Spitalfields Life

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Richard Ince, 11th generation umbrella maker

The factory of James Ince & Sons, the oldest established umbrella makers in the country, is one of the few places in London where you will not hear complaints about the rainy weather, because – while our moist climate is such a disappointment to the population in general – it has happily sustained generations of Inces for over two centuries now. If you walked down Whites Row in Spitalfields in 1824, you would have found William Ince making umbrellas and, six generations later, I was able to visit Richard Ince, still making umbrellas in the East End. Yet although the date of origin of the company is conservatively set at 1805, there was a William Inch, a tailor listed in Spitalfields in 1793, who may have been father to William Ince of Whites Row – which makes it credible to surmise that Inces have been making umbrellas since they first became popular at the end of the eighteenth century.

You might assume that the weight of so much history weighs heavily upon Richard Ince, but it is like water off a duck’s back to him, because he is simply too busy manufacturing umbrellas. Richard’s father and grandfather were managers with a large staff of employees, but Richard is one of only a handful of workers at James Ince & Sons today, and he works alongside his colleagues as one of the team, cutting and stitching, personally supervising all the orders. Watching them at work, it was a glimpse of what William Ince’s workshop might have been like in Spitalfields in 1824, because – although synthetics and steel have replaced silk and whalebone, and all stitching is done by machine now – the essential design and manufacturing process of umbrellas remains the same.

Between these two workshops of William Ince in 1824 and Richard Ince in 2011, exists a majestic history, which might be best described as one of gracious expansion and then sudden contraction, in the manner of an umbrella itself. It was the necessity of silk that made Spitalfields the natural home for James Ince & Sons. The company prospered there during the expansion of London through the nineteenth century and the increase in colonial trade, especially to India and Burma. In 1837, they moved into larger premises in Brushfield St and, by 1857, filled a building on Bishopsgate too. In the twentieth century, workers at Inces’ factory in Spitalfields took cover in the basement during air raids, and then emerged to resume making military umbrellas for soldiers in the trenches during the First World War and canvas covers for guns during the Second World War. Luckily, the factory itself narrowly survived a flying bomb, permitting the company to enjoy post-war success, diversifying into angling umbrellas, golfing umbrellas, sun umbrellas and promotional umbrellas, even a ceremonial umbrella for a Nigerian Chief. But in the nineteen eighties, a change in tax law, meaning that umbrella makers could no longer be classed as self-employed, challenged the viability of the company, causing James Ince & Sons to shed most of the staff and move to smaller premises in Hackney.

This is some of the history that Richard Ince does not think about very much, whilst deeply engaged through every working hour with the elegant contrivance of making umbrellas. In the twenty-first century, James Ince & Sons fashion the umbrellas for Rubeus Hagrid and for Mary Poppins, surely the most famous brollies on the planet. A fact which permits Richard a small, yet justly deserved, smile of satisfaction as the proper outcome of more than two hundred years of umbrella making by seven generations of his family. A smile that in its quiet intensity reveals his passion for his calling. “My father didn’t want to do it,” he admitted with a grin of regret, “but I left school at seventeen and I felt my way in. I used to spend my Saturdays in Spitalfields, kicking cabbages around as footballs, and when we had the big tax problem, it taught me that I had to get involved.” This was how Richard oversaw the transformation of his company to become the lean operation it is today. “We are the only people who are prepared to look at making weird umbrellas, when they want strange ones for film and theatre.” he confessed with yet another modest smile, as if this indication of his expertise were a mere admission of amiable gullibility.

On the ground floor of his factory in Vyner St, is a long block where Richard unfurls the rolls of fabric and cuts the umbrella panels using a wooden pattern and a sharp knife. Then he carries the armful of pieces upstairs  where they are sewn together before Job Forster takes them and does the “tipping,” consisting of fixing the “points” (which attach the cover to the ends of the ribs), sewing the cover to the frame and adding the tie which is used to furl the umbrella when not in use.

