At The Pearlies’ Harvest Festival
Please drop an email to spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to attend the launch
Today I preview the Pearly Kings & Queens Harvest Festival which takes place this Sunday 21st September, commencing with high jinks in the Guildhall yard in the City of London from 1:15pm followed by a procession to St Mary-le-Bow
On a Sunday afternoon in September, the Pearly Kings & Queens come together from every corner of London and gather in the square outside the Guildhall in the City of London for a lively celebration to mark the changing of the seasons.
When I visited there was Maypole dancing and Morris Dancing, there was a pipe band and a marching band, there were mayors and dignitaries in red robes and gold chains, there were people from Rochester in Dickensian costume, there were donkeys with carts and veteran cars, and there was even an old hobby horse leaping around – yet all these idiosyncratic elements successfully blended to create an event with its own strange poetry. In fact, the participants outnumbered the audience and a curiously small town atmosphere prevailed, allowing the proud Pearlies to mingle with their fans, and enjoy an afternoon of high-spirited chit-chat and getting their pictures snapped.
I delighted in the multiplicity of designs that the Pearlies had contrived for their outfits, each creating their own identity expressed through ingenious patterns of pearl buttons, and on this bright afternoon of early Autumn they made a fine spectacle, sparkling in the last rays of September sunshine. My host was the admirable Doreen Golding, Pearly Queen of the Old Kent Rd & Bow Bells, who spent the whole year organising the event. And I was especially impressed with her persuasive abilities in cajoled all the mayors into a spot of maypole dancing, because it was a heartening sight to see a team of these dignified senior gentlemen in their regalia prancing around like eleven year olds and enjoying it quite unselfconsciously too.
In the melee, I had the pleasure to grapple with George Major, the Pearly King of Peckham (crowned in 1958), and his grandson Daniel, the Pearly Prince, sporting an exceptionally pearly hat that is a century old. George is an irrepressibly flamboyant character who taught me the Cockney salute, and then took the opportunity of his celebrity to steal cheeky kisses from ladies in the crowd, causing more than a few shrieks and blushes. As the oldest surviving member of one of the only three surviving original pearly families, he enjoys the swaggering distinction of being the senior Pearly in London, taking it as licence to behave like a mischievous schoolboy. Nearby I met Matthew (Daniels’s father) – a Pearly by marriage not birth, he revealed apologetically – who confessed he sewed the six thousand buttons on George’s jacket while watching Match of the Day.
Fortunately, the Lambeth Walk had been enacted all round the Guildhall Yard and all the photo opportunites were exhausted before the gentle rain set in. And by then it was time to form a parade to process down the road to St Mary-le-Bow for the annual Harvest Festival. A distinguished man in a red tail coat with an umbrella led the procession through the drizzle, followed by a pipe band setting an auspicious tone for the impressive spectacle of the Pearlies en masse, some in veteran cars and others leading donkeys pulling carts with their offerings for the Harvest Festival. St Mary-le-Bow is a church of special significance for Pearlies because it is the home of the famous Bow Bells that called Dick Whittington back to London from Highgate Hill, and you need to be born within earshot of these to call yourself a true Cockney.
The black and white chequerboard marble floor of the church was the perfect complement to the pearly suits, now that they were massed together in delirious effect. Everyone was happy to huddle in the warmth and dry out, and there were so many people crammed together in the church in such an array of colourful and bizarre costumes of diverse styles, that as one of the few people not in some form of fancy dress, I felt I was the odd one out. But we were as one, singing “All Things Bring and Beautiful” together. Prayers were said, speeches were given and the priest reminded us of the Pearlies’ origins among he costermongers in the poverty of nineteenth century London. We stood in reverent silence for the sake of history and then a Pearly cap was passed around in aid of the Whitechapel Mission.
Coming out of the church, there was a chill in the air. The day that began with Summery sunshine was closing with Autumnal rain. Pearlies scattered down Cheapside and through the empty City streets for another year, back to their respective corners of London. Satisfied that they had celebrated Summer’s harvest, the Pearlies were going home to light fires, cook hot dinners and turn their minds towards the Wintry delights of the coming season, including sewing yet more pearl buttons on their suits during Match of the Day.
