At Paul Pindar’s House
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House of Sir Paul Pindar by J.W. Amber
If William Shakespeare passed along Bishopsgate around 1600, he might have observed the construction of one of the finest of the mansions that formerly lined this ancient thoroughfare, Sir Paul Pindar’s house situated on the west side of the highway beyond the City wall next to the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem.
Paul Pindar was a City merchant who became British Consul to Aleppo and subsequently James I’s Ambassador to Constantinople. Although he returned home from his postings regularly, he did not take permanent residence in his house until 1623 when he was fifty-eight and between 1617-18 it served as the London abode of Pietro Contarini, Venetian Ambassador to the Court of St James.
Who can say what precious gifts from Sultan Mehmet III comprised the inventory of Ottoman treasures that once filled this fine house in Bishopsgate? Pindar’s wealth and loyalty to the monarch was such that he made vast loans to James and Charles I who both dined at his house, as well as contributing ten thousand pounds to the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral. Yet Charles’ overthrow in 1649 meant that Pindar was never repaid and he died with huge debts at the age of eighty-five in 1650. What times he had seen, in a life that stretched from the glory days of Elizabeth I to the decapitation of Charles I.
Remarkably, Paul Pindar’s house survived the Great Fire along with the rest of Bishopsgate which preserved its late-medieval character, lined with shambles and grand mansions, until it was redeveloped in the nineteenth century. His presence was memorialised when the building became a tavern by the name of The Paul Pindar in the eighteenth century.
Reading the correspondence of CR Ashbee from the eighteen-eighties in the archives of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Spital Sq, I was astonished to discover that, after Ashbee’s successfully campaign to save the Trinity Green Almshouses in Whitechapel, he pursued an ultimately fruitless attempt to rescue Paul Pindar’s house from the developers who were expanding Liverpool St Station.
In his poignant letters, arguments which remain familiar in our own time are advanced in the face of the unremitting commercial ambition of the railway magnates. CR Ashbee reminded them of the virtue in retaining an important and attractive building which carried the history of the place, even proposing that – if they could not keep it in its entirety – preserving the facade integrated into their new railway station would prove a popular feature. His words were disregarded but, since Paul Pindar’s house stood where the Bishopsgate entrance to Liverpool St Station is now, I cannot pass through without imagining what might have been and confronting the melancholy recognition that the former glories of Paul Pindar’s house are forever lost in time, as a place we can never visit.
The elaborately carved frontage, which concealed a residence much deeper than it was wide, was lopped off when the building was demolished in 1890 after surviving almost three hundred years in Bishopsgate. Once the oak joinery was dis-assembled, it was cleaned of any residual paint according to the curatorial practice of the time and installed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington when it opened in 1909. You can visit this today at the museum, where the intricate dark wooden facade of Paul Pindar’s beautiful house – familiar to James I, Charles I and perhaps to Shakespeare too – sits upon the wall as the enigmatic husk of something extraordinary. It is an exquisite husk, yet a husk nonetheless.
Sir Paul Pindar (1565–1650)
Paul Pindar’s House by F.Shepherd
View of Paul Pindar’s House, 1812
Street view, 1838
The Sir Paul Pindar by Theo Moore, 1890
The Sir Paul Pindar photographed by Henry Dixon, 1890
Paul Pindar’s House as it appeared before demolition by J.Appleton, 1890
Facade of Paul Pindar’s House at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Bracket from Paul Pindar’s House at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Paul Pindar’s Summer House, Half Moon Alley, drawn by John Thomas Smith, c. 1800
Panelled room in Paul Pindar’s House
Bishopsgate entrance to Liverpool St Station
Archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Romance of Old Bishopsgate
The Canal Club Is Saved!
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Toslima Rahman with her daughter Saima & son Ayaan at the Canal Club
I am delighted to report that after an heroic three-year fight by the local community, the proposal for development has been withdrawn by the new regime at the council and the beloved Canal Club and community garden in Bethnal Green is saved.
