Samuel & Elizabeth Pepys At St Olave’s
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Do you see Elizabeth Pepys, leaning out from her monument and directing her gaze across the church to where Samuel sat in the gallery opposite? These days the gallery has long gone but, since her late husband became celebrated for his journal, a memorial to him was installed in 1883 where the gallery once was, which contains a portrait bust that peers back eternally at Elizabeth. Consequently, they will always see eye-to-eye, even if they are forever separated by the nave.
St Olave’s on the corner of Seething Lane has long been one of my favourite City churches. Dating from the eleventh century, it is a rare survivor of the Great Fire and the London Blitz. When you walk in from Hart St, three steps down into the nave immediately reveal you are entering an ancient building, where gothic vaults and medieval monuments conjure an atmosphere more reminiscent of a country church than one in the City of London.
Samuel Pepys moved into this parish when he was appointed Commissioner of the Navy Board and came to live next to the Navy Office at the rear of the church, noting his arrival at “my house in Seething Lane” in his journal on July 18th 1660. It was here that Pepys recorded the volatile events of the subsequent decade, the Plague and the Fire.
In Seething Lane, a gateway adorned with skulls as memento mori survives from that time. Pepys saw the gate from his house across the road and could walk out of the Navy Office and through it into the churchyard, where an external staircase led him straight into the private Navy Office pew in the gallery.
The churchyard itself is swollen above surrounding ground level by the vast number of bodies interred within and, even today, the gardeners constantly unearth human bones. When Elizabeth and the staff of the Navy Office took refuge from the Plague at Woolwich, Pepys stayed behind in the City. Countless times, he walked back and forth between his house and the Navy Office and St Olave’s as the body count escalated through the summer of 1665. “The sickness in general thickens round us, and particularly upon our neighbourhood,” he wrote to Sir William Coventry in grim resignation.
The following year, Pepys employed workers from the dockyard to pull down empty houses surrounding the Navy Office and his own home to create fire breaks. “About 2 in the morning my wife calls me up and tells me of new cries of fire, it being come to … the bottom of our lane,” he recorded on 6th September 1666.
In the seventeenth century vestry room where a plaster angel presides solemnly from the ceiling, I was able to open Samuel Pepys’ prayer book. It was heart-stopping to turn the pages. Dark leather covers embossed with intricate designs enfold the volume, which he embellished with religious engravings and an elaborate hand-drawn calligraphic title page.
Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys are buried in a vault beneath the nave. Within living memory, when the Victorian font was removed, a hole was exposed that led to a chamber with a passage that led to a hidden chapel where a tunnel was dug to reach the Pepys vault. Scholars would love to know if he was buried with his bladder stone upon its silver mount, but no investigation has yet been permitted.
If you seek Samuel Pepys, St Olave’s is undoubtedly where you can find him. Walk in beneath the gate laden with skulls, across the graveyard bulging with the bodies of the long dead, cast your eyes along the flower beds for any shards of human bone, and enter the church where Samuel and Elizabeth regard each other from either side of the nave eternally.
St Olave’s at the corner of Seething Lane
“To our own church, and at noon, by invitation, Sir W Pen dined with me and Mrs Hester, my Lady Betten’s kinswoman, to dinner from church with me, and we were very merry. So to church again, and heard a simple fellow upon the praise of Church musique, and exclaiming against men’s wearing their hats on in the church, but I slept part of the sermon, till latter prayer and blessing and all was done without waking which I never did in my life…” SAMUEL PEPYS, Sunday 17th November, 1661
Samuel Pepys’ memorial in the south aisle
Samuel Pepys’ prayerbook
Engraved nativity and fine calligraphy upon the title page of Pepys’ prayerbook
Door to the vestry
The oldest monument in the church, 1566
Memorial of Peter Capponi, a Florentine merchant & spy, 1582
Paul Bayning, 1616, was an Alderman of the City & member of the Levant company
A Norwegian flag hangs in honour of St Olave
The gate where Pepys walked in from the Navy Office across the street
Sculpture of Samuel Pepys in the churchyard
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Clive Murphy, Phillumenist
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Clive Murphy, Phillumenist
Nothing about this youthful photo of the late novelist, oral historian and writer of ribald rhymes, Clive Murphy – resplendent here in a well-pressed tweed suit and with his hair neatly brushed – would suggest that he was a Phillumenist. Even people who have knew him since he came to live in Spitalfields in 1973 never had an inkling. In fact, evidence of his Phillumeny only came to light when Clive donated his literary archive to the Bishopsgate Institute and a non-descript blue album was uncovered among his papers, dating from the era of this picture and with the price ten shillings and sixpence still written in pencil in the front.