Job was making huge umbrellas, as used by the doormen to shepherd guests through the rain, and I watched as he clamped the bare metal frame to the bench, revolving it as he stitched the cover to each rib in turn, to complete the umbrella. Then came the moment when Job opened it up to scrutinise his handiwork. With a satisfying “thunk,” the black cover expanded like a giant bat stretching its wings taut and I was spellbound by the drama of the moment – because now I understood what it takes to make one, I was seeing an umbrella for the first time, thanks to James Ince & Sons (Umbrella Makers) Ltd.

Richard Ince, seventh generation umbrella maker, prepares to cut covers for brollies.

Job Forster sews the cover to the ribs of the umbrella.

James Ince, born 1816

James John Ince, born 1830

Samuel George Ince, born 1853

Ernest Edward Sears, born 1870

Wilfred Sears Ince, born 1894

Geoffrey Ince, born 1932

Richard Ince, “Prepare for a rainy day!”

New photographs copyright ©  Chris Hill-Scott

Archive photographs copyright © Bishopsgate Institute

Tickets available next Saturday 2nd September

They say it is the oldest road in Britain, maybe the oldest in Europe. Starting from the highest navigable point of the Thames in prehistoric times, the Ridgeway follows the hilltops to arrive at Salisbury Plain where once wild cattle and horses roamed. When the valleys were forested and impenetrable, the Ridgeway offered a natural route over the downland and into the heart of this island. Centuries of cattle driving wore a trackway that curved across the hillside, traversing the contours of the landscape and unravelling like a ribbon towards the horizon.

Over thousands of years, the Ridgeway became a trading route extending from coast to coast, as far as Lyme Regis in the west and the Wash in the east, with fortresses and monuments along the way. Yet once the valleys became accessible it was defunct, replaced by the Icknield Way – a lower level path that skirted the foot of the hills – and there are burial mounds which traverse the Ridgeway dated to 2000BC, indicating that the highway was no longer in use by then.

In fact, this obsolescence preserved the Ridgeway because it was never incorporated into the modern road network and remains a green path to this day where anyone can set out and walk in the footsteps of our earliest predecessors in this land. Leaving Spitalfields early and taking the hour’s rail journey to Goring & Streatley from Paddington, I was ascending the hill from the river by eleven and onto the upland by midday. In this section, the flinty path of the Ridgeway is bordered with deep hedges of hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel, giving way to the open downland rich with the pink and blue flowers of late summer, knapweed, scabious and harebells.

A quarter of a century has passed since I first passed this way and yet nothing has changed up there. It is the same huge sky and expansive grassy plain undulating into the distance with barely a building in sight. This landscape dwarfs the human figure, inducing a sense of exhilaration at the dramatic effects of light and cloud, sending patterns travelling fast across the vast grassy wind-blown hills. When I first began to write and London grew claustrophobic, I often undertook this walk through the different seasons of the year. I discovered that the sheer exertion of walking all day, buffeted upon the hilltops and sometimes marching doggedly through driving rain, never failed to clear my mind.

As a consequence, the shape of the journey is graven into memory even though, returning eighteen years since my last visit, the landscape was greater than I had fashioned it in recollection. And this is the quality that fascinates me about such epic terrain, which the mind cannot satisfactorily contain and thus each return offers a renewed acquaintance of wonder at the scale and majesty of the natural world.

In those days, I was in thrall to endurance walking and I would continue until I could go no further, either because of exhaustion or nightfall. This vast elevated downland landscape encouraged such excessive behaviour, leading me on and on along the empty path to discover what lay over the brow and engendering a giddy sense of falling forward, walking through the sky – as if you might take flight. I walked until I thought I could walk no more and then I carried on walking until walking became automatic, like breathing. In this state my body was propelled forward of its own volition and my mind was free.

One day’s walk brings you to Uffington and the famous White Horse, carved into the chalk of the downland. Placed perfectly upon the crest of a ridge within a vast fold of the hills, this sparsely drawn Neolithic figure looks out across the arable farmland of Oxfordshire beyond and can be seen for great distances. A mystery now, a representation that may once have been a symbol for a people lost in time, it retains a primeval charisma, and there is such an intensity of delight to reach this figure at the end of a day’s walking. Breathless and weary of limbs, I stumbled over the hill to sit there alone upon the back of the hundred foot White Horse at dusk, before descending to the village of Bishopstone for the night. There, at Prebendal Farm, Jo Selbourne offers a generous welcome and, as well as the usual bed and breakfast, will show you the exquisitely smoothed ceremonial Neolithic axe head found upon the farm.

