George Cruikshank’s London Summer
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JULY 1838 – Flying Showers in Battersea Fields
Should you ever require it, here is evidence of the constant volatility of English summer weather, courtesy of George Cruikshank’s Comic Almanack published by Henry Tilt of Fleet St annually between 1835 & 1853, illustrating the festivals and seasons of the year for Londoners. (Click on any of these images to enlarge)
JUNE 1835 – At the Royal Academy
JUNE 1836 – Holidays at the Public Offices
JUNE 1837 – Haymaking
JULY 1835 – At Vauxhall Gardens
JULY 1836 – Dog Days in Houndsditch
JULY 1837 – Fancy Fair
AUGUST 1836 – Bathing at Brighton
AUGUST 1837 – Regatta
SEPTEMBER 1835 – Bartholomew Fair
SEPTEMBER 1837 – Cockney Sportsmen
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A Plaque For The Matchgirls
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Yesterday a blue plaque was unveiled by Anita Dobson in recognition of the heroic achievements of the Matchgirls at the former Bryant & May Match Factory, Bow Quarter, Fairfield Rd, Bow. Today Samantha Johnson outlines the story of her great-grandmother Sarah Chapman, who was one of the strike leaders.
Sarah Chapman (1862 – 1945)
My great-grandmother was born on 31st October in 1862 to Samuel Chapman and Sarah Ann Mackenzie. At the time of her birth, her father was employed as a Brewer’s Servant and was also known to have worked in the docks. The fifth of seven children, Sarah’s early years were spent at number 26 Alfred Terrace in Mile End but, by the time she was nine, the family had moved to 2 Swan Court (now the back of the American Snooker Hall on Mile End Rd), where they stayed for the next seventeen years. For a working class family at this time to stay in one place for such a long time was uncommon. Other evidence of the stability of the Chapman family is that Sarah and her siblings were educated, as they were listed as Scholars in the census and could all read and write.
At the age of nineteen, Sarah was working alongside her mother and her older sister, Mary, as a Matchmaking Machinist, and by 1888 she was an established member of the workforce at the Bryant & May factory in Bow. At the time of the Strike, Sarah is listed as working in the patent area of the business, as a Booker, and was on relatively good wages, which perhaps placed her in a position of esteem among other workers. She was certainly paid more than most and this may have been because of her position as a Booker, or perhaps because she just managed to avoid the liberal fines which were meted out by the employers.
There was a high degree of unrest in the factory due to the low wages, long hours, appalling working conditions and the unfair fines system, which caused the women at the factory to grow increasingly frustrated. External influences, particularly the Fabian Society, also provided an impetus for the Strike. Ultimately, 1400 girls and women marched out of the factory, en masse, on that fateful day of 5th July 1888. The next day some 200 girls marched from Mile End down to Bouverie St in the Strand to see Annie Besant, one of the Fabians and a campaigner for women’s rights. A deputation of three (my great-grandmother Sarah Chapman, Mrs Mary Cummings and Mrs Naulls) went into her office to ask for her support. Although Annie was not an advocate of strike action, she did agree to help them organise a Strike Committee.
“We’d ‘ave come out before only we wasn’t agreed”
“You stood up for us and we wasn’t going back on you”
The first meeting of the striking Matchgirls was held on Mile End Waste on 8th July and both the Pall Mall Gazette and The Star provided positive publicity. This was followed by meetings with Members of Parliament at the House of Commons. The Strike Committee was formed and the following Matchgirls were named as members: Mrs Naulls, Mrs Mary Cummings, Sarah Chapman, Alice Francis, Kate Slater, Mary Driscoll, Jane Wakeling and Eliza Martin.
Following further intervention by Toynbee Hall and the London Trades Council, the Strike Committee was given the chance to make their case. They met with the Bryant & May Directors and by 17th July, their demands were met and terms agreed in principle. It was agreed that:
- All fines should be abolished.
- All deductions for paint, brushes, stamps, etc., should be put an end to.
- The 3d. should be restored to the packers.
- The “pennies” should be restored or an equivalent advantage given in the system of payment of the boys who do the racking.
- All grievances should be laid directly before the firm, before any hostile action was taken.
- All the girls to be taken back.
