Carol Burns, Dogsbody
I was shocked when Carol Burns told me she was a dogsbody because I could not believe it of such an astute woman. “I am surrounded by men telling me what needs to be done,” she confided to me with a hint of theatrical affront, speaking just loud enough for the males in the vicinity to overhear and raising one eyebrow with cool irony. “In the end, it’s easier for me to do what they ask, just for the sake of a quiet life,” she added, wagging a cigarette with a sweet smile of weary compliance.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that Carol is an example of oppressed womankind – you may rest assured she can hold her own in any situation. The truth is that Carol can afford such a self-deprecating quip because she is unquestionably in charge at C.E. Burns Ltd, her father’s waste paper business, still operating from Bacon St where her great-grandfather John Burns started in 1864.
In the blue Micra parked at the kerb, once sat Carol’s ninety-six-year old dad, Charlie Burns. A legendary East End waste paper merchant and boxing entrepreneur, his entire life had been enacted on Bacon St and he could not keep away, observing the ongoing saga from his discreet vantage point in the passenger seat, interrupted only by greetings from passersby. Until he died in 2012, Carol brought Charlie here every day, keeping one eye on him while greeting customers and making sales of secondhand furniture, carpet tiles and job lots of toiletries and fertilizer.
Whenever there is a lull, Carol retreats to her strategically placed garden shed, lined with family photos, where she can snatch a moment’s peace to gather her thoughts before negotiating the next bulk sale of toilet rolls. It was here that I joined Carol on a slow afternoon while she reflected upon her half century on Bacon St.
“My brother Edward told me, when I was eighteen, that I’d still be here at forty and I’m sixty-seven now. I stayed because of my dad, and I’m quite happy with what I’m doing. I don’t even think any more about what else I might have done. You meet different people every day. I walk down the Bethnal Green Rd and the traders in the market all know me.
My dad’s mum, Alice, died on 29th March 1952 and I was born that June – I was the one that lived out of a pair of twins. And I always thought that she died for me to be born. I was born at home in Redmill House, Headlam St, Whitechapel, and I came down here to Bacon St at eight years of age. When I left school at sixteen in 1964, I came here to work, I sat and answered the phones. I came down each day around six to join the boys for a proper breakfast, before they went off to collect waste paper at nine thirty.
We used to keep a horse and cart then, and we had three geese to act as guard, they were worse than any guard dog if they went for you. But then someone reported them and they were taken away. We only had them because somebody asked us to take care of them and never came back. It was better that what it is now, you had a lot more trade even though it was on a smaller site. People was happier. Nobody had to worry about what they had, because they didn’t have anything!
We moved to Sharon Gardens when I was fifteen and I got married for the first time when I was eighteen. Then I separated and moved back to Sharon Gardens, until I got married again and moved to Bethnal Green – I only moved across the Cambridge Heath Rd to go from E1 to E2, when I moved into Canrobert St in 1978, and I’ve been there ever since.
My dad found something you could sell and then others followed, but he was the leader in our eyes. This has always been our family business. My sister used to work down the lane before me, and my mum worked Wednesdays and Fridays, and my brothers were always on the vans. There’s seven or eight of us altogether.
Everything’s negotiable here, because if we a stuck a price on it, we’d be gone years ago. We have a laugh, we have a joke with our customers, we give a little and they give a little, then you meet in the middle and they buy it. And they tell their friends, and they come along too.
It’s my life and it’s been a good life. I get by through talking. We are the East Enders that stayed in the East End, not some that moved out to Ilford. We’re not going anywhere. We’re not out to impress. We don’t buy mansions or drive expensive cars, we are how we are. We don’t want the champagne lifestyle, we want lemonade. We’re just proud to still be here.”
Carol is one of a family of innovators, recycling waste paper for over a hundred and fifty years, before the notion of recycling became virtuous. Today the Burns family are patrons of the arts and you will find a constantly changing gallery of street art outside their Bacon St premises thanks to Carol’s enlightened generosity – “They’ve got to start somewhere,” she says cheerily.
