The Language Of Tailors
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Mohammed Abdul Mannan at Needlepoint in Barnet Grove by Sarah Ainslie
BABY – The stuffed pad of cloth that the tailor works his cloth on.
BALLOON, TO HAVE A – To have no money coming in at the end of the week.
BANGER – A piece of wood with a handle used to draw steam out of the material during ironing.
BOARD – Tailor’s work bench.
BOOT? , CAN YOU SPARE THE – Can you give ma loan? Dating from the time that all tailors used to sit cross-legged at the bench. The tailor would record a loan by chalking it up on the sole of his boot.
BUNCE – A perk of the trade. Mungo is one type of tailor’s bunce.
CODGER – A tailor who does up old suits.
CRIB – Larger scraps of cloth, saved from a length of cloth alloted for a job. The crib can be used to make a skirt or a pair of trousers. Another example of a tailor’s bunce.
DEAD – A job is dead when it’s been paid for already. So there is no more money coming in from it and it is as well to get it off your hands quickly.
DOCTOR – An alteration tailor – a separate trade in most houses.
DOLLY – A roll of material, wetted, and used as a sponge to dampen the cloth.
DRAG, IN THE– Late with a job of work.
DRUMMERS – Trouser makers. A term of contempt used by jacket makers to describe trouser makers because there is said to be less skill in making a pair of trousers. Trouser makers are also given the more contemptuous name of FOUR SEAMS & A RUB OF SOAP.
DUCK SHOVING – An East End expression, meaning making the stitches too big. The West End equivalent is SKIPPING IT.
GOOSE IRON – Hand iron, which used to be heated upon a gas flame.
INCH STICK – Wooden ruler.
KICKING – Looking for another job. If dissatisfied, a tailor might go out looking for another job during the lunch break.
A KILL – A job that is no good at all and cannot be resold. eg If burnt with an iron.
KIPPER – Female tailor’s assistant, called kippers because they always worked in pairs. This was for their own safety – a kind of chaperone system – so that one could protect the other if the tailor made advances.
MANGLE – Sewing machine. Old machine that worked on a treadle looked like mangles.
MUNGO – Cloth cuttings. These belong to the tailor and he can make a few pennies by selling them to a rag merchant.
ON THE COD – Gone for a drink.
ON THE LOG – Piecework. As in most trades, tailors are paid according to the amount of work they turn out. The work is logged up against the tailor’s name in the book.
A PORK – A job that customer rejects but which can be sold to someone else.
PT, RUBBING IN A – Fitting in a private job eg making yourself a pair of trousers during the lunch break. This practice os allowed in most work rooms provided th tailors are discreet about it, and do it in their own time.
SCHMUTTER, BIT OF OLD – Jewish expression for a piece of poor cloth.
SHEARS – Tailor’s scissors.
SKIFFLE – A fast job that a customer wants in a hurry.
SMALL SEAMS – A warning expression to a fellow tailor that the person you are talking about is coming into the room.
SOFT SEW – A cloth that is easy to work with eg tweed.
TWEED MERCHANT – A tailor who does the easy work. A term of contempt for a poor workman, because tweed being soft and rough is easier to work with than other cloths.
UMSIES – A name to describe someone who is in the room whom you are talking about but you do not want them to know it. Even if they hear, there is an element of doubt who you are referring to.
Chris Georgiou, Tailor, Gray’s Inn Rd, by Colin O’Brien
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie & Estate of Colin O’Brien
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The Gentle Author’s Tour Of The City Of London
Last winter, I created THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR OF THE CITY OF LONDON in collaboration with Barbican Arts Centre. Join me for this walk on Easter Monday April 10th at 2pm, meeting on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and walking eastward through the square mile.
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Often when I set out for a walk from Spitalfields, my footsteps lead me to the crossroads outside the Bank of England , at the place where Richard Jefferies – a writer whose work has been an enduring inspiration – once stood. Like me, Jefferies also came to the city from the countryside and his response to London was one of awe and fascination.
Whenever I feel lost in the metropolis, Richard Jefferies’ writing is always a consolation, granting a liberating perspective upon the all-compassing turmoil of urban life and, in spite of the changes in the city, his observations resonate as powerfully today as they did when he wrote them. This excerpt from The Story of My Heart (1883), the autobiography of his inner life, describes the sight that met Richard Jefferies’ eyes when he stood upon that spot at the crossroads in the City of London.