It was also agreed that a union be formed, that Bryant & May provide a room for meals away from where the work was done and that barrows be provided to transport boxes, replacing the practice of young girls having to carry them on their heads. The Strike Committee put the proposals to the rest of the workforce and they enthusiastically approved. Thus the inaugural meeting of the new Union of Women Match Makers took place at Stepney Meeting Hall on 27th July and twelve women were elected, including Sarah Chapman.
An indicator of the belief her fellow workers put in Sarah’s ability, was her election as the first TUC representative of the Match Makers’ Union. Sarah was one of seventy-seven delegates to attend the 1888 International Trades Union Congress in London and at the 1890 TUC she is recorded as having seconded a motion.
On the night of the 1891 census, Sarah was still a Booker at the match factory and living with her mother in Blackthorn St, Bromley by Bow, but in December of that same year, she married Charles Henry Dearman, a Cabinet Maker. By this time she had ceased working at Bryant & May.
Sarah and Charles had their first child, Sarah Elsie in 1892. They had five more children, one was my grandfather, William Frederick, born in 1898 when they had moved to Bethnal Green. Sarah’s two youngest sons, William and Frederick lived with her, on and off, into the thirties and she lived out her years there, dying in Bethnal Green hospital on 27th November 1945 aged eighty-three. She was survived by three of her six children, Sarah, William and Fred.
Sarah was buried alongside five other elderly people in a pauper’s plot at Manor Park Cemetery. It was a sad end to a brave life filled with challenges, not least a leading role in a Strike that was the vanguard of the New Labour Movement and helped establish Trade Unionism in this country.
Sarah as a member of the Matchgirls Union Committee
Sarah with her husband Charles Henry Dearman
Sarah with her grandson, Frederick William
Sarah in later years
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In Old Deptford
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In Albury St
Today Contributing Writer, the distinguished historian, Gillian Tindall goes in search of old Deptford
In my distant childhood, Deptford, with its unfair resonance of ‘debt,’ figured to the outside world as a place of sinister poverty. On that south side of the Thames, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe sounded faintly exciting, with overtones of putting out to sea. Greenwich, just downriver, with its park, Palace and College, was a different world. But Deptford, lost in between, lodged in many people’s minds, and in children’s stories, as a classic London slum. Nor, of course, was this image helped by the severe bombing it suffered in World War Two nor by the dreary estates built by post-war planners.
Yet Deptford, long ago, was a place of fertile green water-meadows, facing the Thames and adjacent to a creek. Here Henry VIII established his Royal Dockyard, in the days when he was a popular young sovereign rather than an obese tyrant. Ships built in Deptford went out all over the world for the next three-and-a-half centuries. By Shakespeare’s time, the scattered country village that had been medieval Deptford had expanded into a riverside settlement. Well-to-do Londoners came down by river to drink there on summer evenings. The fact that one such evening ended in the mysterious death of Shakespeare’s fellow playwright ‘Kit’ Marlow gives a false impression – Deptford was the Maidenhead or Henley of that time, a gentlemanly place to reside, and remained so for the next two centuries.
Marlowe lies buried somewhere in the flowery churchyard of the ancient parish church of St Nicholas. Two generations later, a regular attender at the church was John Evelyn, land owner, man of letters, diarist and courtier (the equivalent of a modern high-ranking civil servant). Through marriage, Evelyn had acquired Sayes Court Manor House, the largest house in Deptford, and from here he went back and forth to visit Charles II in Whitehall palace, often on naval business. Yet wealth and privilege could not protect against an all-too-common grief, also buried in St Nicholas churchyard are three of Evelyn’s children who died young, including one particularly bright little boy over whom his father mourned much. Evelyn wrote in his diary of ‘our extreme sorrow,’ and that ‘This evening, after the service, was my baby buried near the tower with his brothers. All my dear children.’
Evelyn, a great horticulturalist, laid out a splendid garden at Sayes Court, with evergreen and hawthorn hedges and new tree-species imported from abroad. He was one of the first to understand the role of trees in keeping the environment clean and he advised a mass planting operation across London – advice which, unfortunately, was not taken. Late in life, when he and his wife had retired to the Evelyn family country seat at Wootton, in Surrey, he rented his house and gardens at Deptford to a series of tenants, most notably to Peter the Great, the Russian Czar, who wanted to study English ship-building in particular and English life in general. Peter the Great, in spite of some brutally medieval habits towards his enemies, real or supposed, saw himself as a great innovator and the one who was going to drag Russia into the West and the modern age. He was responsible for founding St Petersburg on the western edge of his vast country, and employed European architects to design its palaces.