Here is the feature that Novelist Sarah Winman wrote when she first visited with Photographer Rachel Ferriman to report on the threat to the community spaces at the Wellington Estate.
The Canal Club sits at the corner of Waterloo Gardens and Sewardstone Rd in Bethnal Green. It consists of a playground, a ball park, a community centre and community garden between the vast Wellington Estate to the east, of which it is part, and the Grand Union Housing Coop to the west. At the southern border is Belmont Wharf, a small boating community established by Sally and Dominique who were granted permission by the council nine years ago to have moorings along this stretch of Regent’s Canal and to create a sustainable garden for boat dwellers and land dwellers alike.
The garden is incredibly beautiful, a biodiverse haven. The sound of children playing carries across the water from Victoria Park and faded bunting flutters in the breeze. Flowers of every colour bloom and bees are plenty and go about with purpose. Butterflies delight around the nettles and even bats have found a home here. This garden has been created with care and thought and, more importantly, time. The air is sweet and clean, far removed from the fug of Cambridge Heath Rd and Hackney Rd that pollute nearby.
I met residents Sally, Dominique, Alex, Ricardo, Helga, Erdoo, Mr & Mrs Ali, and Toslima to learn that this beloved site had been selected by Tower Hamlets Council for a housing infill scheme. These schemes are becoming common practise by councils, who target sites – usually recreational – on existing estates and build further.
The proposal for the Wellington Estate was to demolish the Canal Club and remove the open space and community asset it provides. This was to construct a further twenty-two flats on an already densely populated estate which was built in the thirties as an answer to slum clearance – basically, it was taking space from those who have little to start with.
It was a complex situation that was the outcome of thirty years of right-to-buy, money held by central government and the chronic need for housing. However, what was inexcusable to the residents of the estate and the boating community and supportive locals, was the opaque nature of the dealings – the council’s lack of transparency and openness to discussion. Two years earlier, they thought they were simply looking at the refurbishment of their community centre, until they later found out that the decision to demolish the Canal Club site was already under way.
Alex explained that the Canal Club land was given by the GLC to the people of the Wellington Estate in the late seventies and early eighties to offset the overcrowding and the lack of balconies and gardens. It was their land and she believed the council had a responsibility to share their ideas with the residents. The irony was not lost on her too, that Tower Hamlets said they were an Climate Emergency Council and yet were taking away the only green public space on the estate.
Everyone talked about the eighties and nineties when the community centre was thriving. It was hired out for weddings and birthdays then. There was a youth club, opportunities to learn a second language and for recent immigrants to learn English, space for pensioners to get together, and for the residents association to meet and share ideas. Dwight told us he was a member of the youth club and it was the only chance for kids to have day trips out of London. He remembered camping in Tunbridge Wells. The chance to ride horses and canoe – see a different life, be a different person.
There was nothing for kids after that, someone said. So much had already gone. And if you take away the ball park, then what? Looting across the generations, another said. Building slums of the future, said another. Erdoo, who has lived on the state all her life, told me that her dad Joseph looked after the Community Centre for years before the council took away his key and barred the local residents from using it anymore. Then the Community Centre was offered up to private use for private rents. The popular Scallywags nursery is the present tenant, but ill-feeling from that time remains.
This engaging group of people cared so much about their environment and improving the lives of others. Yet what was apparent was how the agency of council tenants was being eroded in the widening chasm of inequality.
The right to space and light and clean air can never only be for the rich.
I stood on the old wharf where the custodians, Sally and Dominique, repaired it with two-hundred-year-old bricks. Wildflowers grew there and nature had reclaimed an area once used for the dumping of waste. Kick the soil and a filament of plastic was revealed, hidden by knapweed or evening primrose, or large swathes of hemp-agrimony. Over the years, composting had built up the fertility of the soil, attracting a diversity of insects and bird population. Dominique explained that the principle of permaculture is to work in sympathy with nature and harness its natural energy. A wild colony of bees appeared every year for a few weeks when the cherry tree blossoms and then disappeared again to their unknown world. Dominique kept a daily diary of the changes and visitations. The secret life that we do not see, either because we move too fast or because the insects are too small.