“There is a place in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory. It is in the shape of a triangle with a rounded apex. A stream of traffic runs on either side, and other streets send their currents down into the open space before it. Like the spokes of a wheel converging streams of human life flow into this agitated pool. Horses and carriages, carts, vans, omnibuses, cabs, every kind of conveyance cross each other’s course in every possible direction.
Twisting in and out by the wheels and under the horses’ heads, working a devious way, men and women of all conditions wind a path over. They fill the interstices between the carriages and blacken the surface, till the vans almost float on human beings. Now the streams slacken, and now they rush again, but never cease, dark waves are always rolling down the incline opposite, waves swell out from the side rivers, all London converges into this focus. There is an indistinguishable noise, it is not clatter, hum, or roar, it is not resolvable, made up of a thousand thousand footsteps, from a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels, of haste, and shuffle, and quick movements, and ponderous loads, no attention can resolve it into a fixed sound.
Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty-red iron clunking on pointless carts, high white wool-packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams, sunlight sparkling on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels, jingle, jingle, jingle! An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of colour, flecks of colour champed, as it were, like bits in the horses’ teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people winding like the curves on fast-flowing water. This is the vortex and whirlpool, the centre of human life today on the earth. Now the tide rises and now it sinks, but the flow of these rivers always continues. Here it seethes and whirls, not for an hour only, but for all present time, hour by hour, day by day, year by year.
All these men and women that pass through are driven on by the push of accumulated circumstances, they cannot stay, they must go, their necks are in the slave’s ring, they are beaten like seaweed against the solid walls of fact. In ancient times, Xerxes, the king of kings, looking down upon his myriads, wept to think that in a hundred years not one of them would be left. Where will be these millions of today in a hundred years? But, further than that, let us ask – Where then will be the sum and outcome of their labour? If they wither away like summer grass, will not at least a result be left which those of a hundred years hence may be the better for? No, not one jot! There will not be any sum or outcome or result of this ceaseless labour and movement, it vanishes in the moment that it is done, and in a hundred years nothing will be there, for nothing is there now. There will be no more sum or result than accumulates from the motion of a revolving cowl on a housetop.
I used to come and stand near the apex of the promontory of pavement which juts out towards the pool of life, I still go there to ponder. London convinced me of my own thought. That thought has always been with me, and always grows wider.”
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)
Archive photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Spitalfields In Kodachrome
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Photographer Philip Marriage took these pictures on 11th July 1984
Crispin St
Widegate St
White’s Row
Artillery Passage
Brushfield St
Artillery Passage
Brushfield St
Fashion St
Widegate St
Artillery Passage
Gun St
Brushfield St
Gun St
Brushfield St
Parliament Court
Leyden St
Fort St
Commercial St
Brushfield St
Photographs copyright © Philip Marriage
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Some People From Spitalfields History
Here are some people from history who you may meet on my walk, as illustrated by Adam Dant upon the border of the map of The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields
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Click here to buy a pocket-sized fold-out copy of the map for £5
Adam Dant’s fine art prints are available from TAG
A Door In Cornhill
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The Bronte sisters visit their publisher in Cornhill, 1848
An ancient thoroughfare with a mythic past, Cornhill takes its name from one of the three former hills of the City of London – an incline barely perceptible today after centuries of human activity upon this site, building and razing, rearranging the land. This is a place does not declare its multilayered history – even though the Roman forum was here and the earliest site of Christian worship in England was here too, dating from 179 AD, and also the first coffee house was opened here by Pasqua Rosee in 1652, the Turk who introduced coffee to London. Yet a pair of carved mahogany doors, designed by the sculptor Walter Gilbert in 1939 at 32 Cornhill – opposite the old pump – bring episodes from this rich past alive in eight graceful tableaux.
Walter Gilbert (1871-1946) was a designer and craftsman who developed his visual style in the Arts & Crafts movement at the end of the nineteenth century and then applied it to a wide range of architectural commissions in the twentieth century, including the gates of Buckingham Palace, sculpture for the facade of Selfridges and some distinctive war memorials. In this instance, he modelled the reliefs in clay which were then translated into wood carvings by B.P Arnold at H. H. Martyn & Co Ltd of Cheltenham.