A statue of Peter the Great, looking oddly elongated in a heavy European coat and a tricorn hat, stands today on an elevated platform on the Thames path not far from the site of Sayes Court, beside a new estate overlooking the river and Deptford creek. Inexplicably, he is flanked by a dwarf and an ornate empty chair in which passing walkers love to sit. The inscription states that he arrived in England in January 1698 and stayed in Evelyn’s house for four months – ‘This monument is erected near the Royal ship-yard where Peter the Great studied English science of ship-building. The monument is a gift from the Russian people and commemorates the visit of Peter the Great to this country in search of knowledge and experience.’
But exactly what experience? It is not mentioned that, during the months he was at Sayes Court, Peter confirmed the common British perception of Russians as a barbaric, backward people by doing a great deal of damage both to the house and the garden. In particular, it is recorded he trashed a number of Evelyn’s carefully tended hedgerows by driving through them for fun in a barrow. The Russian oligarch as hate-figure is clearly not a new phenomenon in this country.
The Royal Dockyard declined in importance in the nineteenth century with the advent of large new warships too big for the Thames, and was closed in 1869. Various uses were found for it and by the twentieth century, when its Tudor vestiges were gradually destroyed or buried, its final use was as a paper-wharf for International Newspapers. Today, under the name ‘Convoys Wharf,’ it is scheduled for redevelopment with high tower blocks, in which few of the flats will be ‘affordable’ in any real sense.
A vestige of the Sayes Court garden does remain. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Deptford was being covered in small terrace houses for dockers, the Evelyn family, who still owned the land, gave a piece of it to the local authority to create a public garden. It survives today, though a refuge for drunks now. Better tended than it was a few years back when I first discovered it, the garden is currently on the World Monument Fund’s list of endangered spaces – presumably because of the looming Wharf development. In the centre of the garden, surrounded by railings, stands a giant mulberry tree, its knotted limbs trailing on the ground. I am sure it dates from John Evelyn’s own high summer of planting, and is another for the Gentle Author’s short list of ancient London mulberries.
Towards the end of Evelyn’s life, the old church was substantially rebuilt, and a new, more elegant one, St Paul’s, just off Deptford High St, offered extra space for the district’s expanding population. A few rows of fine town houses went up also, including Albury St which was built on land belonging to the Evelyn family and was called after their country retreat. Fine brick, and an elegant variety of porches decorated with cherubs, angels, fruit and flowers, made these houses fit homes for the sea-captains, ship-builders and Honourable Company men who were the new affluent middle class of Deptford.
One side of Albury St alone remains as a precious survival in a district that has seen so much destruction through war and bone-headed planning decisions. This enclave at least is now being carefully looked after, while what were once the wastelands of abandoned dockside uses are filling up with tall buildings. Like it or not, regret it or not, Deptford is being hauled into twenty-first century London.
Deptford Dockyard, 1775
Albury St
Entrance to the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford, where Christopher Marlowe is buried
St Nicholas, Deptford, dates from the twelfth century
Door to St Nicholas
Charnel House at St Nicholas
Graves at St Nicholas
St Paul’s church by Thomas Archer, c.1720
Manze’s in Deptford High St
Wellbeloved, Butcher & Grazier
In Deptford High St
In Deptford High St
In Deptford High St
In Deptford Market
In Deptford Market
In Deptford Market
Peter the Great by Sir Godfrey Kneller
Peter the Great at Deptford Creek by Mikhail Shemyakin
John Evelyn, engraving by T. Bragg after Sir Godfrey Kneller (Courtesy Wellcome Library)
John Evelyn’s Mulberry at Sayes Court Garden
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A Few Diversions By John Claridge
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The Daily Message in E3, 1972
Taken between 1959 and 1982, each one of these East End pictures by John Claridge contains a diversion of some kind – either illustrating an activity that is incidental to the flow of life or presenting an observation that is itself a distraction. “These are small incidents, humdrum diversions like going to the hairdresser or the baths, not shattering moments but part of the life of the community all the same,” he assured me. Yet although these sly visual anecdotes may refer to marginal or quotidian experiences, they can sometimes reveal as much or more about the texture and tenor of their times than any news photo of the day.