I was astonished when I saw the beautiful album and I asked Clive to tell me the story behind it. “I was a Phillumenist,” he admitted to me in a whisper, “But I broke all the rules in taking the labels off the matchboxes and cutting the backs off matchbooks. A true Phillumenist would have a thousand fits to see my collection.” It was the first time Clive had examined his album of matchbox labels and matchbook covers since 1951 when, at the age of thirteen, he forsook Phillumeny – a diversion that had occupied him through boarding school in Dublin from 1944 onwards.
“A memory is coming back to me of a wooden box that I made in carpentry class which I used to keep them in, until I put them in this album,” said Clive, getting lost in thought, “I wonder where it is?” We surveyed page after page of brightly-coloured labels from all over the world pasted in neat rows and organised by their country of origin, inscribed by Clive with blue ink in a careful italic hand at the top of each leaf. “I have no memory of doing this.” he confided to me as he scanned his handiwork in wonder,“Why is the memory so selective?”
“I was ill-advised and I do feel sorry in retrospect that they are not as a professional collector would wish,” he concluded with a sigh, “But I do like them for all kinds of other reasons, I admire my method and my eye for a pattern, and I like the fact that I occupied myself – I’m glad I had a hobby.”
We enjoyed a quiet half hour, turning the pages and admiring the designs, chuckling over anachronisms and reflecting on how national identities have changed since these labels were produced. Mostly, we delighted at the intricacy of thought and ingenuity of the decoration once applied to something as inconsequential as matches.
“There was this boy called Spring-Rice whose mother lived in New York and every week she sent him a letter with a matchbox label in the envelope for me.” Clive recalled with pleasure, “We had breaks twice each morning at school, when the letters were given out, and how I used to long for him to get a letter, to see if there was another label for my collection.” The extraordinary global range of the labels in Clive’s album reflects the widely scattered locations of the parents of the pupils at his boarding school in Dublin, and the collection was a cunning ploy that permitted the schoolboy Clive to feel at the centre of the world.
“You don’t realise you’re doing something interesting, you’re just doing it because you like pasting labels in an album and having them sent to you from all over the world.” said Clive with characteristic self-deprecation, yet it was apparent to me that Phillumeny prefigured his wider appreciation of what is otherwise ill-considered in existence. It is a sensibility that found full expression in Clive’s work as an oral historian, recording the lives of ordinary people with scrupulous attention to detail, and editing and publishing them with such panache.
Clive Murphy, Phillumenist
Images courtesy of the Clive Murphy Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to read my other stories about Clive Murphy
The Forgotten Corners Of Old London
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Who knows what you might find lurking in the forgotten corners of old London? Like this lonely old waxwork of Charles II who once adorned a side aisle of Westminster Abbey, peering out through a haze of graffiti engraved upon his pane by mischievous tourists with diamond rings.
As one with a pathological devotion to walking through London’s side-streets and byways, seeking to avoid the main roads wherever possible, these glass slides of the forgotten corners of London – used long ago by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute – hold a special appeal for me. I have elaborate routes across the city which permit me to walk from one side to the other exclusively by way of the back streets and I discover all manner of delights neglected by those who solely inhabit the broad thoroughfares.
And so it is with many of these extraordinary pictures that show us the things which usually nobody bothers to photograph. There are a lot of glass slides of the exterior of Buckingham Palace in the collection but, personally, I am much more interested in the roof space above Richard III’s palace of Crosby Hall that once stood in Bishopsgate, and in the unlikely paraphernalia which accumulated in the crypt of the Carmelite Monastery or the Cow Shed at the Tower of London, a hundred years ago. These pictures satisfy my perverse curiosity to visit the spaces closed off to visitors at historic buildings, in preference to seeing the public rooms.
Within these forgotten corners, there are always further mysteries to be explored. I wonder who pitched a teepee in the undergrowth next to the moat at Fulham Palace in 1920. I wonder if that is a cannon or a chimney pot abandoned in the crypt at the Carmelite monastery. I wonder why that man had a bucket, a piece of string and a plank inside the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. I wonder what those fat books were next to the stove in the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries’ shop. I wonder who was pulling that girl out of the photograph in Woolwich Gardens. I wonder who put that dish in the roof of Crosby Hall. I wonder why Charles II had no legs. The pictures set me wondering.