Carol takes pleasure in all her negotiations as an opportunity to exercise her considerable skills of rhetoric, and the codes of civility and respect that attend these conversations are close to heart of what this old family business is about. It presumes a society in which everyone can talk to each other as equals, based upon mutual respect, and Carol delights to tell me of those customers to whom she says they can pay her later, who invariably do. Shrewd and without sentiment, Carol Burns runs her family enterprise based upon assuming the best rather than the worst of people.
Carol Burns in her shed lined with family memories
Charlie and Carol Burns, snapped a few years ago in their beloved Bacon St warehouse
Carol’s father Charlie Burns in the car where he sat each day on Bacon St – at ninety-five years old, he was the oldest man on Brick Lane.
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Spitalfields Market In The Eighties
Thirty years have passed since the Fruit & Vegetable Market which had operated since 1638 left Spitalfields and now it has passed into legend. Yet I am frequently regaled with tales of the characters who inhabited this colourful lost world that has receded in time as the old market and its attendant buildings have been altered and rebuilt.
So you can imagine my delight when Stefan Dickers, Archivist at Bishopsgate Institute, showed me this photo album of portraits of market traders from the eighties, crammed with such vivid personalities it resembles a series of stills from a lost BBC comedy series of the era.
The fat album with gilt edges comes with its own box and a lock and key. Inside, a letter of dedication explains that it was presented by the Spitalfields Market Tenants Association to Charles Lodemore in 1987 upon the occasion of his retirement after thirty years as Clerk & Superintendent to the market. The photograph above shows the view across the Market from his office.
It was Marion Bullock, Charles Lodemore’s daughter, who presented the album to the Bishopsgate Institute. We do not know who took these characterful pictures and very few of the subjects are named, so I call upon my readers in the London fruit and vegetable business to come forward and help us identify these portraits.
Jimmy Neale on the phone
David Kelsall and Harry Craddock
Nicky Hammond with Roy Posner, man on phone
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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At Goldsmiths’ Hall
The Leopard is the symbol of the Goldsmiths’ Company
Whenever I walk through the City to St Paul’s, I always marvel at the great blocks of Hay Tor granite which form the plinth of this building on the corner of Gresham St and Foster Lane. Goldsmith’s Hall has stood upon this site since 1339 and the current hall is only the third incarnation in seven hundred years, which makes this one of the City’s most ancient tenures.
The surrounding streets were once home to the goldsmiths’ industry in London and it was here they met to devise a system of Assay in the fifteenth century, so that the quality of the precious metal might be assured through “Hallmarking.” The origin of the term refers to the former obligation upon goldsmiths to bring their works to the Hall for Assaying and marking and, all these years later, Goldsmiths’ Hall remains the location of the Assay Office. The leopard’s head – which has always been the mark of the London Assay Office – recalls King Richard II, whose symbol this was and who granted the company its charter in 1393.
Passing through the austere stone facade, you are confronted by a huge painting of 1752 – portraying no less than six Lord Mayors of London gazing down at you with a critical intensity. You are impressed. From here you walk into the huge marble lined stairwell and ascend in accumulating awe to the reception rooms upon the first floor, where the glint of gold is everywhere. The scale of the Livery Hall is such that you do not comprehend how a room so vast can be contained within such a restricted site, while the lavish panelled Drawing Room in the French style with its lush crimson carpet proposes a worthy stand-in for Buckingham Palace in many recent films, and exists just on the right side of garish.
A figure of St Dunstan greets you at the top of the stairs, glowing so golden he appears composed of flame. A two thousand year old Roman hunting deity awaits you the Court Room, dug up in the construction in 1830. A marble bust of Richard II broods upon the landing, sceptical of your worthiness to enter the lofty company of the venerable bankers and magnates whose names adorn the board recording wardens stretching back to the fourteenth century. In every corner, portraits of these former wardens peer out imperiously at you, swathed in dark robes, clutching skulls and holding their council. I was alone with my camera but these empty palatial rooms are inhabited by multiple familiar spirits and echo with seven centuries of history.