John collected his observations of life out of a fascination to explore the strange poetry of existence, revealing his interest in reflections upon images seen through glass, his passion for lettering and design, and especially his delight in people. He takes pleasure in observing how they inhabit a place, and how they show their creativity when they strive to make themselves at home, even in the most unlikely or inopportune of circumstances.
Bridalwear shop, Spitalfields 1966. “Wherever you went at that time, there was always a bridal shop.”
Twenty past one? Spitalfields 1967. “You couldn’t design it better!”
American wrestler and trainer, Walthamstow Town Hall 1982. “They asked me to take the picture.”
Barbers, Spitalfields 1964. (note spelling of ‘closing’)
Accordion player, Spitalfields, 1970. “He was playing under an arch and the sound drifted around, it was wonderful.”
Corsetiere, Whitechapel 1961. “A man came up to me while I was doing this and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m taking a picture,’ I said. ‘There’s something wrong with you, lad,’ he replied.”
East Ham baths, E6 1961. “After Saturday morning football, we always went to East Ham baths to have a bath.”
Football in the street, Spitalfields 1959.
Sweet kiosk, Spitalfields 1967. “See my reflection in this picture. She was so proud. Afterwards, she and her friends came out to be photographed.”
Snack bar – cold drinks, Spitalfields 1982.
Boy on a rocking horse, E2 1982. “Look at the conditions he’s living in. The bars look like a prison and he’s got nowhere to go.”
At the 59 bikers’ club, E9 1973. Founded by Father William Shergold, biker priest, in 1959 to bring mods and rockers together.
Lady on the balcony, Spitalfields 1962. “Her diversion for the day was standing there and watching the world go by.”
Windmill seller, E2 1961.
Washing day, E14 1961. “I just came out of my girlfriend’s house and she said, ‘Look, it’s washday across the road.'”
Man with jobs poster, Spitalfields 1963. “I asked him, ‘Are you alright for a couple of bob?’ and he sat in the sun for me for a moment.”
Ear piercing, Spitalfields 1964. Is this ear piercing done to people over five years of age, or has the jeweller been piercing ears since five years of age?
Hotdog van, Spitalfields 1961.
Cup of tea, Spitalfields 1964. “Settled onto this old sofa in the market, enjoying his cup of tea, he looks like he should be wearing an eighteenth century wig and coat.”
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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So Long, Old Church Nursery School
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Guest Writer Jonathan Moules celebrates the remarkable history of a much-loved Stepney educational institution and the inspirational work of Bridget Cass, with pictures by Contributing Photographer Rachel Ferriman.
The end of term beckons for children across England. But for Stepney’s Old Church Nursery School, whose pioneering work has been encouraging the East End’s youngest pupils into formal learning for nigh on a century, July brings the end of an era.
Old Church opened in August 1930 – one of just two such institutions in London – to meet a growing need for formal children’s education because of women entering the workplace.
Its generously proportioned clapperboard classrooms are little changed from the day the nursery nurses, as well as teaching staff, welcomed their first three and four year olds, ensuring children were clean, nourished and healthy as well as ready to learn.
But from this September, Old Church will no longer be a standalone school. Instead it will be downsized to an adjunct teaching space for the standard nursery teaching provision at nearby Marion Richardson Primary School.
It is the end of an era too for Old Church’s chair of governors for the last three decades, Bridget Cass. She invited me over for one last tour of the site, during which she recalled how she first came to Old Church in the early nineties as a young parent and immediately fell in love with place on account of the straggly climbing tree that still provides refuge for curious young people.
“This tree was the first thing we saw, and the marvellous thing was that there were children in it,” Bridget says, pointing out how its boughs are still strong enough for today’s pupils to clamber over and hang from – which they do with gusto during break time.
“When I was growing up we had a reasonably sized garden and as a parent I felt it was very important that our children had trees to climb,” Bridget adds. “But my husband and I had moved to Mile End where we didn’t have that much outdoor space. When [my daughter] Rachel saw that tree, she loved it.”
After Bridget’s second child joined the school in 1991, she was asked to become a governor, quickly followed by a rapid – and unexpected – promotion to lead the team of trustees.
“They asked me to come on board in part because they were having difficulty finding governors,” Bridget recalls. “At my first meeting, the chair didn’t turn up and they asked me to chair. I’ve been doing it ever since.”
