dictated.
Our door front had been a thing of beauty and a joy forever, until we had to have it taken away and repaired and, in that process, hundreds of years of paint stripped off – O, God, forgive me – to reveal the original contours sleeping unsuspected beneath and then the door became a bad thing. In vain did I argue that mother and I had very little choice in the matter – the architect insisted – but Dennis would have none of it, and so Phyllis and I had the indignity of hearing Dennis and William Candy, the architectural-historian-who-wore-a-kilt-and-sported-a-pigtail, stop in front of our door and exclaim to the nation in a televised documentary, “This is very much an example of the Joan Collins School of Decoration! We prefer the Queen Mother’s School.” They both shook hands on it and that was that. Our fate was sealed.
My mother and I had been consigned to that uncomfortable circle of Dante’s Inferno shared by homosexuals and failed house restorers. Though he would have been mortally offended to hear it, Dennis’ house had a bit too much of the ‘Metro Goldwyn Mayer School of Decoration’ itself but God protect you if you ever hinted so much. He was not only very sensitive in these matters but also – and the two go together like a horse and eighteenth century carriage – deeply insecure.
I had previously joked with Lionheart about Dennis’ ordering us all about as if we were servants, “Now those of you who are sitting in them, bring the eighteenth century chairs up to the drawing room.”
“Dennis, which ones are they?” I asked.
“O, Rodney, really! The eighteenth century chairs have no arms, thereby enabling Mrs Jervis and her daughter, Sophia, to sit with their farthingales and hoopskirts unimpeded,” he emphasised, somewhat pedantically in his short quick trans-Atlantic accent.
Well, lah-di-bloody-dah, my dears, and God bless you all – Dennis, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Queen and Spitalfields!
Text copyright © Estate of Rodney Archer
Photographs copyright © Dennis Severs House
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Norton Folgate, E1 6BX
Rodney Archer’s diary is preserved in the archive at Bishopsgate Institute
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The Spitalfields Nativity Procession
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There was no doubt whatsoever that the Christmas season had arrived in Spitalfields when Photographer Colin O’Brien & I joined a procession of characters from the nativity story advancing up Brick Lane accompanied by all the pupils of Christ Church School singing carols.
We arrived at the school just as the final preparations were taking place. In the hallway, school governors, members of the parent-teachers’ association and any other adults that could be recruited were changing into colourful biblical costumes. They were joined by the pupils, some of whom had been assigned specific roles in the drama and other who had opted for generic nativity outfits. Once we were all gathered in the yard at the front of the school, there was just time for a group photo before the unlikely procession set off up Brick Lane, singing carols enthusiastically to dispel the grim atmosphere of damp and cold.
The curry touts were astonished by this unexpected demonstration of seasonal goodwill and resisted their natural impulse to offer meal deals and free beers to Mary & Joseph, on the their way to Bethlehem via Brick Lane. In fact, the first destination was the Spitalfields City Farm where the holy couple were to acquire a donkey for Mary to ride on their journey. Although legend has it that farm animals gain the power of speech on Christmas Eve, the pig at the City Farm grew impatient and joined in loudly with the carol-singing, much to the delight of the school children.
After readings telling the nativity story and more carols, and once Mary had put on her safety helmet and was securely mounted upon Bayleaf the donkey, we were all set to continue on our Christmas pilgrimage around Spitalfields. The attenuated procession stretched the length of Allen Gardens, offering great amusement to passengers on the East London Line gawping in delight from the train windows as they sped by.
We crossed Brick Lane again and followed the perimeter wall of the Truman Brewery to emerge onto Commercial St. Passing along the side of Spitalfields Market down Lamb St, the procession entered Bishop’s Sq just as it was thronging with office workers at lunchtime. The line of singing children led by a donkey invaded the adult workaday world, as harbingers of the approaching festive season – they had come to remind everyone that very soon everything must stop for Christmas.
The procession assembles at Christ Church School
Advancing up Brick Lane
Arriving at the Spitalfields City Farm
Jasmin as Mary, with Mhairi from Spitalfields City Farm and Bayleaf the donkey
Mary-Jane played the drum with Eleanor on accordion
Hamza, Josh and Kevin as the three kings
Setting out from the farm
Joseph & Mary advancing along Buxton St
Janzaib as the angel
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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Christmas Ravioli At E Pellicci
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Elide Pellicci looks down upon Maria & Nevio Pellicci
If you should spot a light, gleaming after hours in the back kitchen at E. Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd at this time of year, that will be Maria Pellicci making the Christmas ravioli for her family as she has done each year since 1962.