When the license for this garden expired, Dominique and Sally feared the council will not renew it if the demolition went ahead. I found it unbelievable that such a necessary and beautiful urban green space could be sacrificed especially in a time of declining mental health. The benefits that access to nature provides are irrefutable. This community garden is more than a garden, it is a destination for the carers and patients who come down from the Mission Practise or readers looking for solitude. It is a resource for artists seeking inspiration and children who want to know how the natural world works – or simply those who need to be reminded that they are more than their circumstance.
As I left this corner of East London, I was reminded of a speech delivered by Robert Kennedy back in the sixties about how the value of a country is measured – “It does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry… It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion… it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
The Wellington Estate
Save Our Community Spaces – Refurbish Not Demolish
In the Community Garden
Dominique Cornault at the Canal Club
Sally Hone at the Canal Club
Mr & Mrs Ali outside the Canal Club
Helga Lang at the Canal Club
Dwight James at Belmont Wharf
Erdoo Yongo outside her mum’s house on Wellington Estate
Barbara, resident of the Estate, and Bonny her dog
Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman
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Frank Derrett’s West End
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Cranbourne St
Fancy a stroll around the West End with Frank Derrett in the seventies?
This invitation is possible thanks to the foresight of Paul Loften who rescued these photographs from destruction in the last century. Recently, Paul contacted me to ask if I was interested and I suggested he donate them to the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, which is how I am able to show them today.
‘They were given to me over twenty-five years ago when I called at an apartment block in Camden,’ Paul explained. ‘A woman opened the door and, when said I was from Camden Libraries, she told me a solicitor was dealing with effects of a resident who had died and was about to throw these boxes of slides into a skip, and did I want them? I kept them in my loft, occasionally enjoying a look, but actually I had forgotten about them until we had a clear out upstairs.’
Charing Cross Rd
Bear St
Coventry St
Regent St
Earlham St
Long Acre
Dover St
Carnaby St
Carnaby St
Charing Cross Rd
Cranbourne St
Dover St
Perkins Rents
Great Windmill St
Brook St
Conduit St
Frith St
Drury Lane
Dean St
Garrick St
Great Windmill St
Archer St
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Alfred Daniels’ Murals
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Old Hammersmith Bridge by Alfred Daniels
When I met Alfred Daniels, the painter from Bow, almost the first thing he said to me was, ‘Have you seen my murals in Hammersmith Town Hall? I’m very proud of them.’ So it was with more than a twinge of regret when I went to see the murals for the first time, years since he died, realising I should have gone while Alfred was here to tell me about them.
Yet it proved an exhilarating experience to discover these pictures that declare themselves readily and do not require explanation. Five vast paintings command the vestibule of the old town hall, created with all the exuberance you might expect of a young painter fresh from the Royal College of Art in 1956.
On the south wall, three interlinked paintings show scenes on the riverbank at Hammersmith Mall, which was just across the lawn at the back of the Town Hall before the Great West Road came through. The first looks east, portraying rowers standing outside The Rutland Arms with Hammersmith Bridge in the background. The second painting looks south, showing rowers embarking in their sculls from a pontoon, while the third looks west, showing a Thames pleasure boat arriving at the pier. A walk along this stretch of river, reveals that these pictures are – in Alfred Daniels’ characteristic mode – composites of the landscape reconfigured, creating a pleasing and convincing panorama. In Alfred’s painting the river appears closer to how you know it is than to any literal reality.
These three pictures are flanked by two historical scenes from the early nineteenth century, showing old Hammersmith Bridge and the Grand Union Canal, adding up to an immensely effective series of murals which command the neo-classical thirties interior authoritatively and engagingly, without ever becoming pompous.
This must have once been an impressive spectacle upon arrival at Hammersmith Town Hall, after crossing the small park and then climbing the stairs to the first floor entrance, before they built the brutalist concrete extension onto the front in 1971. This overshadows its predecessor and offers a new low-ceilinged entrance hall on the ground floor which has all the charisma of a generic corporate reception. Yet this reconfiguration of the Town Hall has protected Alfred Daniels murals even if it has obscured them from the gaze of most visitors for the past forty years.