The Old Church site is a local secret, hidden behind postwar housing estates at the end of a cul-de-sac. But it is known by those that count: not just education experts but the many and varied local families – rich and poor, of all religions and none – that live cheek by jowl in this corner of the East End.
One of the great achievements of Old Church has been to bring these families together. The school aspires to make Old Church “a safe, joyful place where everyone is known and valued as a unique individual; and where needs are acknowledged, accepted and met”.
This is obvious from the range of parents with young ones queueing at the gate at the start of the school day, or gathered around the teachers in each of the classrooms.
One of the joys of her time as governor, Bridget adds, has been to see the crossover between different communities as a result of parents feeling encouraged to be themselves, then getting to know one another as neighbours in need of each another’s support.
“I remember once at a parents’ coffee morning where an obviously middle class parent was talking with someone clearly unable to speak much English and said that they would take them to the shops after the meeting was over. There were huge differences between these people but they saw that they were similar in that they were all having difficulties as parents.”
Such cultural interchange – alongside the children’s polite and considerate behaviour to one another – was noted by Ofsted in its most recent report, in which it restated the outstanding rating that Old Church has held since 2012.
Yet Old Church is more than just a place of learning. From its inception, the school employed nursery nurses and later special educational needs support staff to work alongside the classroom teachers, ensuring that developmental issues could be spotted and addressed at this formative stage.
This kind of facility would be welcomed in most communities around the country, but in Stepney it is particularly important.
“This year we have, out of almost eighty children, over thirty who have some sort of delay, some of them severe, including children with visual impairment,” Bridget says.
“All of these children need to be assessed and supported appropriately. We therefore need a highly skilled staff team.”
This concern for the child’s whole development, in addition to the concept of learning through exploration, goes back to the original school design, which included drying, lavatory and bathing rooms plus a medical inspection room, in addition to the classroom.
Like other state schools in Tower Hamlets, there was a period where Old Church was in need of significant improvement. That changed in the nineties thanks largely to the Labour government elected in 1997, but also because support came from the local authority.
“What I am really proud of is Tower Hamlets,” Bridget says, adding that it was “the most extraordinary story” of a turnaround in educational attainment.
“When I first started as a governor, I would go to meetings and people would say wouldn’t it be good to get Tower Hamlets up to the national average for child attainment. That has been transformed in my thirty years as governor. Tower Hamlets is now way ahead of the national average and other local authorities wonder how they can be as good as us.”
Changes in central government funding for education since the coalition government was elected in 2010 have made finding this money to maintain standards increasingly difficult. While Tower Hamlets continues to perform above most other local authorities in London as well as the rest of England, the way education funding has been redistributed nationally has meant that the writing has been on the wall for a while at Old Church.
Before the decision to amalgamate Old Church with Marion Richardson, Tower Hamlets had already cut the number of places it would fund at Old Church. This has meant halving staff numbers over the last two years, from twenty-six to thirteen posts.
“What we lose by going into a primary [school] is that the head there, quite rightly, will be thinking about how to make these kids into ones that are academically prepared for reception or year one. The risk is that in doing this they will miss what we can spot at Old Church because of the people we employ in addition to teachers,” Bridget says.
“When my daughter started at Old Church, she liked to play with this toy that enabled children to make electrical circuits. There was this one boy who worked alongside her who could wire up a circuit board like there was no tomorrow. My daughter could wire it up to make one bell ring but he could make all the bells ring at once.
“That boy couldn’t read when he left Old Church but he knew he could do something.”
Bridget says she will find other ways to serve the community after Old Church, including as a member of St Dunstan’s Church, helping to stage events such as the recent Jubilee party in the churchyard. However, Bridget is clearly still passionate about supporting education and urges others to get involved in their local schools.
“It is the end of an era for me and I have learned more than I ever thought I would have done. I have learnt about managing people and about how to win battles with borough officials to try to make things work. But most importantly I have learnt about what really matters to people by getting an insight into my community.
“Every thinking person should be involved in education.”
Bridget Cass, Chair of the Governors for thirty years
Old Church Nursery School
Pupils from the thirties
The climbing frame among trees
Pupils from the thirties
‘I have learned more than I ever thought I would have done’ – Bridget Cass
Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman
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Danny Tabi, Furrier
Danny Tabi is one of the many local people you will meet on my tour. Tickets are available this weekend and throughout July, so come along and let me show you Danny’s old haunts.