Watermen’s Stairs
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Wapping Old Stairs
I need to keep reminding myself of the river. Rarely a week goes by without some purpose to go down there but, if no such reason occurs, I often take a walk simply to pay my respects to the Thames. Even as you descend from the Highway into Wapping, you sense a change of atmosphere when you enter the former marshlands that remain susceptible to fog and mist on winter mornings. Yet the river does not declare itself at first, on account of the long wall of old warehouses that line the shore, blocking the view of the water from Wapping High St.
The feeling here is like being offstage in a great theatre and walking in the shadowy wing space while the bright lights and main events take place nearby. Fortunately, there are alleys leading between the tall warehouses which deliver you to the waterfront staircases where you may gaze upon the vast spectacle of the Thames, like an interloper in the backstage peeping round the scenery at the action. There is a compelling magnetism drawing you down these dark passages, without ever knowing precisely what you will find, since the water level rises and falls by seven metres every day – you may equally discover waves lapping at the foot of the stairs or you may descend onto an expansive beach.
These were once Watermen’s Stairs, where passengers might get picked up or dropped off, seeking transport across or along the Thames. Just as taxi drivers of contemporary London learn the Knowledge, Watermen once knew the all the names and order of the hundreds of stairs that lined the banks of the Thames, of which only a handful survive today.
Arriving in Wapping by crossing the bridge in Old Gravel Lane, I come first to the Prospect of Whitby where a narrow passage to the right leads to Pelican Stairs. Centuries ago, the Prospect was known as the Pelican, giving its name to the stairs which have retained their name irrespective of the changing identity of the pub. These worn stone steps connect to a slippery wooden stair leading to wide beach at low tide where you may enjoy impressive views towards the Isle of Dogs.
West of here is New Crane Stairs and then, at the side of Wapping Station, another passage leads you to Wapping Dock Stairs. Further down the High St, opposite the entrance to Brewhouse Lane, is a passageway leading to a fiercely-guarded pier, known as King Henry’s Stairs – though John Roque’s map of 1746 labels this as the notorious Execution Dock Stairs. Continue west and round the side of the river police station, you discover Wapping Police Stairs in a strategic state of disrepair and beyond, in the park, is Wapping New Stairs.
It is a curious pilgrimage, but when you visit each of these stairs you are visiting another time – when these were the main entry and exit points into Wapping. The highlight is undoubtedly Wapping Old Stairs with its magnificently weathered stone staircase abutting the Town of Ramsgate and offering magnificent views to Tower Bridge from the beach. If you are walking further towards the Tower, Aldermans’ Stairs is worth venturing at low tide when a fragment of ancient stone causeway is revealed, permitting passengers to embark and disembark from vessels without wading through Thames mud.
Pelican Stairs
Pelican Stairs at night
View into the Prospect of Whitby from Pelican Stairs
New Crane Stairs
Wapping Dock Stairs
Execution Dock Stairs, now known as King Henry’s Stairs
Entrance to Wapping Police Stairs
Wapping Police Stairs
Metropolitan Police Service Warning: These stairs are unsafe!
Wapping New Stairs with Rotherithe Church in the distance
Light in Wapping High St
Wapping Pier Head
Entrance to Wapping Old Stairs
Wapping Old Stairs
Passageway to Wapping Old Stairs at night
Aldermans’ Stairs, St Katharine’s Way
You may also like to read about
Madge Darby, Historian of Wapping
Small Trades Scraps
Walter typing edited script pages in St Petersburg on the set of ‘Orlando’
When these die-cut Victorian scraps of small trades are enlarged to several times their actual size, the detail and characterisation of these figures is revealed splendidly. Printed by rich-hued colour lithography, glossy and embossed, these appealing images celebrate the essential tradesmen and shopkeepers that were once commonplace but now are scarce.
