Dilruba Khanam, Photographer
This photograph by Dilruba Khanam of a Bengali bride in East London fascinates me with its unlikely combination of lyrical and urban realist elements. The bride in her luxuriant wedding clothes sitting beneath a tree might be an image from a classical miniature painting, if it were not for the satellite dish and the car – which place the picture precisely in the here and now. And when Dilruba told me her principal subjects were fashion and politics, it confirmed the source of the dynamic tension that enlivens this extraordinary image. Yet when Dilruba told me her story, I realised that as much as it reflects aesthetic choices, her remarkable sensibility is the outcome of her own struggle to wrestle freedom from the tyranny of circumstance.
Growing up in a high-ranking Muslim family in Bangladesh, Dilruba acquired a vivid knowledge of politics through personal experience. “The head of my family had supreme authority, and women were not even allowed to go out.” she admitted to me when I visited her in Mile End,”There was a separate conference room for the men where the newspapers were kept and females were not allowed to enter, but I would secretly go there and read them. I was the first female to break the rules, because I could not tolerate any injustice to women and I wanted to fight against it. As a young girl, I knew many politicians closely and I had seen their dirty politics and corruption, and I did not like it.”
At sixteen years old, Dilruba left home and went to live in the YWCA. “It was difficult for me to survive without family support,” she revealed in unsentimental reminiscence, “I was desperate to find a job, and I went from office to office asking. At that time, I had long hair and I was good looking, and I saw their dirty thinking about me, so I realised I had to protect myself. I cut my hair short and me and my best friend Javine – who was the first professional female magician in Bangladesh – we got training in judo, karate and shooting guns.”
At first, Dilruba pursued athletics but it was photography that became her career. Once she had some training, Dilruba won freelance commissions from newspapers in Dhaka and became Bangladesh’s first professional female photographer, covering politics and fashion. One day, when Audrey Hepburn came to Bangladesh, Dilruba went along to take photographs of a star who herself once portrayed a certain youthful independence. But events took an ironic twist when the other photojournalists, who were all male, took pictures of Dilruba with her short hair and Western casual clothes, making her first prominent public appearance as a professional photographer – which ended upon the front pages of the national newspapers next day instead of Audrey Hepburn. An unexpected turn of events, but one – I like to think – that Audrey would have savoured with amusement.
Thus, Dilruba came to the attention of Rowshan Ershad, First Lady of Bangladesh and wife of President Ershad, who extended her personal support, appointing Dilruba as her official photographer upon all engagements for the next two years. And, almost like fairy tale, a whole new world of success opened up in which Dilruba was invited to Bollywood to photograph the stars, becoming accepted into the world of celebrities, singers, dancers, actors and models who took her as an equal and in many cases as a friend. Yet Dilruba could never forget the wider political picture, and when students at Dhaka University protesting against the ruling party were beaten up, she found that as a woman photographer she alone was able to get into the hospital to photograph their injuries.
Through her own courage and talent, Dilruba had achieved what no woman had done before in Bangladesh, forging a career as a photographer, but she realised that she could never be at peace there. Using the mobility that her professional status gave her she came to London. “First of all, I came to see the difference, and I found this is the place I want to live – because this is a free country.” she explained with a smile of quiet relief, ” I brought my camera with me and I started working with a Bengali newspaper here. Then I published my own glossy magazine ‘Elegant,’ and I stated my own modelling agency with a mixture of Asian and European models.”
“My family apologised to me,” she confided frankly, “when they realised I had done well and the newspapers wrote good things about me, but it was too late. I went through a lot of pain and hardship, and when I needed them most, I was all alone. So I can’t forgive and forget.”
Dilruba Khanam is happy to live a relatively low-profile life in the East End, concentrating on the subjects of her photography rather than becoming a subject herself – but there is an intensity in her portraits of women, a detachment in her pictures of politicians, and a frequent use of passionate flaming reds, that – in different ways – all speak of the challenges she overcame on her journey to get here.