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At six yesterday morning, Brick Lane was empty of people but Danny Tabi, the last furrier in Spitalfields was already at work when I arrived at Gale Furs. When Danny started in 1963, hundreds worked in the fur trade and the streets thronged with workers from all the different garment industries making their way to work at six, but now there is just Danny.
Today Danny just does repairs and – in response to the controversial nature of the trade – works from an undisclosed address. Others who merely import furs call themselves furriers, but Danny is the only one still working here with a lifetime’s expertise, at an occupation that must surely rate as one of the oldest known to mankind. I sat alone with Danny in the empty workshop at Gale Furs as the sun rose over Whitechapel and he told me his story.
“I was walking down Fournier St looking for a job one day and above the Market Cafe was a furrier, he interviewed me and said could I start on Monday. So I got a job starting the next week. Then, as I came out of there and walked back towards Brick Lane along Fournier St, when I got to Gale furs at number 8, I asked if they had any vacancies. The proprietor, Solly Shamroth, said “yes” and I could start the following day. So I went there rather than the other place and this was how my association started with Gale Furs. If I had turned left rather than right that day in Fournier St, my life would have been different.
I started at the firm, working with a guy called Max Ross, as a nailer. That’s a person that used to shape the furs by stretching them when they were wet. I picked up the nails off the floor and dampened the skins for him, then I used to go downstairs and pick up the needles from between the cracks in the floorboards with a magnet – nothing was wasted. In those days when you started in a firm like that you did everything, swept floors, did errands and got the cheese rolls too. Also on Friday my job was to clean three cars!
I could tell you a million stories of the street and the customers, and all the characters. Everyone had their special way of doing things. Morrie Klass, who taught me how to cut, he turned up for work in detachable collars, immaculately turned out, dapper like a city gent. He read The Guardian and The Times and spoke perfect Queen’s English. Maxie Ross, the nailer, he was a chain smoker always with a cigarette or a cigar. He used to leave a pint of milk on the window sill until it had congealed for a week and drank it sour because he loved it that way. He picked up nails and pieces of string and made use of it. He couldn’t walk past something he could use. One time, he had to go to a funeral but he had no proper black tie, so he wore a bow tie! Maxie was champion ballroom dancer, and he and Morrie won competitions in the ballrooms. That’s where Maxie met his wife, and his son used to play drums for Joe Loss. That was how I got to go to West End clubs because he got complimentary tickets and passed them onto me as a young lad of sixteen and seventeen.
Along the way I learnt all my skills and, as the factory started dwindling in workers, I found myself taking the places of the people who had left. People just retired but no-one came in to the trade, instead they were encouraged to go into office work.When you couldn’t replace them, you had to do certain things yourself. I found myself doing more cutting, making and sewing too. I learnt my trade during the sixties and seventies, then I started using my skills in the late seventies and eighties. During the sixties when there were eighteen people working in the furriers – it was a beautiful thing – turning out coats, collars, cuffs, stoles and hats, you name it we made it. It wasn’t just the work, it was the atmosphere.
Every single time you make a garment, it’s different because fur is a living thing. You work from scratch, one skin at a time, every time – when you match up pieces, the fur has to be same length. It’s definitely an art, you can’t explain what you did from arriving in the morning to going home at night. I’ve enjoyed my work over the years. I made a white collar from fake fur for Princess Diana. I’ve worked for lords and ladies. Katy Price is wearing one of my coats at present, and Kate Moss and Jemima Khan both have pieces of my work. They go to the West End stores to buy stuff but we make them here.
I was born in 136 Brick Lane in the attic in a one room flat, my mother lived there with me and my brother Ray. We weren’t brought up in luxury. At one point we lived in a hostel in Cable St because housing wasn’t available to mixed race families. I’ve worked since I left school, I never claimed benefits and I can count on my two hands the days off. I must be one of the longest-serving people in Brick Lane, I’ve always worked here.
I love walking down Brick Lane at five thirty in the morning, I can hear echoes from the past of when I walked down there suited and booted. I get emotional. People have moved away but I have always been drawn to the area. This used to be the dregs here, but here’s nothing wrong with Brick Lane. I’m pleased to see lots of young people come now. I pop out to get something and there’s crowds of young people. It’s incredible.”