Maria originates from the same tiny village of Casciana near Lucca in Tuscany as her late husband Nevio Pellicci (senior). And, to her surprise, when Maria first arrived in London she discovered his mother Elide Pellicci, who came over in 1899, was already making ravioli to the same recipe that she knew from home in Italy.
Elide is the E. Pellicci celebrated in chrome letters upon the primrose yellow art deco facade of London’s best-loved family-run cafe, the woman who took over the running of the cafe in the thirties after the death of her husband Priamo who worked there from 1900 – which means we may be assured that the Christmas ravioli have been made here by the Pelliccis in this same spot for over a century.
Thus it was a great honour that Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I were the very first outsiders to be invited to witness and record this time-hallowed ritual in Bethnal Green. But I regret to inform you that this particular ravioli is only ever made for the family, which means the only way you can get to taste it is if you marry into the Pelliccis.
“It’s a Tuscan Christmas tradition – Ravioli in Brodo – we only do it once a year and every family has their own recipe,” Maria admitted to me as she turned the handle of the machine and her son Nevio Pellici (junior) reached out to manage the rapidly emerging yellow ribbon of pasta. “My mother and my grandmother used to make it, and I’ve been doing it all my life.”
In recent years, Maria has been quietly tutoring Nevio in this distinctive culinary art that is integral to the Pellicci family. “I was going with the boys to see Naples play against Arsenal tonight, but that’s down the drain,” he declared with good grace – revealing he had only discovered earlier in the day that his mother had decided the time was right for making the special ravioli, ready for the whole family to eat in chicken broth on Christmas Day.
“He’s a good boy,” Maria declared with a tender smile, acknowledging his sacrifice, “years ago I used to stay here on my own making the ravioli until eleven o’clock at night.”
“She’s trying to hand it over to me,” Nevio confirmed proudly.
“Nevio’s good and he’s got the patience,” Maria added encouragingly, as Nevio lowered the pasta carefully onto the ravioli mould.
“I’ve got the rubbish job, I have to fill the ravioli,” he complained in mock self-pity, grinning with pleasure as the two of them set to work with nimble fingers to fill the ravioli. Although the precise ingredients are a fiercely guarded secret, Maria confided to me that the filling comprises beef and pork with Parmigiano and Percorino, along with other undisclosed seasonings. “Everyone does it differently,” she confessed modestly, making light of the lifetime of refining that lies behind her personal recipe.
Already Maria had cooked the mixture slowly for a hour and added a couple of eggs to bind it, and – now it had cooled – she and Nevio were transferring it into the ravioli mould. “We used to do this by hand,” she informed me, turning contemplative as she watched Nevio expertly produce another ribbon of yellow pasta to sit on top of the mould. “We rolled the pasta out on the table before we had the machine. Sometimes, large families used to fill the whole table rolling out enough pasta to feed everyone on Christmas Day. When my mother was small, they were poor and lived in a hut but they had their own flour and eggs, so they could always make pasta.”
It was Nevio’s task to turn the mould over and press it down hard onto the table, binding the layers of pasta together. Then, with intense concentration as Maria waited expectantly, he peeled the ravioli away from the mould, revealing a sheet that looked like a page of neatly upholstered postage stamps. Making swift work of it, Maria wielded her little metal wheel by its wooden handle, separating the individual ravioli and transferring them to a metal tray.
In the kitchen of the empty restaurant, mother and son surveyed their fine handiwork with satisfaction. Each mould produced forty ravioli and, in the course of the evening, they made eight batches of ravioli, thus producing three hundred and sixty ravioli to delight the gathered Pelliccis on Christmas Day – and thereby continuing a family tradition that extends over a century. Yet for Maria, Ravioli in Brodo is more than a memento of her origin in Tuscany, making it here in the East End over all this time incarnates this place as her home.
“I am happy here and I know everyone in Bethnal Green,” she admitted to me, “It’s my village and it’s my family.”