‘I always marvel at the great blocks of Hay Tor granite which form the plinth of this building’
St Dunstan is the patron saint of smiths
The four statues of 1835 by Samuel Nixon represent the seasons of the year
Staircase by Philip Hardwick of 1835
William IV presides
The figure of St Dunstan holding tongs and crozier was carved in 1744 for the Goldsmiths’ barge
Dome over the stairwell
Richard II who granted the Goldsmiths their charter in 1393
The Court Room
Philip Hardwick’s ceiling in imitation of a seventeenth century original
Roman effigy of a hunting deity dug up in 1830 during the construction of the hall
The Drawing Room
Clock for the Turkish market designed by George Clarke c.1750
Eleven experts worked for five months to make the Wilton carpet
Ormolu candelabra of 1830 in the Drawing Room
The Drawing Room, 1895
Mirror in the Livery Hall
The Livery Hall
The second Goldsmiths’ Hall, 1692
The current Goldsmiths’ Hall, watercolour by Herbert Finn 1913
Benn’s Club of Alderman, 1752 – containing six Lord Mayors of London
Join a tour booked through The Goldsmiths’ Company or attend the Goldsmiths’ Fair held annually each autumn.
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At Sandys Row Synagogue
Author and artist Rachel Lichtenstein writes about Sandys Row Synagogue, accompanying Morley Von Sternberg‘s photographs of one of Spitalfields’ magnificent hidden wonders.
There were once nearly one hundred and fifty synagogues operating in East London, yet today Sandys Row is the last functioning Ashkenazi synagogue in Spitalfields, situated at the heart of the former Jewish East End. Dutch Jewish migrants, who began arriving in London from Amsterdam in the 1840s, established the synagogue in 1854. They were economic migrants seeking a better life, rather than refugees fleeing persecution like the thousands of Ashkenazi Jews who came after them in the 1880s from the Pale of Settlements.
The majority of the Dutch Jews settled in a small quarter of narrow streets in Spitalfields known as the Tenterground. They continued to practise the trades they had bought with them from Holland, which were predominately cigar making, diamond cutting and polishing, and slipper and cap making. Many small workshops were established and businesses passed down through generations.
This small, distinctive, tight-knit Dutch Jewish community of a few hundred had their own traditions and customs which were different from other Ashkenazi Jewish groups. To the frustration of the more established Anglo-Jewish population living in London at the time, the Chuts (as they were known locally) refused to join any of the larger existing synagogues. They wanted their own establishment.
In the early years of the community, they met in a house on White’s Row which served as a makeshift house of prayer, while for festivals and high holy days they rented Zetland Hall in Mansell St. In 1854, fifty families from this community formed the Society for Comfort of the Mourners, Kindness, and Truth, which originally functioned as a burial and mutual aid society and later became a way of raising funds to purchase their own building. By 1867, the Society had amassed enough money to acquire the lease on a former Huguenot Chapel in Sandys Row, a small side street in Spitalfields. The chapel was particularly suitable to adapt into a synagogue because it had a balcony (where women worship in many orthodox synagogues) and was on an East-West axis (Jewish people in this country pray facing east towards Jerusalem).
The community employed Nathan Solomon Joseph, one of the most famous synagogue architects of the time, to remodel the chapel. He kept many original features of the Georgian interior, including the roof and the balcony and added a new three-storey extension onto the building, creating a vestry and accommodation for the rabbi and caretaker. He also designed a beautiful mahogany ark, which can still be seen recessed into the eastern wall of the building framed by neo-classical columns. Since it was consecrated in 1870 with ‘an immense throng of Jewish working men assembled – with devotion, enthusiasm and solemn demeanor – to join in dedicating the humble structure to the worship of God’ Sandys Row Synagogue has never closed its doors.