The second day’s walk leads through the earthen ramparts of Liddington Hill and Barbary Castle, and on either side of the path the fields are punctuated by clumps of trees indicating the myriad ancient burial mounds scattered upon this bare Wiltshire scenery. It is a more expansive land than the fields of Berkshire where I began my journey, here the interventions made in ancient times still hold their own and the evidence of the modernity is sparser. As I made the final descent from the hill towards Avebury, a village within a massive earthwork and stone circle which was the culmination of my journey, I could not resist the feeling that it was all there for me and I had earned it by walking along the old path which for thousands of years had brought people to arrive at this enigmatic location of pilgrimage.

In two days upon the hilltops I had only passed a dozen lone walkers, and now the crowds, the coach parties, the shops and the traffic were a startling sight to behold. And so I knew my journey had fulfilled its purpose – to reacquaint me freshly with the familiar world and restore a sense of proportion. My feet were sore and my face was flushed by the sun. In Berkshire, the ripe fields of corn were standing, in Oxfordshire, they were being harvested and, in Wiltshire, I saw the stubble being ploughed in. It had been a walk to arrive at the end of the summer. It had been a walk through time along the oldest road.

Goring Mill

“Join it at Streatley, the point where it crosses the Thames, at once it strikes you out and away from the habitable world in a splendid purposeful manner, running along the highest ridge of the downs.” Kenneth Grahame, 1898

A ninety-two year old man told me this year is the worst harvest he could remember. “It doesn’t want to come in the barn,” he lamented.

At East Illsley

“A broad green track runs for many a long mile across the downs, now following the ridges, now winding past at the foot of a grassy slope, then stretching away through cornfield and fallow.” Richard Jefferies, 1879

“A rough way, now wide, now narrow, among the hazel, brier and nettle. Sometimes there was an ash in the hedge and once a line of spindly elms followed it round in a curve.” Edward Thomas, 1910

On White Horse Hill

“The White Horse is, I believe, the earliest hill drawing we have in England. It is a piece of design, in another category from the other chalk figures, for it has the lineaments of a work of art. The horse, which is more of a dragon than a horse, is cut on the top of the down’s crest, so that it can only be seen completely from the air, or at a long view, from the surrounding country – but it was precisely this aspect of the Horse design that I found so significant.” Paul Nash, 1938

The Neolithic axe head found at Prebendal Farm, photo by Rob Selbourne.

At Bishopstone

At Barbary Castle

“The origin of the track goes back into the dimmest antiquity: there is evidence that it was a military road when the fierce Dane carried fire and slaughter inland, leaving his nailed bark in the creeks of the rivers, and before that when the Saxons pushed up from the sea. The eagles of old Rome were, perhaps, borne along it and yet earlier the chariots of the Britons may have used it – traces of all have been found: so that for fifteen centuries this track of primitive peoples has maintained its existence through the strange changes of the times, til now in the season the cumbrous steam ploughing engines jolt and strain and pant over the uneven turf.” Richard Jefferies, 1879

Since the man suspected of making crop circles died, his protege has adopted a different style of design.

At Avebury

At Avebury

Next ticket availability Saturday 2nd September

Next weekend, Pollock’s Toy Theatres return to their roots with a two day pop up at House of Annetta in Spitalfields including performances, workshops and an exhibition. Below you can read my account of the origin of the nineteenth century toy theatre movement in the East End.

William Webb, 49 Old St, 1857

These days, Old St is renowned for its digital industries but – for over a hundred years – this area was celebrated as the centre of toy theatre manufacture in London. Formerly, these narrow streets within walking distance of the City of London were home to highly skilled artisans who could turn their talents to the engraving, printing, jewellery, clock, gun and instrument-making trades which operated here – and it was in this environment that the culture of toy theatres flourished.

Between 1830 and 1945, at a handful of addresses within a half mile of the junction of Old St and City Rd, the modest art of publishing engraved plates of characters and scenery for Juvenile Dramas enjoyed its heyday. The names of the protagonists were William Webb and Benjamin Pollock. The overture was the opening of Archibald Park’s shop at 6 Old St Rd in 1830, and the drama was brought to the public eye by Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured in 1884, before meeting an ignominious end with the bombing of Benjamin Pollock’s shop in Hoxton St in 1945.