Dilruba as a teenage rebel in a Bangladeshi policeman’s hat
Azra Javine, the first female magician in Bangladesh with Dilruba the first female photographer in Bangladesh, 1987
Dilruba with her patron Rowshan Ershad, First Lady of Bangladesh
President Ershad of Bangladesh
Dilruba with Audrey Hepburn in Bangladesh, 1989
A famous dancer from Bangladesh
Lata, TV Star
Nasrin Hussain Hema, choreographer
Shabnoor, Film Star
Chatna, Model
Celebrating Boishakhi, 2000
A student of Dhaka University beaten with chains by the Jatiotabadi Chattra Dal (the student front of the Bangladeshi National Party), 1988
Yet another bruised girl of Dhaka University, 1988
John Major in Brick Lane, 1995
George Galloway in Whitechapel, 2009
Dilruba Khanam
Photographs copyright © Dilruba Khanam
East End Toy Manufacturers of 1917
Seeking lost East End toy manufacturers by studying copies of GAMES & TOYS, a trade publication from 1917, in the Young V & A Archive in Bethnal Green, I was struck by the irony of the tragic contrasts in this magazine – where celebratory warlike advertisements selling toy guns and tanks to boys sit alongside features promoting ‘patriotic’ companies employing wounded soldiers in toy manufacture.
Images courtesy Young V & A Archive
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An Astonishing Photographic Discovery
Back in 2014, Spitalfields Life Books published Horace Warner’s SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS. Now there are only a few copies left and I am giving my final lecture on this subject at 6pm next Tuesday 7th February at the beautiful Hanbury Hall in Spitalfields, explaining how we discovered the photographs, who Horace Warner was and why he took his pictures, and revealing what we discovered about the lives of the Nippers.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK A TICKET FOR THE LECTURE FOR £6
These breathtaking photographs were taken by Horace Warner in Spitalfields at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before I published them on Spitalfields Life, they had hardly been seen by anyone outside his immediate family. We were granted permission personally by Horace Warner’s grandson, Ian McGilvray.
Previously, only a handful of Warner’s sympathetic portraits of the children who lived in the courtyards off Quaker St – known as the Spitalfields Nippers – were believed to exist, but through some assiduous detective work by researcher Vicky Stewart and a stroke of good luck upon my part, we were able to make contact with his grandson who keeps two albums comprising more than one hundred of his grandfather’s pictures of Spitalfields, from which the photographs published here are selected.
Many of the pictures in these albums are photographic masterpieces and, after I published the book, David Bailey contacted me to say he believed they are the most significant set of portraits ever taken in the East End.
There is a rare clarity of vision in the tender photography of Horace Warner that brings us startling close to the Londoners of 1900 and permits us to look them in the eye for the first time. You can imagine my excitement when I met Ian McGilvray and opened Horace Warner’s albums to discover so many astonishing pictures. I experienced a sensation almost of vertigo, like looking down the dark well of time and being surprised by these faces in sharp focus, looking back at me.
It was no straightforward journey to get there. I first published a series of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers in these pages in 2011, reproduced from a booklet accompanying a 1975 exhibition of the handful of pictures once published in fund-raising leaflets by the Bedford Institute in 1912. When I sought to reproduce these pictures in The Gentle Author’s London Album, Vicky Stewart established that the photographic prints were held in the Quaker archive at Friends House in the Euston Rd.
This discovery which permitted me to include those pictures in my Album was reward enough for our labours. The story might easily have ended there, if we had not been shown a 1988 letter from Horace Warner’s daughter Gwen McGilvray that accompanied the prints. In this letter, Gwen mentions the ‘albums’ – this was the first tantalising evidence of the existence of more of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields photographs.
Even as our hopes of finding these other pictures were raised, we were disappointed to realise that Gwen was unlikely to be still alive. Yet through online research and thanks to his unusual surname, Vicky was able to find an address for one of Gwen’s four children, her son Ian, in Norfolk. It was a few years out of date but there was a chance he was still there, so we sent off a copy of The Gentle Author’s London Album to Ian McGilvray.
Within weeks, Ian wrote back to ask if I would like to visit him and see the ‘albums.’ It was my good fortune that the one of Horace Warner’s grandchildren we had been able to reach was also the guardian of the photographic legacy. And so it was that on a bright winter’s day I made a journey to Norfolk to meet Ian and see the complete set of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers for the first time. My fear was that I had seen the most important images among those already known, but my shock was to recognise that the best pictures have not yet been seen.
These wonderful photographs revolutionise how we think about East Enders at the end of the nineteenth century since, in spite of their poverty, these are undeniably proud people who claim a right to existence which transcends their economic status. Unlike the degraded photographic images created by charitable campaigners or the familiar middle-class studio portraits, Horace Warner’s relaxed intimate pictures draw us into a personal relationship with his subjects whom we meet as our equals. The Spitalfields Nippers are a unique set of photographs, that witness a particular time, a specific place, a discrete society, and an entire lost world.