In the course of my interviews, I have spoken with hundreds of shopkeepers and stallholders – and it is apparent that most only make just enough money to live, yet are primarily motivated by the satisfaction they get from their chosen trade and the appreciation of regular customers.
Here in the East End, these are the family businesses and independent traders who have created the identity of the place and carry the life of our streets. Consequently, I delight in these portraits of their predecessors, the tradesmen of the nineteenth century – rendered as giants by these monumental enlargements.
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
The Markets Of Old London
Help publication by preordering now and we will post you a copy signed by Tessa Hunkin at the end of September in advance of publication on October 2nd. Additionally, we are including a complimentary copy of A Hoxton Childhood (cover price £20) with all pre-orders in the United Kingdom. CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY
Clare Market c.1900
I never knew there was a picture of the legendary and long-vanished Clare Market – where Joseph Grimaldi was born – until I came upon this old glass slide among many thousands in the collection of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, housed at the Bishopsgate Institute. Scrutinising this picture, the market does not feel remote at all, as if I could take a stroll over there to Holborn in person as easily as I can browse the details of the photograph. Yet the Clare Market slum, as it became known, was swept away in 1905 to create the grand civic gestures of Kingsway and Aldwych.
Searching through this curious collection of glass slides, left-overs from the days of educational magic lantern shows – comprising many multiple shots of famous landmarks and grim old church interiors – I was able to piece together this set of evocative photographs portraying the markets of old London. Of those included here only Smithfield, London’s oldest wholesale market, continues trading from the same building, though Leather Lane, Hoxton Market and East St Market still operate as street markets, but Clare Market, Whitechapel Hay Market and the Caledonian Rd Market have gone forever. Meanwhile, Billingsgate, Covent Garden and Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market have moved to new premises, and Leadenhall retains just one butcher selling fowl, once the stock-in-trade of all the shops in this former cathedral of poultry.
Markets fascinate me as theatres of commercial and cultural endeavour in which a myriad strands of human activity meet. If you are seeking life, there is no better place to look than in a market. Wherever I travelled, I always visited the markets, the black-markets of Moscow in 1991, the junk markets of Beijing in 1999, the Chelsea Market in Manhattan, the central market in Havana, the street markets of Rio, the farmers’ markets of Transylvania and the flea market in Tblisi – where, memorably, I bought a sixteenth century silver Dutch sixpence and then absent-mindedly gave it away to a beggar by mistake ten minutes later. I often wonder if he cast the rare coin away in disgust or not.
Similarly in London, I cannot resist markets as places where society becomes public performance, each one with its own social code, language, and collective personality – depending upon the nature of the merchandise, the location, the time of day and the amount of money changing hands. Living in Spitalfields, the presence of the markets defines the quickening atmosphere through the week, from the Thursday antiques market to the Brick Lane traders, fly-pitchers and flower market in Bethnal Green every Sunday. I am always seduced by the sense of infinite possibility when I enter a market, which makes it a great delight to live surrounded by markets.
These old glass slides, many of a hundred years ago, capture the mass spectacle of purposeful activity that markets offer and the sense of self-respect of those – especially porters – for whom the market was their life, winning status within an elaborate hierarchy that had evolved over centuries. Nowadays, the term “marketplace” is sometimes reduced to mean mere economic transaction, but these photographs reveal that in London it has always meant so much more.
Billingsgate Market, c.1910
Billingsgate Market, c.1910
Whitechapel Hay Market c.1920 (looking towards Aldgate)
Whitechapel Hay Market, c.1920 (looking east towards Whitechapel)
Porters at Smithfield Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Book sale at Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Covent Garden Market, c.1920
Covent Garden Market, c.1910
Covent Garden, c.1910
Covent Garden Market, 1925
Covent Garden Market, Floral Hall, c.1910
Leadenhall Market, Christmas 1935
Leadenhall Market, c.1910
East St Market, c.1910
Leather Lane Market, 1936
Hoxton Market, Shoreditch, 1910
Spitalfields Market, c.1930
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to look at these old photographs of the Spitalfields Market by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies
Night at the Spitalfields Market
Other stories of Old London
So Long, Jil Cove
I have just learnt of the death of Spitalfields resident Jil Cove (1939 – 2025) back in July, aged eighty-six
Jil pensive
Jil humorous
Jil astute
Jil valiant
Jil triumphant
As Phil Maxwell’s exuberant portraits revealed, Jil Cove was one of the most quick-witted women you could hope to meet. She first came to Whitechapel in the nineteen fifties as a nurse at the Royal London Hospital, and then worked as a probation officer, putting East End villains on the straight and narrow for a quarter of a century, before becoming leader of the campaign to save the Spitalfields Market – when famously she had all the developers running around in circles for fifteen years. As a consequence of this and all her other work for the community over this time, Jil was universally respected in Spitalfields, even by those who would consider themselves her adversaries.