Danny worked for Gale Furs for thirty years before he took it over, and now he is the proprietor and sole employee. Leaving the factory premises at 8 Fournier St in 1994 (it has become a private house now), today Danny works from a small nondescript second floor space on Whitechapel High St. On one side are the rails of coats and other pieces that have come in for renovation and repair, with prime garments displayed upon stands as superlative examples of the furrier’s art, and on the opposite side is the work table, pierced with infinite lines of little holes created when Danny transfers the pattern to the skins. Everywhere, scraps of fur are piled and paper patterns hang in sheaves from the wall.
Danny is justifiably proud of his skill and accomplishments and retains an appealing enthusiasm, shrewd yet bright. I was fascinated to watch Danny work at his cutting table, displaying natural dexterity, confidence and love of what he does, using all the tools that have always been with the company, many of which are a hundred years old or more, but still serviceable and in fact perfectly suited to the job. I felt privileged to be there in this sanctum and to understand that Danny extended his trust and welcome to me.
“It’s going to die a death” he declared without any regret, explaining that the Chinese are now the whole world’s furriers, as he took me through all the various tools of his trade demonstrating the purpose and telling the story for each one. A new world opened to me as Danny outlined the enormous number of processes and techniques that meet in the creation of garments of fur. We kept eye contact, like teacher and pupil, as he took me through what it takes to make a fur coat that might require seven weeks work. Picking up the tools, he mimed how he used them, specifying each of the distinctive requirements of the job and sometimes losing words when there were none to describe the methods of how you work with fur, and I had simply to follow his expert demonstration.
Today, Danny does all the different jobs and possesses all the skills of the eighteen staff that once worked for Gale Furs. He is widely respected for his talent and forty-seven years of experience at the high-end of an exclusive luxury trade. No-one is learning from Danny and, irrespective of your feelings about the origin of fur, there is an undeniable poignancy about the culture of the furrier which is an intricate refined expression of a certain vein of human ingenuity, with its own language, history and tools, and of which Danny is now the last exponent in a place where once so many people pursued this ancient trade.
The tool at the top is for stretching skins. Danny has used these scissors his entire career, they have a perfect balance and silken movement, and are over a hundred years old.
These irons which Danny uses as weights are over a century old too.
Newly acquired rolls of the highest quality silk lining, dated last day of December 1948.
Danny uses this machine from the Fournier St factory, the cloth with pins on it has been there since before he started in the trade. Note the Bishopsgate phone number carved into the wooden base on the right.
The tool on the left is a homemade device for snapping a razor into two triangular blades, it works perfectly. The other two are stretching blocks for stretching skins into shape, the one in the centre is marked with its owner’s initials.
An old weaver’s stool of traditional design that Danny uses when he sits at his sewing machine.
The magnet Danny used to pick up pins from the floor when he started work at Gale Furs in Fournier St in 1963.
The Custom House Is Saved
Tickets are available for my tour this coming weekend and throughout July.
Click here to book your ticket for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS
Custom House by Robert Smirke, 1825, with elements by David Laing, 1817
I am delighted to report that, further to the Public Inquiry into the future of the Custom House in the City of London, the Planning Inspector has refused permission for conversion to a boutique hotel. Significantly, this verdict contradicts Historic England’s disappointing approval of the hotel scheme.
The Planning Inspector’s decision paves the way for this magnificent building and the waterfront to become public spaces for cultural use in the manner of Somerset House. Thank you to all the readers to who wrote to the Planning Inspectorate in January urging the rejection of the boutique hotel and contributing to this happy outcome.
Meanwhile, the Judicial Review into Tower Hamlets Council’s approval of the Truman Brewery Shopping Mall took place at the High Court this week. We will publish the verdict here as soon as it is given.
One day, I walked down from Spitalfields to the Custom House. For years, I was unaware of the nature of this enormous austere building which presents an implacable front of Portland stone to the Thames between the Tower of London and old Billingsgate Market. Once I understood its purpose, then its commanding position over the Pool of London became evident.
For more than seven hundred years, this is where all cargoes passing through the Port of London were declared and duties paid, as well as serving as a passport office for migrants, registering upon arrival and departure. Perhaps no building is as central to our history as a seafaring nation than the Custom House. In recent years, we have come to re-evaluate the morality of the creation of Empire and the wealth it delivered. London was the financial capital of the system of slavery and the centre of the sugar trade, and the Custom House was part of this.