It is what we cannot know that endows these photographs with such poignancy. Like errant pieces from lost jigsaws, they inspire us to imagine the full picture that we shall never be party to.
Tiltyard Gate, Eltham Palace, c. 1930
Refuse collecting at London Zoo, c. 1910
Passage in Highgate, c. 1910
Westminster Dust Carts, c. 1910
The Jewel Tower, Westminster, 1921
Fifteenth century brickwork at Charterhouse Wash House, c1910
Middle Temple Lane, c. 1910
Carmelite monastery crypt, c. 1910
The Moat at Fulham Palace, c. 1920
Clifford’s Inn, c. 1910
Top of inner dome at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1920
Apothecaries’ Hall Quadrangle, c. 1920
Worshipful Company of Apothecaries’ Shop, c.1920
Unidentified destroyed building near St Paul’s, c. 1940
Merchant Taylors’ Hall, c. 1920
Crouch End Old Baptist Chapel, c. 1900
Woolwich Gardens, c. 1910
The roof of Crosby Hall, Richard III’s palace in Bishopsgate , c. 1910
Refreshment stall in St James’ Park, c. 1910
River Wandle at Wandsworth, c. 1920
Corridor at Battersea Rise House, c. 1900
Tram emerging from the Kingsway Tunnel, c. 1920
Between the interior and exterior domes at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1920
Fossilised tree trunk on Tooting Common, c. 1920
St Dunstan-in-the-East, 1911
Cow shed at the Queen’s House, Tower of London, c. 1910
Boundary marks for St Benet Gracechurch, St Andrew Hubbard and St Dionis Backchurch in Talbot Court, c. 1910
Lincoln’s Inn gateway seen from Old Hall, c. 1910
St Bride’s Fleet St, c. 1920
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Tragical Death Of An Apple Pie
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The time in the year for apple pie has arrived. So I take this opportunity to present The Tragical Death of an Apple Pie, an alphabet rhyme first published in 1671, in a version produced by Jemmy Catnach in the eighteen-twenties.
Poet, compositor and publisher, Catnach moved to London from Newcastle in 1812 and set up Seven Dials Press in Monmouth Court, producing more than four thousand chapbooks and broadsides in the next quarter century. Anointed as the high priest of street literature and eager to feed a seemingly-endless appetite for cheap printed novelties in the capital, Catnach put forth a multifarious list of titles, from lurid crime and political satire to juvenile rhymes and comic ballads, priced famously at a quarterpenny or a ‘farden.’
A An Apple Pie
B Bit it
C Cut it
D Dealt it
E Did eat it
F Fought for it
G Got it
H Had it
J Join’d for it
K Kept it
L Long’d for it
M Mourned for it
N Nodded at it
O Open’d it
P Peeped into it
Q Quartered it
R Ran for it
S Stole it
T Took it
V View’d it
W Wanted it
XYZ and & all wished for a piece in hand
Dame Dumpling who made the Apple Pie
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We Make An Offer For The Bell Foundry
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The foundry, shuttered and graffitied since 2017
After campaigning for six years, I am delighted to announce that this week The London Bell Foundry made an offer to acquire the former Whitechapel Bell Foundry at market value. The London Bell Foundry is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, set up with the purpose of operating a bell foundry in Whitechapel, combining traditional bell founding with the use of digital technology.
Although the hotel scheme is now dead, the judgement of the Secretary of State’s Public Inquiry into the future of the foundry in 2020 obligates the owner to ensure foundry activity continues at this site.
We seek to acquire the Grade II* listed buildings as a permanent home for the London Bell Foundry.
We want to open it as a fully-working foundry, re-establishing the world’s most famous bell foundry that operated in Whitechapel for five hundred years from the reign of Elizabeth I to the reign of Elizabeth II.
Our mission is to reinvigorate the art and science of bell founding through a marriage of new and old technology, casting church bells, artists’ bell, ceremonial bells, and bells for all occasions.
We are working with Nigel Taylor, foreman at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry for forty years, alongside artists of international stature and a team of the foremost experts in the technology of casting.
We plan to maximise the educational potential, through apprenticeships for local people and work with schools and colleges in East London.
Our first commission was the Covid Bell in 2021, designed by Grayson Perry in support of our mission, which debuted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2022. The Covid Bell will tour NHS hospitals, enabling those have been bereaved to toll the bell in remembrance.