She lived in a small block of flats beside Petticoat Lane, where she was proud to count eight different nationalities amongst her neighbours in the building and where, as we sat in her cosy kitchen, she recalled a few impressions from the passing years.
“When I was eight years old, I said, “When I get married, I’m going to marry a black man and have a black baby.” My parents were generous to a fault but they had terrible views about black people. And I know my politics doesn’t come from them because they both voted for Margaret Thatcher. So I think it may be part of my rebellion. We lived across the road from a convent in Brighton and one day when I became a beatnik and wore no shoes, my dad said, “What will the nuns think? They’ll think we can’t afford shoes!” My mum thought I was going through a phase, but it was a sense of rebellion and a sense of justice too.
I trained as nurse in Brighton, and then applied to do midwifery at the Royal London Hospital. My mum came with me for the interview and there were drunks lying on the pavement all along Whitechapel, and she said, “You can’t come here!” but that was why I was attracted to it. I was working here in 1957, when the Windrush came over, and I worked alongside the first influx of black nurses, while my mum couldn’t believe black people were even allowed in the hospital.
After a couple of years, I was advised to give up nursing because I had a slipped disc, so I decided to try to become a probation officer and I got to know a psychiatric social worker at the Toynbee Hall in Commercial St where they had an outpost of Grendon Underwood prison – for inmates with personality disorders. At that time, the building where I live now was for ex-prisoners coming in and going off into the world, and she had a flat there but she needed a back-up to keep an eye on things, and I’ve been here ever since.
One of the things I do remember is walking down Brick Lane and, if you were on your own, Bengali guys would come up and ask “Do you want to come with me?” They were here without their families in those days. But I discovered if you carried a briefcase, it was, “Good Evening, Miss Cove! Nice to see you.”
In all the twenty-five years I worked in probation, I only took three people back to court for non-co-operation. You saw them for half an hour a week and you were supposed to influence them. My policy was radical non-intervention – I didn’t interfere with them and they didn’t interfere with me, but I was always there if they needed help. I think one of the things that me and my friends who worked together in the service for all those years valued was that we were left alone, but we had a small budget to do things – even as simple as getting a cat speyed.
One poor man, he was convinced the neighbours were sending sinister rays through the walls and ceiling, so we bought baking foil and helped him line the flat with it and it worked, it calmed him down. I remember one family in particular, the dad was a forger, the boys committed offences and the daughters would get pregnant, but somehow the mother held it all together – the kids were immaculately turned out and I always wondered how she did it. Another of the guys I worked with had done a lot of really nasty offences, a real tough nut. He was doing his A levels in prison and I visited him, and he said he’d just read the Diary of Anne Frank and it made him cry. It was November, and I said I wouldn’t retire until he got parole, and he got out next June. He’d never been to the theatre before so I took him to see Julius Caesar – you saw how you could change someone’s life and that’s what made it worthwhile. It was a nice job and I wouldn’t have left, but there was change towards a more punitive approach. In those days you could actually do social work. At my leaving party at The Water Poet, I got so drunk I was drinking pints of vodka and gin, and then they took me home and I drank half a bottle of rum.
On my sixtieth birthday, I had my first tattoo and I paid for it with my first pension money. He said, “You’re my first pensioner, and I’ve never done a daffodil before!” I went home and told my mum. I said, “I’ve had a tattoo,” and she said, “That’s disgusting!” So I thought, “If I can still disgust my mum at sixty, I must be OK.”