As a designer managing the family wallpaper-printing business, Horace Warner had the income and resources to explore photography in his spare time and produce images of the highest standard technically. As superintendent of the charitable Bedford Institute, he was brought into close contact over many years with the families who lived nearby in the yards and courts south of Quaker St. As a Quaker, he believed in the equality of all and he was disturbed by the poverty he witnessed in the East End. In the Spitalfields Nippers these things came together for Horace Warner, creating compassionate images that gave dignity to his subjects and producing great photography that is without parallel in his time.
Excerpt of 1988 letter from Horace Warner’s daughter Gwen McGilvray referring to the ‘albums’ and giving the name of his grandson, Ian McGilvray. (Reproduced courtesy of Friends House)
Sisters Wakefield
Walter Seabrook
Celia Compton
Photo referred to by Gwen McGilvray with headlines at the end of the Boer War, dating it to 1902
At the Whitechapel Gallery to see the Burne Jones exhibition 1901
In Pearl St (now Calvin St)
See the man looking over the wall in Union Place
Towering Folly At Liverpool St Station
‘Where is the top part?’ I asked, when shown the lower portion of a model at the public consultation for the proposed redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station by Network Rail, Sellar & MTR . ‘We don’t have it,’ replied the developers’ representative. ‘So how can I judge the impact?’ I queried, growing suspicious and feeling I was being taken for a fool.
Then I was helpfully directed to a larger, much-smaller-scale, model of the surrounding urban landscape that included a great part of the City of London and in which I had to search to find the Liverpool Street proposal amid the forest of towers. The outcome was that while I could see this would be one more tower among many, the immediate impact upon the station and the former Great Eastern Hotel (designed by Charles Barry Junior and his son and partner Charles Edward Barry, 1883–84) was less discernible.
Yet I was swiftly disenchanted of my innocence when I saw the rendering of the view down Liverpool Street with an overwhelming tower of 11 storeys squatting on top of the fine Victorian hotel like a monstrous succubus in a nightmare. My feelings of nausea were compounded on learning that this would be supported by pilings through the grade II* listed hotel which would be converted to offices and replaced by a new five-star hotel in the block on top, boasting the advantage of City views.
London’s great railway stations – 19th-century cathedrals of glass and steel refracting the ever-changing changing patterns of light from our northern skies – are one of the architectural marvels of Europe. St Pancras, Paddington, Waterloo, King’s Cross and Liverpool Street are universally loved for their inspirational vaulted glass roofs. Euston, Charing Cross and Cannon Street exist as salient reminders of what has been lost through misguided redevelopment in the last century, removing the natural light by plonking ugly buildings on top.
When Liverpool Street Station (built between 1873 and 1875 for the Great Eastern Railway by chief engineer Edward Wilson) was last redeveloped between 1985 and 1992, the former labyrinthine palimpsest was clarified by the sympathetic extension of the 1870s glass roof over the platforms across the passenger concourse to meet the Great Eastern Hotel. Unfortunately, the new development proposes building over the concourse and replacing this part of the roof with a solid ceiling beneath the new office tower which itself will cast a long shadow, obscuring much of the daylight from the remaining Victorian glass vaults above the platforms.
The case put forward at the consultation was that passenger access to Liverpool Street Station needs upgrading and this ‘improvement to the public realm’ can be delivered at no cost to the taxpayer by sticking a massive office block on top of the station. Yet it is a false logic, because Network Rail – as a responsible operator — has a public duty to provide adequate access. It does not follow that such overdevelopment is either necessary or obligatory in order to achieve decent public access to the station.
My heart sank when I saw the artist’s renderings of the wild-flower meadow that the developers plan to plant on top of their block and the rooftop infinity pool which is to be open to all. These are cynical sops to the public. Architects Herzog & de Meuron presumably got this job because of their conversion of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern. The hope was that they would bring a similar magic to Liverpool Street Station, but the brief here is entirely misconceived.
Why is the City of London contemplating the construction of new offices at all when so many sit empty, post-Covid and post-Brexit? Flexible working patterns mean the financial industries will require far less office space in future. I see no evidence of the City advancing any cogent or enlightened vision that accommodates to this prospect.
Thankfully, Historic England are objecting to the new development and have revised and updated their listing of the station, adding the sensitively conceived 1985/92 vaulted-glass roof over the passenger concourse which was the result of a seminal conservation battle for the station in the 1980s. The hotel has also been upgraded from grade II to grade II* (the second highest level of protection).