Gilbert’s elegant reliefs appeal to me for the laconic humour that observes the cool autocracy of King Lucius and the sullen obedience of his architects, and for the sense of human detail that emphasises W. M. Thackeray’s curls at his collar in the meeting with Anne and Charlotte Bronte at the offices of their publisher Smith, Elder & Co. In each instance, history is given depth by an awareness of social politics and the selection of telling detail. These eight panels take us on a journey from the early medieval world of omnipotent monarchy and religious penance through the days of exploitative clergy exerting controls on the people, to the rise of the tradesman and merchants who created the City we know today.
“St Peter’s Cornhill founded by King Lucius 179 AD to be an Archbishop’s see and chief church of his kingdom and so it endured for the space of four hundred years until the coming of Augustine the monk of Canterbury.”
“Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, did penance walking barefoot to St Michael’s Church from Queen Hithe, 1441.”
“Cornhill was an ancient soke of the Bishop of London who had the Seigneurial oven in which all tenants were obliged to bake their bread and pay furnage or baking dues.”
“Cornhill is the only market allowed to be held afternoon in the fourteenth century.”
“Birchin Lane, Cornhill, place of considerable trade for men’s apparel, 1604.”
“Garraway’s Coffee House, a place of great commercial transaction and frequented by people of quality.”
“Pope’s Head Tavern in existence in 1750 belonging to Merchant Taylor’s Company, the Vinters were prominent in the life of Cornhill Ward.”
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Lament For The Bell Foundry
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What a pitiful sight this is. Six years after it shut, graffiti is piling up on the wood-grained fascia of the world-famous Whitechapel Bell Foundry, revealing nothing at all is being done to care for it.
The scheme to redevelop the grade ll listed building into a boutique hotel has been abandoned and now it sits rotting and neglected. When it closed, despite an offer to acquire the foundry and reopen it making bells, Historic England instead misguidedly advocated the boutique hotel as offering the most sustainable future for the historic foundry.
Since the hoteliers have given up, they have put it up for sale. But there are no takers willing to fulfil the obligation imposed by the Secretary of State at the Public Inquiry that any future occupant continue foundry activity, which – you may recall – the developers promised to do by casting bells in a toy foundry in their cappuccino bar.
Yet when The London Bell Foundry, which was set up by those who have been campaigning to save the building as a fully-working foundry, made an offer at market value to acquire it last year, they were only met with indifference from the estate agents.
Has everyone forgotten that this is an international treasure of the greatest importance and a major asset for the Borough of Tower Hamlets and for London? It is evident from the state of disrepair that the developers care nothing for the bell foundry, yet a solution – in the form of The London Bell Foundry – sits waiting.
If you care about the future of the foundry, please write to Duncan Wilson, Director of Historic England, and Lutfur Rahman, Mayor of Tower Hamlets, asking them to intervene to save it.
Here are their emails: londonseast@historicengland.org.uk and mayor@towerhamlets.gov.uk
Copy in contact@thelondonbellfoundry.co.uk
Graffiti is piling up on the grade II listed Whitechapel Bell Foundry
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Phil Mills, Steeplekeeper
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‘I was always very interested in church bells’
Walking around the City of London and admiring all the church steeples piercing the sky, you might imagine that they just stood there of their own accord. In fact, they need constant attention if they are to continue in use and it is the job of the steeplekeeper to care for them.
Recently I enjoyed the privilege of visiting the bell ringers in Christopher Wren’s handsome tower of St Vedast’s in Foster Lane next to St Paul’s Cathedral, where I had the pleasure of meeting steeplekeeper Phil Mills. Intrigued to learn more, Phil agreed to arrive early to meet me the following Monday at the church before bell-ringing practice and talk to me about his job.
It was fascinating to hear Phil speak with such passion and commitment about his chosen role, revealing a rare glimpse of the elaborate hidden world of bell maintenance and steeplekeeping.
“I became a bell ringer at Dorchester Abbey after we moved from Southampton to Oxfordshire in 1986 when I was twenty-two and I stayed a ringer at the Abbey for over thirty years. It took me a year to learn but – once I got the rope handling – I became a member of the Oxford & Diocese Guild of Church Bell Ringers and earned my certificate. Things hastened from there, I became a steeplekeeper in 1987 at twenty-five and I have been with it ever since.
Brian White of Whites, Bellhangers of Appleton Ltd, he thought I might make a good steeplekeeper after I got involved with the restoration of the bells at Dorchester Abbey. So I was appointed steeplekeeper with Alf Cooper as my deputy and – between the two of us – we looked after the bells, keeping them in good working order, and looking after the clock, the clock room, the ringing room and the bell chamber, and maintaining everything.