The Elizabeth Bell is a forthcoming commission to commemorate seventy years since the coronation of Elizabeth II.
The London Bell Foundry has demonstrated a proven financial model that can ensure the tradition of bell founding continues in this country in perpetuity.
SUPPORTERS
“I fully support the proposal by the London Bell Foundry to establish a working foundry at the historic Whitechapel site. It is tragic that the bell foundry has been shuttered up since 2017. The presence of a rejuvenated modern bell foundry will once again assert Whitechapel as a place of creative innovation and restore the international reputation of the place where Big Ben and the Liberty Bell were made.”
Lutfur Rahman, Mayor of Tower Hamlets
“The Whitechapel Bell Foundry is one of the East End’s most treasured institutions, with a history stretching back to the 16th century. The foundry made Big Ben, America’s Liberty Bell and more locally the Bow Bells. So many people in the community are campaigning to save as much of the original building as possible, and to keep it as a working foundry. I am proud to support the Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry campaign, and encourage everyone to join in. Together we can save this important feature of East End life.”
Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green & Bow
“The East London Mosque & London Muslim Centre welcomes the proposal from the London Bell Foundry to reestablish a working foundry in Whitechapel. This will provide apprenticeships and work experience in traditional and digital crafts for the local community.”
Sufia Alam, East London Mosque & London Muslim Centre
“The re-established Whitechapel Bell Foundry would add significantly to the creative offer in East London. As the V&A East establishes a substantial presence at Stratford and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and develops particular links with the adjacent boroughs, we would welcome the opportunity to promote the Whitechapel-based art and bell foundry. Combining traditional skills with innovative technology and the offer of apprenticeship and further training in this specialised field will enhance the interpretation of the V&A’s important collection of works of art in bronze. Continuing the centuries-old tradition of bell founding in London with its global outreach will enrich the cultural presence and attract national, regional and international interest.”
Dr Tristram Hunt, Director of Victoria & Albert Museum
“The Whitechapel Bell Foundry is a crucial component of historic Whitechapel. That it has survived for so long on this site, and in such fascinating and evocative buildings, is nothing short of a miracle. Its survival as a working site is vital both for future generations and for Whitechapel.”
Heloise Palin, Spitalfields Historic Buildings Preservation Trust
Learn more at our new THE LONDON BELL FOUNDRY website
Charles Saumarez Smith & Dickon Love will be talking about The London Bell Foundry & London Bells at the Salon for London at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury on Thursday 24th November. Click here for tickets
Grayson Perry’s Covid Bell at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2022 (Photograph © David Parry/Royal Academy of Arts)
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The Whitechapel Bell Foundry Is For Sale
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
14 Whitechapel Bell Foundry Poems
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Peta Bridle’s London Viewpoints
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Today it is my pleasure to publish Peta Bridle‘s latest drawings
On the 55 Bus
Me and my daughter Daisy took the 55 bus from Old St to Oxford St on a shopping trip. Great views are to be had from the top deck and I like the play of the light on the roof.
Beech Garden, Barbican
This is a quiet residential area in the City of London with its concrete architecture and tower blocks, beautiful lake and gardens. When I went to sit down on a step I fell off backwards into the flowerbed and then had ants crawling over my legs whilst I was drawing. Yet it was worth it for the composition and the view.
Brushfield St, Spitalfields
A view along Brushfield St with a terrace of Georgian buildings, the original Gun Pub on the corner of Gun St and the glass towers of the City looming in the background.
Raven Row & Artillery Lane, Spitalfields
This is the view over Raven Row & Artillery Lane from the White’s Row car park which is now demolished.
The Emirates Air Line
This is a cable car which crossed the Thames between the Greenwich Peninsula and the Royal Docks, reaching a height of ninety metres. The ascent was terrifying as I am not very good with heights but, once high up in the air, the views are spectacular. I also had my son’s arm to hang on to which helped. The crossing is quite gentle unless the wind catches the cabin causing it to sway.
St Augustine’s Tower, Hackney
When you climb St Augustine’s Tower there are wonderful views to be had across Hackney towards the City. A bus turns on to Mare St which is busy with shoppers and a lone beggar sits under the bridge.
London Bridge Station & The Shard
For my exhibition at Southwark Cathedral, I was given special permission to go to the top of the tower. At the time the Shard was still under construction and London Bridge Station was being rebuilt. From such a height, people walking up Tooley St appear ant-like and the toy traffic moves slowly.