Maria & Nevio rolling out the pasta
Maria sprinkles semolina in the mould to stop the pasta sticking
Maria & Nevio placing the meat filling in the ravioli
Nevio presses down on the ravioli mould
The ravioli are turned out from the mould
Maria cuts out the individual ravioli
Over three hundred ravioli ready for Christmas Day
Elide & Priamo, the Pellicci ancestors look down in approval upon the observance of making Christmas ravioli for more than a century in Bethnal Green
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
E.Pellicci, 332 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 0AG
You may like to read my other Pellicci stories
Maria Pellicci, The Meatball Queen of Bethnal Green
Colin O’Brien’s Pellicci Portraits ( Part One)
Colin O’Brien’s Pellicci Portraits (Part Two)
Christmas At The Salvation Army, 1975
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Photographer David Hoffman recently discovered these pictures he took at the Salvation Army Christmas Day lunch in Cambridge Heath Rd in 1975
“On Christmas Day 1975, I was squatting in Fieldgate Mansions in Whitechapel and it was a bit boring because all my friends were away for the holiday. The shops were shut and I was looking for something interesting to do with the day. I had seen that the Salvation Army were holding an open Christmas lunch at Sigsworth Hall in Globe Rd so I rocked up there with my camera and, without any formality, I just started to take photographs.
It was terribly dark. I had no flash and I had to work hard in the darkroom to coax these images from the horribly under-exposed and heavily over-developed film. The prints I made at the time were flat and grey but, now that I have been able to convert them to digital files, they do look a bit better and remind me of a very different era, now lost without trace.” – David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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David Hoffman at Fieldgate Mansions
My Winter Walks In the City
Many years ago, when my last relative died, for the first time in my life I had no longer any obligations at Christmas so, in recognition of this, I decided to walk all night through London on Christmas Eve alone, when the rest of the city was sleeping, and savour my strange moment of liberation. You can read my account below.
This year, as a the result of a commission by Barbican Arts Centre, you can join me for a two hour storytelling ramble across the empty square mile, from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral through the narrow alleys and lanes to the Bank of England, in search of the wonders and the wickedness of the City of London. These walks take place on 28th & 30th December and are conceived to elevate and uplift that curious moment of hiatus between Christmas and New Year.
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Winter Walks Through the City of London
On New Year’s Day, you are invited to join my walk around Spitalfields to blow away the cobwebs of 2023 and step forward with me into 2024. We shall ramble through two thousand years of culture in the heart of London and encounter some of the people and places that make this ancient neighbourhood distinctive. We will follow in the footsteps of all who came before, with a keen eye and an open heart, to experience the manifold wonders of Spitalfields.
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields on January 1st
ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT IN THE CITY
Fortified by a late supper of lamb cutlets, I set out after eleven through the streets of Spitalfields just as some of the residents were making their way to Christ Church for the midnight service, but I did not join them, instead I walked out into the City on Christmas Eve. As I passed through Brick Lane, the ever-optimistic curry touts were touting to an empty street and in Commercial St a few stragglers who had been out for the night loitered, but I left them all behind as I entered the streets of the City of London where there was no-one. Passing through the deserted Leadenhall Market, illuminated like a fairground, I slipped into the web of narrow alleys to emerge at the Bank of England. Here where the Bank, the Mansion House and the Royal Exchange face each other at this famous crossroads, the place was empty save a lonely policeman patrolling outside the Bank of England.
I headed down to the river and as I crossed the footbridge above the dark water with powerful currents churning in the depths below, I could enjoy the panorama of the vast city of empty rooms around me. Tonight, I was the sole rambler through its passages and byways, an explorer in the unknown territory of the familiar city, transformed by the complete absence of inhabitants. The sound of the gulls’ cry registered as it had not before and birdsong followed me throughout my journey into the dark streets, in which for the first time ever I heard the echo of my own footsteps in the centre of London.
Yet just as I had befriended the emptiness, I came round a corner in Southwark to see the cathedral glowing with light and the tune of a carol blowing on the breeze. I stepped down to the cathedral door and discovered a candlelit service in progress. An usher saw me through the glass door, and although I kept a respectful distance – imbued with the generosity of the season, he could not resist coming outside to lead me in. Before I knew it, I was in the midst of the service and it was overwhelming in contrast to the cold dark streets to which I had acclimatised. But once the bishop had led the choir in a procession through a haze of incense as the congregation sang “O Come all Ye Faithful,” the service was over. So as quickly as I arrived, I was able to return to my wandering.