Brian White sent me on a tower maintenance course, I did a beginners’ one and then I went on to the more advanced one – and I just headed on from there! I was always very interested in church bells and I used to listen to them a lot in Southampton, especially when I went to family weddings. I was captivated by the sound and I already knew something about the different methods of ringing.
Being a steeplekeeper consists of looking after the tower and the bells, and maintaining the interior. Belfry maintenance includes greasing ball bearings and roller pulleys, checking the ropes, greasing the clappers, checking the stays, checking the slider and runner boards, checking the lighting, testing the emergency lighting, checking the tower roof drainage system and checking for ingress of water. The bell ropes also need looking after and many church towers have clock hammers that need to be looked after too.
Some towers do not have steeplekeepers, they can go for years and years without having any work done to them, then all of a sudden they go out of action. That is why you need a steeplekeeper. It is a labouring job but as long as we have got facemasks, proper overalls, hard hats and safety precautions, then we are ok. I can do the maintaining of the bells myself and undertake a full maintenance check, although in the case of replacing pulley wheels or clappers, I need to call in a contractor. Sometimes a tower can be a dangerous environment and this is why we have Health & Safety Issues. They only came out a few years ago but now we have to keep ourselves safe from dangerous activities like trying to put a new clapper in and it ending up landing on top of you. These are the things we have to look out for.
There was a steeplekeeper at Wallingford for quite a good number of years named Jim. Although he had been ringing for sixty-nine years, knew every single method in the book and how to compose and conduct, he also knew the ways of maintenance. He made a rope warmer by using a piece of drainage pipe, a wooden box, a light bulb and a flex. He wired it all up and put the ropes in there and it warmed them. It even had a timer so it came on before we were going to ring and all the ropes were nice and warm, ready for us. Jim died at seventy-nine and I took over from him. Steeplekeepers do not retire but he had already appointed me to take over, so I continue where he left off.
Back in 2006, I decided I was going to get myself a two-hundredth-visited tower because I had visited one hundred and ninety-nine. So I thought, ‘I wonder where I can get my two-hundredth?’ I decided to go to London and I had already seen the ringers at St Vedast’s because they are visible from Foster Lane through the windows of the ringing chamber and I thought, ‘They look a bit friendly.’ I was only down for a promenade concert but I saw them on a Friday doing their lunchtime quarter peals and I thought, ‘Oh this is fantastic, I’ll go along and see what it’s like.’ So I did that on 17th August 2009, I have still got the rail ticket from when I first came here. My instincts were happily right and after a couple of years Tom Lawrence, the ringing master, made me a member of the ringers at St Vedast’s.
I visit every Monday from Wallingford for bell-ringing practice. I always check the bells before we do the ringing. I have many favourite towers but St Vedast’s is definitely near the top of my list because it has such a wonderful ring of bells. I love the sound of them as it comes down through the ringing room. It is quite masterful. You hear this lovely sound coming down towards you and this is my favourite ring of six bells. My favourite ring of eight has got to be St Botloph’s Bishopsgate because the tower is on the move, so it wobbles about a lot as the bells are changing. It is seventeen hundred-weight ring of eight bells. The tower moves and it has a lot of character and that is why I enjoy ringing there, that is another favourite.
We only get paid for ringing when we do weddings but I am semi-retired and I live on my own in Wallingford. I usually get home about twelve or one o’clock on Monday night. I have been ringing for thirty-nine years now and I have visited two-hundred-and-fifty-seven towers. I can barely keep track of all these towers! I have definitely clocked up a lot and I am still visiting new ones. The immense pleasure I get out of it is putting something back into a community – that is why I like to keep the bells going through my work as a steeplekeeper.
There is a lot of atmosphere in towers. I could feel it when I was listening to LP I have of the ‘Bells Of London.’ I was listening to it on a Saturday afternoon, this was back in the days when I was still only a learner, and I thought, ‘There’s something strange, I’m beginning to get an atmosphere from this.’ That same atmosphere came back to me when I first rang for a wedding at St Vedast’s and I realised my instincts had been right because that is very, very strange. Ringing in London has definitely got a lot of atmosphere.”
Eighteenth century graffitti in the ringers’ chamber
St Paul’s seen from St Vedast’s
St Vedast’s, Foster Lane
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