However, the murals can be viewed free of charge when the Town Hall is open and I recommend you pay a visit.. You just need to drop an email to arts@lbhf.gov.uk and make an appointment.
Painted by Alfred Daniels and John Mitchell in 1956, cleaned and restored by Alfred Daniels assisted by Vic Carrara and Robyn Davis, 1983
Mural on the west wall
At Hammersmith Pier
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At Old St Pancras Churchyard
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The Hardy Tree
As I arrived at Old St Pancras Churchyard, the Verger was sweeping leaves from the steps and she informed me there was a wedding taking place inside the church. Yet I was more than happy to explore this most ancient of central London churchyards for an hour while the nuptials were in progress.
The churchyard itself is upon a raised mound that is the result of all the hundreds of thousands of burials upon this ground which is claimed to be one of the earliest sites of Christian worship in London, recorded by the Maximilian Mission as already established by the year 324. Such is the proximity of St Pancras Station, you can hear the announcements from the platforms even as you wander among the tombs, yet an age-old atmosphere of tranquillity prevails here that cannot be dispelled by the chaos and cacophony of contemporary King’s Cross and St Pancras.
However, the railway has encroached upon the churchyard increasingly over the years and, in the eighteen-sixties, architect Arthur Blomfield, employed Thomas Hardy as his deputy, responsible for exhumations of the dead. Tombstones were arranged around an ash tree which has absorbed some of them into its trunk over time and acquired the name ‘The Hardy Tree,’ commemorating this unlikely employment for the young novelist whose subsequent literary works express such an inescapable morbidity.
Once the bride and groom emerged from the church door, the Verger ushered me in through the back and I was delighted by the intimate quality of the church interior, studded with some impressive old monuments. The Verger relished telling the tale of St Pancras, beheaded by the Emperor Diocletian in Rome in 304 at the age of fourteen for refusing to renounce his faith.
When the cloth had been removed from the altar after the ceremony, I was able to view the small sixth century altar stone, marked with five crosses of curious design, of which the only other examples are upon the tomb of Eithne, mother of St Columba, on the Hebridean island of Luing, dated to 567. A modest piece of Kentish rag stone, there is a legend this once served as an altar for St Augustine.
“We try to fall down every two hundred years,” explained the Verger breezily, drawing my attention to the alarming cracks in the wall and outlining the elaborate history of collapse and rebuilding that has produced the appealing architectural palimpsest you discover today.
Outside in the June sunshine, the newly-married couple were getting their wedding photographs taken, while rough sleepers slumbered among the graves just as the long-gone rested beneath the grass. A text carved nearby the entrance of the church reads “And I am here in a place beyond desire and fear,” describing the quality of this mysterious enclave in the heart of London perfectly.
The Vestry
St Pancras Coroners
Sir John Soane’s tomb of 1837 inspired Giles Gilbert Scott’s design for the telephone box
Baroness Burdett Coutts was responsible for the vast gothic memorial sundial
Mary Wollstonecraft, born in Spitalfields and buried in Bournemouth, but commemorated here with her husband William Godwin
The grave of Charles Dickens’ school teacher, William Jones, believed to be the inspiration for the ferocious Mr Creakle in David Copperfield. “By far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know … one of the worst tempered men perhaps that ever lived.”
Norman stonework uncovered in the renovation of 1848
The seventh century altar stone is incised with crosses of Celtic design
“O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!”
“We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
‘I know not which I am!’”
Thomas Hardy, The Levelled Churchyard (1882)
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Tony Jack, Truman’s Brewery Chauffeur
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“I was born in Balmoral Castle and I grew up in Windsor Castle …” Tony Jack told me proudly without bragging, “… they were both pubs in Canning Town.” It was a suitably auspicious beginning for an East End hero who was barely out of his teens before he joined the RAF and sent this picture home inscribed, “To Mother, Myself in a rear cockpit of a Harvard with the sun in my eyes. Love Tony.” Yet destiny had greater things in store for Tony, he was appointed to secret government work in Princes Risborough, where his sharp young eyes qualified him as an expert in photographic interpretation of aerial surveys, snooping on Jerry. If Tony spotted activity behind enemy lines, the information was relayed to our spies in the field who went to make a reconnaissance.