The evolution of the Custom House through the centuries follows the growth of Britain’s status as a trading nation, which makes this a pertinent moment to reflect upon the history of the building and the legacy it embodies.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the epic Long Room – claimed to be the longest in Europe – at the heart of the Custom House was renowned as a wonder in its own right. Londoners came to observe the variety of races of traders from across the globe who attended to fulfil their obligations in the form of tariffs and taxes.
When Geoffrey Chaucer worked as Comptroller of the Customs of Wools, Skins and Tanned Hides in the Custom House, constructed by John Churchman in 1382, duties had formerly been collected since 1203 at Wool Quay just to the east. Tudor expansionism was reflected in an enlarged Custom House of 1559, destroyed a century later by the Great Fire.
Afterwards, the rebuilding of the Custom House was the first priority and it was Christopher Wren who established the pattern of the central Long Room surrounded by smaller offices, which has been maintained in the subsequent buildings each larger than the one before. It is a template that has been replicated in Custom Houses around the world.
Wren’s Custom House was destroyed by fire in 1717, initiating a series of ill-fated replacements that suffered multiple calamities. The next Custom House, designed by Thomas Ripley, caught fire in 1814, resulting in an explosion of gunpowder and spirits that dispersed paperwork as far as the Hackney Marshes. Simultaneously, the unfinished replacement, designed by David Laing, foundered when builder John Peto died unexpectedly leaving the project with insufficient financial backing.
Within two years of completion, Laing’s new Custom House developed structural problems, revealed when the ceiling of the Long Room partially collapsed in 1824. Canny architect Robert Smirke advised occupants to move out of the Long Room two days before it fell down and undertook an investigation which exposed shoddy workmanship and unstable riverfront foundations done on the cheap.
Unsurprisingly, Smirke was employed to rebuild and repair the Custom House, and he replaced the entire central section containing the Long Room in 1825. It is Smirke’s sober sensibility that prevails today, incorporating Laing’s east and west wings into an authoritative frontage of uniformity with an institutional restraint in embellishment and a spare, sombre proportion throughout.
For decades, the Custom House has been inaccessible to the public which is why a building of such central significance has become relatively unnoticed, yet it is publicly-owned. Now Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs has vacated it and it has been leased to an offshore property developer based in the Bermuda tax haven. Their rejected planning application was for an unsympathetic conversion to a luxury hotel that was destructive to the fabric of the grade I listed building, erasing its meaning and significance.
Meanwhile, SAVE Britain’s Heritage and The Georgian Group have prepared an imaginative alternative scheme which takes advantage of its spectacular location. The Long Room should be returned as a space for Londoners and south-facing quayside opened for permanent public access with riverside cafes, restaurants and bars, like a square in Venice.
The obvious precedents of Somerset House and Tate Modern demonstrate how the Custom House could be put successfully to public use again.
Christopher Wren’s Custom House
“The Custom House, in the uppermost of which is a magnificent room running the whole length of the building. On this spot is a busy concourse of nations who pay their tribute towards the support of Great Britain. In front of this building, ships of three hundred and fifty tons burthen can lie and discharge their cargoes.” From The Microcosm of London by Augustus Pugin & Thomas Rowlandson 1805 (Image courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Thomas Ripley’s Custom House from The Microcosm of London by Augustus Pugin & Thomas Rowlandson, 1805
David Laing’s Custom House, 1817
Plan of Laing’s Custom House
“Between London Bridge and the Tower, and – separating it from the Thames – a broad quay that was for long almost the only riverside walk in London open to the public, is the Custom House. Five earlier buildings on the same site were destroyed by fire, and the present structure was erected in 1814-17, the fine facade being designed by Sir R. Smirke. Some 2,000 officials are employed at the Custom House, and in its famous Long Room alone -190 ft by 66 ft – eighty clerks are habitually engaged. This is not surprising, for the trade of the Port of London is by far the greatest of any port in the world. The building, which is entered from Lower Thames St, contains an interesting Smuggling Museum.”
From The Queen’s London: a Pictorial & Descriptive Record of the Streets, Buildings, Parks & Scenery of the Great Metropolis, 1896
Custom House c. 1910 (Image courtesy LAMAS Collection, Bishopsgate Institute)
Boundaries of the parishes of All Hallows by the Tower and St Dunstan in the East, marked on the river wall which was designed by John Rennie, 1819
The Lower Thames St frontage with the main entrance
The Custom House as it appeared before the Great Fire by Wenceslas Hollar, 1647