Borough Market from Southwark Cathedral Tower
This is a favourite view from the top of Southwark Cathedral Tower. Looking south, trains pass in front and behind the market roof with a jumble of architecture receding into the distance. To the west you overlook the streets of Southwark, while to the north London Bridge spans the Thames, and to the east sits the Shard and London Bridge Station.
St Paul’s Cathedral from Tate Modern
I visited the Tate Modern on a wet and miserable day, and sat on the floor in front of a gallery window, watching people cross the Millennium Bridge to St Paul’s. Music playing on a loop, combined with the dimness of the gallery and the outside gloom made it difficult to draw, so I completed my sketch at home.
Trinity Buoy, Leamouth
I visited Trinity Buoy on a bright and breezy spring day to make a sketch looking towards the Millennium Dome. In the background, an Uber boat pulled into the pontoon.
Wardrobe Place, City of London
This is a secret little courtyard close to St Paul’s Cathedral. The shade of the trees was welcome as it was a very hot day. An occasional breeze sent a flurry of small leaves to the ground and in the distance bellringing practice began.
Waterloo Station
A good viewpoint over Waterloo Station from the balcony with the station clock directly in front of me. I sketched the ironwork and roof structure first, then added people from random snaps taken on my phone.
Greenwich Park
I sat on a hillside in Greenwich Park in the shade of oak trees, looking towards the National Maritime Museum and the Canary Wharf towers. A blob of ink fell off my brush in front of a dog I had drawn, resembling a ball, so I just left it there.
Acorns from Greenwich Park
Some acorns I picked up from where I had sketched.
Drawings copyright © Peta Bridle
You may also like to take a look at
Peta Bridle’s East End Sketchbook
Peta Bridle’s Riverside Sketchbook
Peta Bridle’s Gravesend Sketchbook
Peta Bridle’s City of London Sketchbook
Women Of Hackney At Work
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Terrie Alderton, Bus Driver
Complementing Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie’s new exhibition Women Of Bethnal Green at Work which opens today at Oxford House, Bethnal Green, here is an earlier series of Sarah’s portraits.
Sarah took these portraits in Hackney between 1990 and 1991 as a commission for Hackney Museum. “I was aware there were a lot of women in the workplace but mostly in behind the scenes roles,” Sarah explained to me, “I wanted to give them visibly and also show the variety of work that women were doing.”
Loretta Leitch, Electrician
Rosemary More, Architect
Fontanelle Alleyne, Environmental Health Officer
Hackney Registrar of Births, Marriages & Deaths
Jenny Amos, Heating & Ventilation Engineer
Carol Straker, Dancer
Annie Johns, Sculptor
Sue Hopkins, Doctor at Lawson Practice Baby Clinic
Lilly Claridge, Age Concern Charity Shop Manager
Karen Francis & Carolyn Donovan, Dustwomen
Helen Graham, Street Sweeper
Denise Martin, Truck Driver
Judy Benoit, Studio Manager
Luz Hollingsworth, Fire Fighter
Diane Abbott, Member of Parliament
Dionne Allacker, Joanne Gillard, Winnifred John, Clothing Warehouse Supervisors
Lanette Edwards, Machinist
Nora Fenn, Buttonholist
Jane Harris, Carpenter
Eileen Lake, Chaplain at Homerton Hospital
Dr Costeloe, Homerton Hospital
Ivy Harris & E Vidal, Cleaners at Homerton Hospital
Sister Ferris Aagee, Homerton Hospital
Joan Lewis, Homerton Hospital
Sister Sally Bowcock
Valerie Cruz, Catering Assistant
K Lewis, Traffic Warden
Gerrie Harris, Acupuncturist
WPC Helen Taylor
Mary, Counter Assistant at Ridley’s Beigel Bakery
Mandy McLoughlin & Angela Kent, Faulkners Fish & Chip Restaurant
Terrie Tan, Driver at Lady Cabs
Maureen McLoughlin, Supervisor at Riversdale Laundrette
Anna Sousa, Hairdresser at Shampers
Jane Reeves, Councillor
Carolin Ambler, Zoo Keeper
Mrs Sherman, Dentist
Eileen Fisher, Police Domestic Violence Unit
Yvonne McKenzie, Jacqui Olliffe & Dirinai Harley, Supervisors at Oranges & Lemons Day Nursery
Jessica James, Active Birth Teacher
Di England, Supervisor at Free Form Arts
Sally Theakston, Chaplain, St John’s Hackney
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Photographs courtesy Hackney Museum