Jill told me she has not been to the Spitalfields Market for years, even though it was only quarter of a mile from her home. “The building we got was marginally better than the building they wanted to put there,” she confided, summing up the outcome of her campaign, “But when you’re up against the City and the local authority, you don’t stand much of a chance. At the end of the day, there was money.” Yet over time, Jil was been proved right in her case against the development, because in the rebuilding of the market, it was taken away from the residents and is no longer the community focus it once was. For many years, Jil’s influence has prevailed in Spitalfields and she will be remembered as a woman of great spirit and humour, a passionate unvanquished fighter.
Jil at an event in Victoria Park in the nineteen seventies.
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
Walter Donohue, Director, Editor, Producer & Publisher
It is my pleasure to introduce you to Walter Donohue who is teaching our Screenwriting Course on 8th & 9th November at Townhouse, Spitalfields. We have a few places available. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION
Walter Donohue typing out edited script pages on set for ‘Orlando’ in St Petersburg, 1992
Introduction by filmmaker Joel Coen –
‘Not only is Walter a steady friend and a discerning intellect, he has also carved out a space in the movie business that no one else really occupies. In the theatre you would call it a ‘dramaturg’—a creative advisor to the director, both from a literary and a production point of view. This position doesn’t exist in the movie business. At least not officially. I can’t say that there aren’t legions of people who are eager to analyse and offer an opinion, but I will say that there are precious few that are so consistently right. You might call Walter a ‘movie whisperer’.’
Here is Walter Donohue’s own account of his extraordinary transatlantic journey to London where he has worked in theatre and film as a director, producer, editor and publisher for half a century –
‘In May 1967, I was on the verge of graduating from the theatre department of the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. and start a job as an assistant director at Arena Stage when the Vietnam War suddenly escalated and all us guys were immediately eligible to be drafted. What the hell was I going to do? The only way out was to stay in school. I applied for a Fulbright scholarship to go to Bristol University and study theatre but I did not get the award and I was facing the prospect of being sent to Vietnam, so I contacted Bristol directly and ended up going anyway. Five of my fellow students were drafted and two died in Vietnam, so it really was a matter of life or death.
When I finished my degree, I hoped I would be able to jump into regular employment as a theatre director but that turned out to be difficult because directors had to be members of the union, which was reluctant to let in an American. I figured I had no alternative except to return to America but then, out of the blue, I heard that that Charles Marowitz needed an assistant at the Open Space Theatre in London. Some British people had tried the job and could not get on with him, so they thought that perhaps an American might stand a better chance.
For Charles, actors were just objects to push around on the stage. He did not seem to give much thought to the inner lives of the characters. In 1972, I was assistant director on a production of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, and when Charles left town to do his version of Hamlet in Denmark, I took over and worked with the actors.
I asked Sam, who was living in London, to come in and watch a run-through, which he absolutely hated. He felt that the actors were moving around in a way that had nothing to do with the dramatic situation they were meant to be playing. ‘But that’s how Charles directed it,’ I said. ‘OK,’ said Sam, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m going home.’
Obviously, the production should somehow embody his intentions as a playwright, so I sat him down, asked what was wrong and we set about re-blocking the entire play. The actors clearly felt a sense of relief. We were all so pleased with ourselves, but when Charles got back into town and watched what we had done, he threw out all our work.
While Sam was still living in London, I set up a production of Cowboy Mouth, which Sam had co-written with Patti Smith. It was in a small, basement theatre, just Sam, me, and the two actors. No sense of hierarchy, no egos—just commitment to the vision of the writer.
I spent ten years as a theatre director focussing entirely on new writing. I had not realised at the time that the interactions I had with playwrights gave me the skills that came to fruition when I was asked to work at Channel 4. David Rose who had been head of drama at BBC Birmingham offered me a job as his assistant.