I understand that, for the development to go ahead in its current form, this would have to be successfully challenged and overturned, so we must now brace ourselves for a mighty and possibly protracted fight over Liverpool Street Station. The planning application is expected to be submitted at the end of April.
This article was commissioned by Apollo magazine
Developers’ rendering of proposed redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station. This is the view along Liverpool Street looking east towards the Andaz (formerly the Great Eastern Hotel). Courtesy Sellar/Herzog & de Meuron
The proposed rooftop wild flower meadow Courtesy Sellar/Herzog & de Meuron
The proposed new entrance to Liverpool St Station Courtesy Sellar/Herzog & de Meuron
John Olney Of Donovan Brothers
Philip Marriage’s photograph of Donovan’s Bags, Crispin St, in 1985
John Olney told me it all began with two brothers, Jeremiah & Dennis O’Donovan, who came to Liverpool from Dublin in the eighteen thirties at the time of the potato famine in Ireland. Dennis took a passage from Liverpool across the Atlantic to seek his fortune with the Hudson Bay Trading Company, while Jeremiah came to the East End and settled in Fireball Court, Aldgate.
It sounds like an adventure story of long ago, yet John imbues it with a vivid present tense quality because Jeremiah was his great-great-grandfather and, to a degree, the nature of John’s own life has been the outcome of these events. The brothers’ tale explains both how he came to be here and why Donovan Brothers continues today in the way it does as a family business.
I was touched by John’s story because it was the first I have heard of the Irish in Spitalfields recounted to me by a descendant. Of the different waves of immigration that have passed through, the Irish are the least acknowledged and the people who have left the least evidence visible today. Yet anyone who walks through Spitalfields knows the building in Crispin St with the fine old signwriting that says “Donovan Brothers – The noted house for paper bags,” this was where the business began that still runs today at the New Spitalfields Market in Leyton.
John and I sat talking in the office of the Market Tenants’ Association in the grey light of early morning, watching as the wholesale fruit & vegetable market wound up for the night and the car park emptied out. There is an innate modesty to this gracious man with a strong physical presence and a discreet, withheld quality that colours the plain telling of his stories. You can tell from his glinting eyes that John’s family possesses an intensity of meaning for him, yet he adopts a quiet unemotional tone while speaking of it which serves to communicate a greater depth of feeling than any overt emotion.
“So you’ve come to hear about the fields…” he said, thinking out loud. By “the fields” John meant Spitalfields, using a term of reference I had not heard before. In its archaic colloquial tone, it spoke eloquently of his relationship to the place where his family dwelled continuously from the eighteen thirties and where he began his lifelong involvement with markets.
“My mother was a Donovan” declared John, outlining his precise connection to the line of descent, “She was one of eight, five boys and three daughters. We were a very close knit family, and it was so exciting for a boy of seven or eight, when I first entered the Spitalfields shop and sat on the counter. My uncle would sit outside with the chicken seller at the corner of Leyden St and reminisce about old times. It was history that was being spoken, you didn’t have to read it in books. My uncle used to end up at the bottom of Whites Row where there used to be a barbers and I would sit outside on the curb with my sweets – and that’s how it was in the old days.
My grandfather Patrick Donovan was one of nine children, he started the business and then the brothers came in and that’s how Donovan Brothers came about. I always knew I had a job to go to in the family business. You did everything. If there was a job there, from sweeping up to serving, you did it. It was second nature. Our motto was politeness cost nothing, I would always say, ‘Good Morning, Mr So & So,’ and my uncle would say to the customer, ‘The boy will take it out for you.’
We ran it as a family business and if there was a problem we dealt with it at once between us. The eldest was my grandfather, the governor, and when he died my uncles took over. The governor tells you what to do but everyone else asks. To everyone that works for me today, I am the governor, but in the family my elderly uncles are still the governors. Like in all family businesses, you could count upon one another. There’s no one person shouldering all the problems at any one time.
Every one of my uncles ran a different market. We were involved in Covent Garden, Borough and Stratford Market as well as Spitalfields. I would go out and make the deliveries. Whichever market I was in, it was always the same, whenever I walked through, traders would come up to me with orders and say ‘Tell your father.’ No-one knew who I was. I was ‘the boy’ and I still am to my uncles, and this makes a family. Because although we do retire as such, there’s no retirement from the family business. You are born on the job. You die on the job.”
John’s two sons and daughter work for Donovan Brothers now, ensuring the family business goes on for another generation. I think we may permit him to enjoy a certain swagger, coming in to work before dawn in all weathers and continuing his pattern of napping twice a day, at the end of the afternoon and in the late evening, thereby sustaining himself with superlative resilience through the extended antisocial hours that market life entails. The market is a world to itself and it is John Olney’s world.