Responsibility for the origin of this vein of publishing belongs both to John Kilby Green of Lambeth and William West of Wych St in the Strand, with the earliest surviving sheets dated at 1811. Green was just an apprentice when he had the notion to produce sheets of theatrical characters but it was West who took the idea further, publishing plates of popular contemporary dramas. From the beginning, the engraved plates became currency in their own right and many of Green’s vast output were later acquired by Redington of Hoxton and eventually published there as Pollock’s. West is chiefly remembered for commissioning artists of acknowledged eminence to design plates, including the Cruickshank brothers, Henry Flaxman, Robert Dighton and – most notably – William Blake.

Green had briefly collaborated to open Green & Slee’s Theatrical Print Warehouse at 5 Artillery Lane, Spitalfields, in 1805 to produce ‘The Tiger’s Horde’ but the first major publishers of toy theatres in the East End were Archibald Park and his family, rising to prosperity with premises in Old St and then 47 Leonard St between 1830 until 1870.

Park’s apprentice from 1835-42, William Webb, set up on his own with shops in Cloth Fair and Bermondsey before eventually opening a quarter a mile from his master at 49 (renumbered as 146) Old St in 1857. Webb traded here until his death in 1898 when his son moved to 124 Old St where he was in business until 1931. Contrary to popular belief, it was William Webb who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous essay upon the subject of toy theatres. Yet a disagreement between the two men led to Stevenson approaching Webb’s rival Benjamin Pollock in Hoxton St, who became the subject of the story instead and whose name became the byword for toy theatres.

In 1876, at twenty-one years old, Benjamin Pollock had the good fortune to acquire by marriage the shop opened by his late father-in-law, John Redington in Hoxton in 1851. Redington had all the theatrical plates engraved JK Green and, in time, Benjamin Pollock altered these plates, erasing the name of ‘Redington’ and replacing it with his own just as Redington had once erased the name ‘Green’ before him. Although it was an unpromising business at the end of the nineteenth century, Pollock harnessed himself to the work, demonstrating flair and aptitude by producing high quality reproductions from the old plates, removing ‘modern’ lettering applied by Redington and commissioning new designs from the naive artist James Tofts.

In 1931, the writer AE Wilson had the forethought to visit Webb’s shop in Old St and Pollock’s in Hoxton St, talking to William Webb’s son Harry and to Benjamin Pollock, the last representatives of the two surviving dynasties in the arcane world of Juvenile Dramas. “In his heyday, his business was very flourishing,” admitted Harry Webb speaking of his father,” Why, I remember we employed four families to do the colouring. There must have been at least fifteen people engaged in the work. I could tell their work apart, no two of them coloured alike. Some of the work was beautifully done.”

Harry recalled visits by Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens to his father’s premises. “Up to the time of the quarrel, Stevenson was a frequent visitor to the shop, he was very fond of my father’s plays. Indeed it was my father who supplied the shop in Edinburgh from which he bought his prints as a boy,” he told Wilson.

Benjamin Pollock was seventy-five years old when Wilson met him and ‘spoke in strains not unmingled with melancholy.’ “Toy theatres are too slow for the modern boy and girl,” he confessed to Wilson, “even my own grandchildren aren’t interested. One Christmas, I didn’t sell a single stage.” Yet Pollock spoke passionately recalling visits by Ellen Terry and Charlie Chaplin to purchase theatres. “I still get a few elderly customers,” Pollock revealed, “Only the other day, a City gentleman drove up here in a car and bought a selection of plays. He said he had collected them as a boy. Practically all the stock has been here fifty years or so. There’s enough to last out my time, I reckon.”

Shortly after AE Wilson’s visit to Old St & Hoxton, Webb’s shop was demolished while Benjamin Pollock struggled to earn even the rent for his tiny premises until his death in 1937. Harry Webb lived on in Caslon St – named after the famous letter founder who set up there two centuries earlier – opposite the site of his father’s Old St shop until his death in 1962.