From there, young Tony was transferred to work in the Cabinet War Rooms deep beneath Whitehall where he barely saw daylight for weeks on end, taking solace in rooms lit with ultraviolet to induce the sensation of sunlight. Tony was involved in developing photographs of the blitz and making maps, but at the culmination of hostilities he was brought the document that ended the war, to photograph it and make fifty copies. With his outstanding eye for detail, Tony noticed that the date had been altered in ink from 7th May to 8th May 1945, and, with the innocent audacity of youth, Tony tentatively asked Winston Churchill if he would prefer this aberration photographically removed. “The Americans wanted the war to end on one date and the Russians wanted it to end on another,” growled the great man to the impertinent young whippersnapper in triumph, “But I got my way, May 8th!” And thus the correction duly remained in place upon the historic document.
When Tony told me these stories, as we sat drinking tea in a cafe in Spitalfields, I did wonder how he could possibly follow these astounding life experiences when the war ended, but the answer was simple. Tony got a job as a chaffeur driving a Rolls Royce for the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.
“There were seven of us and we were nicknamed the Black Crows on account of our black uniforms. We used to kick off the day by picking up the directors from railway stations and driving them to the brewery. During the day we used to drive them to and fro visiting pubs and there also was a certain private aspect, which we kept quiet about, taking their wives shopping. Most of the other chauffeurs had once driven delivery trucks for the brewery. They couldn’t tell you the names of the streets but they knew where all the pubs were, that’s how they navigated around London!”
“You couldn’t wish to work in a better environment than a brewery,” admitted Tony in rhapsodic tones, as he opened a worn plastic bag to show us his cherished cap badge and buttons that he keeps to this day. Then, caught in the emotion of the moment and experiencing a great flood of memories, Tony launched into a spontaneous eulogy about the brewery, which gained an elegaic lustre in the description.
He told me the name of the head brewer was Gun Boat Smith. He told me the brewery had two black London taxis for visiting pubs incognito, registration numbers HYL55353 & 4. He told me there were two chefs in the canteen, one named Harry was a woodcarver who carved fancy work for churches and the other was a glass engraver who could put a painting into a glass and copy it onto the surface. He told me that John Henry Buxton asked “What regiment were you in?” and when Tony revealed he was in the RAF, declared, “Well, never mind!” He told me that a man called Cyclops was responsible for the “finings” which filtered the beer, as well as repairing the bottling girls’ clogs and distributing pints of beer to the delivery men in the mornings. He told me that the phone number of John Henry Buxton’s country home was Ware 2, a source of endless amusement when you asked the operator to connect you. He told me that the brewery staff manned the roof with buckets of water when the great Bishopsgate Goods Yard fire of 1964 sent burning cinders drifting into the sky. He told me that the brewery had its own customs officer because beer was taxed as it was brewed in those days. He told me that there was always a cooper on call night and day to make repairs, in case a barrel of beer split in a pub. He told me that the dray horses sometimes got out at night and wandered around which terrified him because they were magnificent creatures. He told me that there was priest who worked in the electrical shop who would marry employees. He told me that there was a man who was solely responsible for all the uniform badges and buttons, who was TGWU representative and also the Mayor of Bethnal Green. He told me that there was a rifle range below Brick Lane which still exists today and the cleaners refused to go there alone because there were so many rats. He told me that the shire horses were all sent to a retirement home in Long Melford. He told me that the brewery organised Sports Days and Beanos on alternating Summers. He told me that the Sports Days were held at Higham Park, Chingford, where they brought in circus acts to entertain the children. He told me that the Beanos were at Margate. He told me that they hired two trains from Liverpool St to get them there, and a paddle steamer to take them on a trip over to Folkestone and back for a sit down dinner at Dreamland. He told me that there was always plenty of beer on the train coming back. He told me that they were wonderful days out. He told me that Truman’s were unique in the sense that they were self-sufficient, you had no need to go outside.