Portrait of John Olney by Mark Jackson
The building in Crispin St retains its signwriting today
In Commercial St, nineteen sixties
John’s shop in the Spitalfields Market, nineteen eighties
John Olney outside his shop in the New Spitalfields Market, Leyton
Portraits of John Olney © Mark Jackson
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Jimmy Huddart, Spitalfields Market Porter
Peter Thomas, Fruit & Vegetable Supplier
Ivor Robins, Fruit & Vegetable Purveyor
John Olney, Donovan Brothers Ltd
Jim Heppel, New Spitalfields Market
On The Beat With PC Lew Tassell
Lew Tassell at the Mansion House
Lew Tassell, formerly of the City of London Police, took me on a walk tracing the path of his old beat last week and regaled me with stories of his adventures in the City in the last century.
“I joined the City of London Police in June 1969. After thirteen weeks training at Eynsham Police Training Centre, I commenced divisional duties at Bishopsgate in September for about a month with an experienced officer and then on my own, patrolling for a two year probationary period.
The COLP had three divisions then – Bishopsgate, Wood St & Snow Hill. Each was split into areas, subdivided into beats. There were always plenty of officers patrolling and, although you were supposed to patrol alone, you very often teamed up with a colleague, as long as you were not caught by the Duty Inspector who patrolled for about an hour on each shift. If you saw the Inspector, you had to approach him, stand to attention, salute and state your beats. If you were “off your ground” or not on the area designated you could be in trouble.
In the days when there were few automated crossings, an officer would be posted to operate the lights manually and ensure smooth running of traffic during the rush hour. You could open the traffic light box with a key on your whistle chain to sequence the lights. At 8.00am and again at 18.00pm, there would always be two officers directing traffic at the junction of Aldgate, Minories and Houndsditch which was the busiest point. The entrances to Liverpool St Station would be manned during the rush hour to assist commuters. There were also two school crossing duties to cover in the morning and evenings, Dukes Place and Bishopsgate North by Pindar St, for the students at the Central Foundation School for Girls.
Between 7.00am and 20.00pm, three officers policed Tower Bridge. The rule was an officer for the North Tower, one for the South Tower and a third for the bascules, where it opens up. There were police boxes on both sides of the bridge for “inclement weather” but a four hour shift was quite boring, especially if it was quiet – so often we would often congregate in one box, keeping an eye out for an Inspector on patrol.
I also enjoyed being allocated bicycle duty on nights and at the weekends. You collected a standard sit-up-and-beg black bicycle and cycled anywhere on division for the whole shift that started and finished an hour earlier than usual to cover the change-over period. You wore standard uniform including your helmet and perhaps bicycle clips. I was knocked off my bike once as I was approaching Tower Bridge when a coach cut in, turning left into East Smithfield. Nothing was hurt apart from my pride as my helmet bounced down the street in front of onlookers.”
“I often took the short cut from Houndsditch through the Port of London Authority’s bonded warehouse in Cutler St to the back entrance of Bishopsgate Police Station in New St. The PLA policemen on the gates waved me through the complex which was built for the East India Company as their warehouse in the City and appeared to have changed little in 1969. It was dark and imposing, and I always felt the atmosphere of history. In one dark corner was the only facility permitted for the storage of opium. You could smell it from outside – or I assumed that was what it was. When the complex became derelict in the seventies, the City Police used it for firearms training.”
“I have enjoyed visiting the Lamb Tavern in Leadenhall Market frequently over fifty years. It is my favourite pub in London and thankfully has hardly changed. My introduction came on Christmas Eve 1969. Unlike today, most people in the City worked on Christmas Eve but everyone finished at midday and went to the pub. They got carried away and there were a lot of drunk people trying to make their way home in the afternoon when licensing hours meant the pubs had to stop serving at 3.30pm. Two officers were allocated to each pub to assist the landlord in clearing the bars. In 1969, I was allocated the Lamb. The atmosphere was generally good natured and there was little aggravation but there were a lot of drunk people, especially those that were once-a-year drinkers.
One Christmas Eve, I encountered a City gent in striped trousers and a bowler hat, with an umbrella, staggering towards me in Bishopsgate. He could not stand straight and hardly talk, but I managed to find out he had to catch a train from Broad St Station to somewhere in West London, so I literally carried him to the station and put him on a train home.”