Hastening Eastward along the Thames, I came to Tower Bridge where I crossed and skirted around the Tower of London. In the absence of floodlighting, its grim austerity came to the fore, yet even though all the gates were shut for the night I could see a few of the residents’ individual lights still burning within. From here I set out Westward, along Cheapside and Cannon St, where I came upon the fabled London Stone, built into an illuminated box in the wall, as I was passing on my way to St Pauls. Here also, the floodlighting was off, allowing Wren’s great cathedral to loom magnificently among the trees like some natural excrescence, a towering cliff of rock, eroded into pinnacles.
Winding my way onwards along the Strand through the courtyards and alleys, I found myself in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and I had it to myself. And in homage to the writer most famous for his walks by night through London, I visited the Old Curiosity Shop. Already, the night was drawing on and I discovered a sense of urgency, walking on purposefully even though I did not where I was going. At the Savoy, I turned down Carting Lane where I came upon one of just three people that I saw suffering the misfortune of sleeping out last night, though equally I was also aware of many bundled up in dark clothing with backpacks walking slowly and keeping to the shadows. I could only presume these people were walking all night in preference to sleeping in the frost.
I followed the Embankment along to Parliament Sq where there was no-one, apart from the antiwar protesters sleeping peacefully in their tents and statues of dead men standing around on plinths. Big Ben struck three in the morning and, without any traffic, I could sense the sound travelling around me, bouncing and reverberating off the stone buildings as I made my way up Whitehall. Coming to the end of Downing St, two policemen with machine guns on duty behind the fortifications spotted me, the lone figure in the street, and I realised they were focusing on me. Then, to my surprise, one waved, and so I returned the wave automatically and the atmosphere of unease was broken.
There were plenty of taxis for hire circling Trafalgar Square – they were the only traffic on the road by this time – but absurdly there were no customers to rent them. Looking through Admiralty Arch, I espied Buckingham Palace tempting me, and I wanted to go walking around St James’ Palace too, but weariness was also coming upon me. It was time to return home. I walked doggedly across Covent Garden, along Holborn and over Smithfield, then through the Barbican and so I found myself in Spitalfields again.
The city was as still as the grave and there was a keen edge to the wind, yet I had kept warm by walking continuously. It was as though I had travelled through a dream – a dream of an empty city. Although I delighted in the privilege of having London to myself, it is an alien place with nobody in it, so I was eager to renounce my monopoly and give the city back to everyone else again, because I longed for the reassurance of my warm bed. Already children were waking to unwrap parcels that appeared mysteriously in the night, although I must confess I saw no evidence of nocturnal deliveries upon my walk. It was now 4:30am on Christmas Morning and as I approached my front door, even before I took out the key to place it in the lock, a cry of a certain cat was heard from just inside, where he had been waiting upon my return for all this time.
Leadenhall Market at 11:50pm on Christmas Eve.
At the Bank at Midnight.
In Southwark Cathedral, 1:00am Christmas Morning.
Leaving Southwark Cathedral.
The London Stone in Cannon St.
At St Pauls, 2:00am Christmas Morning.
The Old Curiosity Shop, 2:30am.
At the Savoy, 2:45am.
In Carting Lane, next to the Savoy.
A lonely photographer at the London Eye, 2:55am
The Nativity scene in Trafalgar Square, 3:15am.
In Covent Garden, 3:30am.
At High Holborn, 3:45am.
At the Barbican, 4:00am on Christmas Morning.
The New Christmas Dinner Song
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I am grateful to John Foreman, Folk Singer and Printer of the Catnap Press in Camden Town, also known as The Broadsheet King, who kindly sent me his reprint of The New Christmas Dinner Song as originally published by Taylor of Brick Lane in the nineteenth century
John Foreman, The Broadsheet King
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The Smithfield Christmas Eve Meat Auction
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Carnivorous readers will be delighting to learn that – after a few years’ break – the traditional Smithfield Christmas Eve meat auction returns this year hosted by G Lawrence & Co on Grand Avenue in the Central Market from 10am. Blow you can read my account of a visit there with the late photographer Colin O’Brien.
The carnivores of London converged upon Smithfield Market, as they do every year for the annual Christmas Eve auction staged by Harts the Butcher. At ten in the morning, the rainy streets were almost empty yet, as I came through Smithfield, butchers in white overalls were wheeling precarious trolleys top-heavy with meat and fowls over to the site of the auction where an expectant crowd of around a hundred had gathered, anxiously clutching wads of banknotes in one hand and bags to carry off their prospective haul in the other.