This was before Channel 4 began broadcasting. David and I imagined that as soon as we opened the door to our office, scripts would come pouring in, but that did not happen. People just did not know about it, so we scrambled to start commissioning scripts. I thought we should commission novelists. The first I approached was Neil Jordan, he had a script to hand—what became Angel. We also commissioned Angela Carter to write the screenplay of her version of Red Riding Hood, The Company of Wolves, which ended up becoming Neil’s next film after Angel.
Eventually people started sending their scripts to us. If I liked them, I would forward them to David, and if he liked them, they would come back to me because they always needed work. I became involved in the production of various films from their inception, which included going with David to the sets and watching these films being made, then looking at the various cuts with David when the films were in postproduction.
I encouraged David to support Paris, Texas, partly because Sam Shepard was the writer. Paris, Texas winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes really put Channel 4 on the map. I was sort of the script editor. Wim and Sam began with a stack of paper with the basic scene descriptions on them: Scene 1: Travis walking through the desert. Scene 2: Travis walks into a bar. That’s all they wrote, all the way to the end. Once they had done that, they went back and filled out each scene. Scene 1: Travis walking through the desert. Stops. Drinks from a carton. Throws it away. Walks off. Scene 2: Travis goes into a bar to find something to drink. He eats some ice and faints. That kind of thing. Wim and Sam felt that the best way to conceive the film on paper was to represent the story in terms of what was seen, not what was heard. Because Channel 4 was the main financier, I spent a week with Wim in Los Angeles because Sam, at that stage, was beginning to send the dialogue. Then I visited Berlin when Wim was in postproduction.
When we were looking for novelists to commission, I came across a thriller called In the Secret State by Robert McCrum. I thought he was the new Le Carré, so I went to meet him. It turned out he was working at Faber as its editorial director and he introduced me to the chief executive, Matthew Evans, who immediately said I should come work at Faber. I said I was not interested in publishing, I wanted to work in movies so he said, ‘Listen, British films only shoot at certain times of the year because of the weather. I will give you a desk and typewriter and a telephone, and can you start building Faber’s film list. When you are not here, when you’re working on a film, someone else from the company will look after things.’
In the beginning, most of the film books never made money. But then, in 1994, we published the screenplay of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and it sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Tarantino had never gone to film school, so every eighteen-year-old thought they could be a filmmaker if they watched enough videos. But what gave Tarantino’s films their impact was their original structure and the music of the dialogue—which meant that neophyte filmmakers needed to read screenplays. They became teaching tools, of a kind, and in the wake of Pulp Fiction there was a huge spike in the sale of screenplays, as well as our interview books with filmmakers.
If I look back, the thing that is consistent, whether I was working in the theatre or at Channel 4 or at Faber, it is all more or less the same thing – dealing with writers, helping them get their work out there. I certainly enjoy the process. When a writer sends me their scripts, my response is based entirely on instinct, honed over the years. And I never made statements, I never imposed anything. I only ever asked the writers questions, to see if I could draw out from them anything that would clarify their intentions. Given the diversity of the filmmakers who approached Channel 4 for money, the best approach was just to respond to the originality of the writers.’
Invitation To The Launch Of Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project Book
You are invited to join us at the private launch party for Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project on Saturday 27th September from 2-5pm at the mosaic workshop in the Pavilion on Hackney Downs, Downs Park Rd, Lower Clapton, London, E5 8NP.
There will exhibitions of the sample pieces for each of the project’s mosaic works over the past thirteen years and of mosaics by members of the project. You will be able to visit the workshop, meet the makers and see how mosaics are made, and view the mosaics in the park, the Hounds of Hackney Downs and the magnificent Playground Shelter.
Tessa Hunkin will be signing copies.
Complimentary soft drinks will be supplied by our good friends at Company Drinks in Poplar.
Please register in advance if you wish to attend by emailing spitalfieldslife@gmail.com as numbers are strictly limited at the Pavilion.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF TESSA HUNKIN’S HACKNEY MOSAIC PROJECT
We are including a complimentary copy of ‘A Hoxton Childhood’ with all pre-orders to United Kingdom addresses.