One day, Tony was candidly given advance notice by the chairman, while driving him the Rolls Royce, that the brewery was being sold to Grand Metropolitan and chauffeurs would no longer be required. So Tony switched to working as a security guard for many years. “I know every inch of the brewery,” he assured me authoritatively. Then in 1969, Tony became a cab driver which he continued to do until 2007. “I retired just before I was eighty. I was happy because I was driving around and it was all I wanted to do in life,” he confided to me with a lightness of tone, revealing endearing modesty and impressive stamina.
All the astonishing details of Tony Jack’s vibrant description of life at the brewery were whirling in my mind as we crossed Commercial St and walked down Brushfield St together in the Autumn sunlight, before shaking hands in Bishopsgate. And then he hopped on a bus to Clerkenwell, where he lived, quite the most sprightly octogenarian I have met. It must be something in the beer.
A studio portrait of Tony from the nineteen twenties.
As a young man Tony acquired the nickname “Thumbs up!”
Tony is in the centre with his head down, working on a photographic interpretation of aerial surveys of enemy territory, as part of secret government programme in Princes Risborough during World War II.
The tax disc of the Rolls Royce that Tony drove for the Truman Brewery in the nineteen fifties.
The eagle on the left was Tony’s cap badge, the THB his lapel badge, along with two sizes of buttons, all from his chauffeur’s uniform. The eagle on the right was a truck driver’s cap badge and the key fob was from an ad campaign, “Ben Truman has more hops!” They are all laid upon a letter dated 29th June 1889, analysing the chemical constituents of the beer, that Tony salvaged from a skip when Truman’s were throwing out their archive. It concludes, “I do not think the beer is at all more laxative than any Burton beer would be in this weather.”
John Henry Buxton invited the members of the Brewery Angling Club to clear the weed out of the river at his estate at Wareside, Hertfordshire, in return for letting them fish in it.
Tony’s membership card for the Truman Brewery Sports Club dated 1st March 1959.
Tony photographed his daughter Janet on the roof after a Christmas party in the nineteen fifties.
Tony’s last day as cab driver in 2007, he drove Janet up to the West End for a shopping trip.
Tony Jack
New portrait copyright © Jeremy Freedman
The Harvest Festival Of The Sea
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Frank David, Billingsgate Porter for sixty years
The Harvest Festival of the Sea will be held today at St Mary-at-Hill at 11am
Thomas à Becket was the first rector of St Mary-at-Hill in the City of London, the ancient church upon a rise above the old Billingsgate Market, where each year at this season the Harvest Festival of the Sea is celebrated – to give thanks for the fish of the deep that we all delight to eat, and which have sustained a culture of porters and fishmongers here for centuries.
The market itself may have moved out to the Isle of Dogs in 1982, but that does not stop the senior porters and fishmongers making an annual pilgrimage back up the cobbled hill where, as young men, they once wheeled barrows of fish in the dawn. For one day a year, this glorious church designed by Sir Christopher Wren is recast as a fishmongers, with an artful display of gleaming fish and other exotic ocean creatures spilling out of the porch, causing the worn marble tombstones to glisten like slabs in a fish shop, and imparting an unmistakably fishy aroma to the entire building. Yet it all serves to make the men from Billingsgate feel at home, in their chosen watery element – as photographer Ashley Jordan Gordon and I discovered when we went along to join the congregation.
Frank David and Billy Hallet, two senior porters in white overalls, both took off their hats – or “bobbins” as they are called – to greet us. These unique pieces of headgear once enabled the porters to balance stacks of fish boxes upon their heads, while the brim protected them from any spillage. Frank – a veteran of eighty-nine years old – who was a porter for sixty years from the age of eighteen, showed me the bobbin he had worn throughout his career, originally worn by his grandfather Jim David in Billingsgate in the eighteen-nineties and then passed down by his father Tim David.