Robert Louis Stevenson visited 73 Hoxton St in 1884. “If you love art, folly or the bright eyes of children speed to Pollock’s” he wrote fondly afterwards. Stevenson was an only child who played with toy theatres to amuse himself in the frequent absences from school due to sickness when he was growing up in Edinburgh. I too was an only child enchanted by the magic of toy theatres, especially at Christmas, but I cannot quite put my finger on what still draws me to the romance of them.

Even Stevenson admitted “The purchase and the first half hour at home, that was the summit.” As a child, I think the making of them was the greater part of the pleasure, cutting out the figures and glueing it all together. “I cannot deny the joy that attended the illumination, nor can I quite forget that child, who forgoing pleasure, stoops to tuppence coloured,” Stevenson concluded wryly. I cannot imagine what he would have made of Old St’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ today.

Drawings for toy theatre characters by William Blake for William West

The sheet as published by William West, November 4th 1816 – note Blake’s initials, bottom right

Another sheet engraved after drawings by William Blake, 1814

124 Old St, 1931

73 Hoxton St (formerly 208 Hoxton Old Town) 1931

Benjamin Pollock at his shop on Hoxton St in 1931

Next ticket availability Saturday 2nd September

Fourteen years ago this week I began publishing daily in these pages with the ambition of reaching at least ten thousand posts, which would take twenty-seven years and four months. It seemed an outlandish endeavour then, yet recently I passed the halfway point without even noticing until a reader wrote to congratulate me.

I was motivated by the knowledge that my parents had both died at exactly the same age and ten thousand days would deliver me to that time. So I sought a means to make my days as rewarding and productive as I could through writing and participating in the life surrounding me. I happy to admit to you that in these terms the project has succeeded beyond all expectation.

Ten years ago, the readers of Spitalfields Life campaigned to save the Marquis of Lansdowne from 1838 in Haggerston from demolition and today it is restored as part of the Museum of the Home. Five years ago, we campaigned to save the five-hundred-year-old Bethnal Green Mulberry and now it is protected. This year, the mulberry cuttings have rooted and we plan to distribute them this autumn to those patient souls who contributed £100 or more to the legal fund.

As I write, Liverpool St Station and the Bishopsgate Bathhouse are under threat from development, while the #SaveBrickLane Coalition – of which Spitalfields Life is part – prepares to go to the Supreme Court to challenge the Truman Brewery’s plans for a shopping mall.

Down in Whitechapel, the bell foundry has been rotting since its closure five years ago, acquiring layers of graffiti now that the neglect is tangible. The developers have abandoned their plan for a boutique hotel and it has been on sale without takers for a year, despite a standing offer at market value from the London Bell Foundry to buy it to start casting bells again and cherish the historic buildings.

On a brighter note, in November last year it was my great delight to speak at the party for the tenth birthday of the East End Trades Guild of which I am proud have been one of the founders. You may have read recently of the Guild’s heroic campaign to champion the rights of Len Maloney and other tenants of railway arches in the face of excessive rent increases.

Eleven years have passed since I wrote my book Spitalfields Life and ten since I became a publisher myself with The Gentle Author’s London Album in 2013. Then I published twenty titles before the pandemic called a halt to operations. But this autumn I plan relaunch Spitalfields Life Books starting with a crowdfunding campaign next month and at least four new titles in hand.

When I take a reckoning of these milestones and contemplate the future, I do not regret my choice to embrace the relentless progress of life in this corner of London.

Thus, with all these thoughts in mind, I come to the end of the fourteenth year in the pages of Spitalfields Life.

I am your loyal servant

The Gentle Author

25th August 2023

The Gentle Author’s cat, Schrodinger (formerly of Shoreditch Church)

HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 25th-26th November. Spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Spitalfields and learn how to write your own blog.

You may like to read my earlier Annual Reports

First Annual Report 2010

Second Annual Report 2011

Third Annual Report 2012

Fourth Annual Report 2013

Fifth Annual Report 2014

Sixth Annual Report 2015

Seventh Annual Report 2016

Eight Annual Report 2017

Ninth Annual Report 2018

Tenth Annual Report 2019

Eleventh Annual Report 2020

Twelfth Annual Report 2021

Thirteenth Annual Report 2023