“When I joined the Force I was taken out under instruction by an experienced officer. Most had places where they could stop for a cup of tea and a chat, it was a good way to meet the community. They were known as ‘tea holes.’ One of the ones I was taken to was a coffin factory, situated on the first floor of Artillery Lane at the junction with Sandys Row. It surprised me to find such an establishment in the City. All the carpenters made the coffins by hand with one floor entirely for storage. I was told that – by law -they had to keep at least two hundred coffins in case they should be required in an emergency, if there was a disaster.”
“Gun St is in Spitalfields and not strictly the City of London, but I would often cut through there from Brushfield St. There were a number of Victorian workshops, all run by the Asians, manufacturing clothing in sweatshops. In Gun St, they made leather coats and jackets and I purchased garments for myself, excellent quality and well made. The production process was astonishing to see, with dozens of people in a small space producing leather goods, measuring, cutting, stitching and sewing.”
“A favourite beat of mine was around and beneath Fenchurch St Railway Station, especially through French Ordinary Court. It was an alley that led into the underground cavernous area beneath the railway station arches. Cool in summer and warm in winter, there was an overwhelming smell of spices as you entered the tunnel. Sadly, they have managed to erase the spices but the cobbles are still there as you emerge into Crutched Friars, very close to another favourite spot – the churchyard of St Ghastly Grim.”
“The City of London Police Headquarters was situated at 26 Old Jewry since the Force was formed in 1839, it housed the offices of the Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner. The building was rebuilt in 1929 but, unusually for that time, retained the original staircase from 1725. Later, Old Jewry became the first offices of the Fraud Squad and the C.I.D. HQ. It was here I was interviewed to become a Cadet in 1967 and join the Force in 1969.”
“The City of London Magistrates Court opened in 1990 at 1 Queen Victoria St after the Mansion House and Guildhall Justice Rooms were closed.”
“Painted bright blue with an amber lamp on top, police boxes they were the main source of communication with officers on the beat before the advent of police radios. The general public could also summon help from a telephone in the upper part of the box. If an officer needed to be contacted, the amber light would flash on the boxes situated on his beat. If the light on the top was constantly illuminated, it signalled that royalty was in the City. By 1969, there were only a few occasions when you were not issued with a radio but, even so, the boxes were totally reliable unlike some of the radios.”
“I love rock music and going to gigs and, as a teenager, my favourite band were The Nice. They split in 1970 and keyboard player Keith Emerson formed Emerson Lake & Palmer with Greg Lake and Carl Palmer. In the spring of 1972, I noticed heavy boxes being unloaded from a large van in the lay-by outside the Fire Station in Bishopsgate with the word NICE painted on the sides. It could only be Keith Emerson’s equipment. The boxes were being taken into a lunchtime drinking club that was shut in the evenings called The Poor Millionaire, whose premises are now Dirty Martini. I had a chat to the roadies who invited me down and I spent the evening watching Emerson Lake & Palmer rehearsing their next album Trilogy. The band were very friendly and welcoming, and I got to play Keith’s Hammond organ while he was leaping around wearing my police helmet.”
“Officers in the City of London Police are given a silver statue of a policeman upon retirement if they complete thirty years’ service. The origin of this goes back to the thirties when Mrs Firminger Paton a director of Baston-Firminger Ltd, Commodity Brokers in Cullum St, used to drive to her offices in her Daimler from her home in Wimbledon every day. Police officers assisted her passage through the City and she was so impressed she invited them to her house and garden each year for beer and a buffet in a marquee. In return, the grateful officers made a collection and had a silver policeman made that could be screwed onto the bonnet of her Daimler. When Mrs Firminger Paton died in the seventies, the mascot was returned to the City Police and kept permanently in the Commissioner’s office at her request. So it was then decided that retiring officers should each receive a Silver Policeman of their own.”
Lew Tassell’s helmet
Lew Tassell’s oak truncheon which had been used by generations of policemen before him, dating back to the nineteenth century
Lew Tassell’s badge, keys and whistle
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At Ben Truman’s House
Behold, the winter dusk is glimmering in this old house in Princelet St built in the seventeen-twenties for Benjamin Truman. A hundred years later, a huge factory was added on the back which more than doubled the size. In the twentieth century, this became the home of the extended Gernstein family from whom the current owners bought the house in the eighties. Notable as Lionel Bart’s childhood home, who once returned to have his portrait taken by Lord Snowden on the doorstep, in recent years it has served as the location for innumerable film and photo shoots. Then, as if to complete the circle, the house was sold to the proprietors of the Old Truman Brewery.
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