Of sturdy wooden construction, covered with canvas and bitumen, stitched and studded, these curious glossy black artefacts seemed almost to have a life of their own. “When you had twelve boxes of kippers on your head, you knew you’d got it on,” quipped Billy, displaying his “brand new” hat, made only in the nineteen thirties. A mere stripling of seventy-three, still fit and healthy, Billy started his career at Christmas 1959 in the old Billingsgate market carrying boxes on his bobbin and wheeling barrows of fish up the incline past St Mary-at-Hill to the trucks waiting in Eastcheap. Caustic that the City of London revoked the porters’ licences after more than one hundred and thirty years – “Our traditions are disappearing,” he confided to me in the churchyard, rolling his eyes and striking a suitably elegiac autumnal note.
Proudly attending the spectacular display of fish in the porch, I met Eddie Hill, a fishmonger who started his career in 1948. He recalled the good times after the war when fish was cheap and you could walk across Lowestoft harbour stepping from one herring boat to the next. “My father said, ‘We’re fishing the ocean dry and one day it’ll be a luxury item,'” he told me, lowering his voice, “And he was right, now it has come to pass.” Charlie Caisey, a fishmonger who once ran the fish shop opposite Harrods, employing thirty-five staff, showed me his daybook from 1967 when he was trading in the old Billingsgate market. “No-one would believe it now!” he exclaimed, wondering at the low prices evidenced by his own handwriting, “We had four people then who made living out of just selling parsley and two who made a living out of just washing fishboxes.”
By now, the swelling tones of the organ installed by William Hill in 1848 were summoning us all to sit beneath Wren’s cupola and the Billingsgate men, in their overalls, modestly occupied the back row as the dignitaries of the City, in their dark suits and fur trimmed robes, processed to take their seats at the front. We all sang and prayed together as the church became a great lantern illuminated by shifting patterns of October sunshine, while the bones of the long-dead slumbered peacefully beneath our feet. The verses referring to “those who go down the sea in ships and occupy themselves upon the great waters,” and the lyrics of “For those in peril on the sea” reminded us of the plain reality upon which the trade is based, as we sat in the elegantly proportioned classical space and the smell of fish drifted among us upon the currents of air.
In spite of sombre regrets at the loss of stocks in the ocean and unease over the changes in the industry, all were unified in wonder at miracle of the harvest of our oceans and by their love of fish – manifest in the delight we shared to see such an extravagant variety displayed upon the slab in the church. And I enjoyed my own personal Harvest Festival of the Sea in Spitalfields for the next week, thanks to the large bag of fresh fish that Eddie Hill slipped into my hand as I left the church.
St Mary-at-Hill was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren in 1677
Senior fishmongers from Billingsgate worked from dawn to prepare the display of fish in the church
Fishmonger Charlie Caisey’s market book from 1967
Charlie Caisey explains the varieties of fish to the curious
Gary Hooper, President of the National Federation of Fishmongers, welcomes guests to the church
Frank David and Billy Hallet, Billingsgate Porters
Frank’s “bobbin” is a hundred and twenty years old and Billy’s is “brand new” from the nineteen thirties
Billy Hallet’s porter’s badge, now revoked by the City of London
Jim Shrubb, Beadle of Billingsgate with friends
The mace of Billingsgate, made in 1669
John White (President & Alderman), Michael Welbank (Master) and John Bowman (Secretary) of the Billingsgate Ward Club
Crudgie, Sailor, Biker and Historian
Dennis Ranstead, Sidesman Emeritus and Graham Mundy, Church Warden of St Mary-at-Hill
Senior Porters and Fishmongers of Billingsgate
Frank sweeps up the parsley at the end of the service
The cobbled hill leading down from the church to the old Billingsgate Market
Frank David with the “bobbin” first worn by his grandfather Jim David at Billingsgate in the 1890s
Photographs copyright © Ashley Jordan Gordon
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The Last Porters of Billingsgate Market