Photographer Colin O’Brien met me there. He grew up half a mile away in Clerkenwell during the nineteen fifties and, although it was his first time at the auction, he remembered his father walking down to Smithfield to get a cheap turkey on Christmas Eve more than sixty years ago. Overhearing this reminiscence, a robust woman standing next to us in the crowd struck up a conversation as a means to relieve the growing tension before the start of the auction which is the highlight of the entire year for many of stalwarts that have been coming for decades.
“You can almost guarantee getting a turkey,” she reassured us with the authority of experience, revealing she had been in attendance for fifteen successive years. Then, growing visibly excited as a thought came into her mind, “Last year, I got thirty kilos of sirloin steak for free – I tossed for it!”, she confided to us, turning unexpectedly flirtatious. Colin and I stood in silent wonder at her good fortune with meat.“We start preparing in October by eating all the meat in the freezer,” she explained, to clarify the situation. “Last night we had steak,” she continued, rubbing her hands in gleeful anticipation, “and steak again tonight.”
Yet our acquaintance was terminated as quickly as it began when the caller appeared in a blood-stained white coat and red tie to introduce the auction. A stubby bullet-headed man, he raised his hands graciously to quell the crowd. “This is a proper English tradition,” he announced, “it has been going on for the last five hundred years. And I’m going to make sure everybody goes away with something and I’m here to take your money.”
His words drew an appreciative roar from the crowd as dozens of eager hands were thrust in the air waving banknotes, indicative of the collective blood lust that gripped the assembly. Standing there in the midst of the excitement, I realised that the sound I could hear was an echo. It was a reverberation of the famously uproarious Bartholomew Fair which flourished upon this site from the twelfth century until it was suppressed for public disorder in 1855. Yesterday, the simple word “Hush!” from the caller was enough to suppress the mob as he queried, “What are we going to start with?”
The answer to his question became manifest when several bright pink loins of pork appeared as if by magic in the hatch beside him, held by butchers beneath, and dancing jauntily above the heads of the delighted audience like hand puppets. These English loins of pork were soon dispatched into the crowd at twenty pounds each as the curtain warmer to the pantomime that was to come, followed by joints of beef for a tenner preceding the star attraction of day – the turkeys! – greeted with festive cheers by the hungry revellers. “Mind your heads, turkeys coming over…” warned the butcher as the turkeys in their red wrappers set out crowd-surfing to their grateful prospective owners as the cash was passed hand to hand back to the stand.
It would not be an understatement to say that mass hysteria had overtaken the crowd, yet there was another element to add to the chaos of the day. As the crowd had enlarged, it spilled over into the road with cars and vans weaving their through the overwrought gathering. “I love coming for the adventure of it,” declared one gentleman with hair awry, embracing a side of beef protectively as if it was the love of his life, “Everyone helps one another out here. You pass the money over and there’s no pickpockets.”
After the turkeys came the geese, the loins of lamb, the ribs of beef, the pork bellies, the racks of lamb, the fillet steaks and the green gammon to complete the bill of fare. As the energy rose, butchers began to throw pieces of red meat into the crowd to be caught by their purchasers and it was surreal to watch legs of lamb and even suckling pigs go flying into the tumultuous mass of people. Finally, came tossing for meat where customers had the chance of getting their steaks for free if they guessed the toss correctly, and each winning guess was greeted with an exultant cheer because by then the butchers and the crowd were as one, fellow participants in a boisterous party game.
Just ninety minutes after it began, the auction wrapped up, leaving the crowd to consolidate their proud purchases, tucking the meat and fowls up snugly in suitcases and backpacks to keep them safe until they could be stowed away in the freezer at home. In the disorder, I saw piles of bloody meat stacked on the muddy pavement where people were tripping over them. Yet a sense of fulfilment prevailed, everyone had stocked up for another year – their carnivorous appetites satiated – and they were going home to eat meat.
As I walked back through the narrow City streets, I contemplated the spectacle of the morning. It resembled a Bacchanale or some ancient pagan celebration in which people were liberated to pursue their animal instincts. But then I realised that my thinking was too complicated – it was Christmas I had witnessed.
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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