Apart from some pine wood paneling, which was added in the fifties along with some pine pews, the synagogue today looks much the same as it did when it opened in the nineteenth century. It was described in the Jewish press in 1870 as ‘a sacred place…simple, yet charming,’ a building that ‘invites the worshipper to religious meditation.’ The same holds true for the interior of Sandys Row today, it is an oasis of calm from the bustle of the City outside. The building still evokes the sense of awe and quiet meditation described by the journalist who witnessed the consecration ceremony nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.
During the last few years, I have fallen in love with the place and its unique history, which is connected to my own family heritage. My paternal grandparents were Polish Jewish migrants who met in Whitechapel in the thirties and married at the nearby Princelet St Synagogue.
I have been collecting oral histories of past and present members of Sandys Row. We have recorded interviews at member’s homes in Pinner, Golders Green, Redbridge and other places on the outskirts of London, where most of the former Sandys Row community now live, as well as locally with the few elderly members who remain in East London. These people spoke of a neighbourhood once bursting with life, filled with kosher butchers, bewigged women, friendly societies and Yiddish speaking traders. They told of a time when there was a synagogue or house of prayer on nearly every street in the area and the vicinity of Sandys Row was filled with Jewish shops, workshops and thousands of stalls from Petticoat Lane.
‘Everybody was so friendly, you could leave your doors open. Mum left a jug of milk on the table so the neighbours could come in and help themselves,’ recalled Minnie Jacobson. She also spoke of visiting the baths in Goulston St, ‘Three times a week, Mummy would take me over. You had this green soap. You had room numbers and if the temperature wasn’t right, you’d call out: “Hot water number 9,” or “Cold Water for number 7.”
All of our interviewees had fond memories of Sandys Row Synagogue, some like Pamela Freedman and board member Rose Edmands are directly related to the Dutch founding members. ‘It was a family shul, they used to call it the Dutch shul. All my late husband’s family were members. He was the president, his uncle was the president, I think the grandfather was president,’ said Pamela.
Rose, whose original Dutch surname was Engelsman, remembered high holy days as a child: ‘There used to be the wardens who sat in the box in front of the bimah (reading desk) with top hats on. We used to have a great time on Simchat Torah (A Jewish holiday celebrating the conclusion of the annual cycle of Torah readings) where we’d have apples and flags and march around the bimah.’ Her entire family were members, ‘my great aunts used to sit in the front row and my mother’s generation sat in the row behind, and we kids sat in the back. And, now I sit in the front row – there’s nobody. So the reminder of time passing is very poignant there.’ I loved hearing their stories of this lost world.
The current president of Sandys Row, Harvey Rifkind, told me ‘during the fifties and sixties, the synagogue flourished. On Shabbat there were one hundred to two hundred people there and on the high holy days you could not get a seat. People literally sat on the floor in the aisles.’
Today it is almost impossible to get any sense of a Jewish presence in the neighbourhood. Spitalfields has changed beyond recognition but Sandys Row Synagogue remains as both a reminder of a bygone era and a living example of Jewish culture and religion, where every weekday the building is open for afternoon prayers.
Photographs copyright © Morley Von Sternberg
Rachel Lichtenstein‘s books include Estuary, Diamond St, Rodinsky’s Room (with Iain Sinclair) and On Brick Lane.
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Laurie Allen Of Petticoat Lane
This fellow – so at home he is almost merging with the shopfront behind him – is Laurie Allen standing on a street corner in Petticoat Lane, assuming a characteristically nonchalant posture and watching the world go by. Through his debonaire stance, Laurie demonstrates his confidence, good humour and general optimistic attitude to life.
Laurie grew up in Petticoat Lane and still lives in Petticoat Lane. He is at ease with the current of life in Petticoat Lane, that provides him with unceasing fascination and delight.“Throbbing with wonderment,” is his phrase for Petticoat Lane.
Yet Petticoat Lane does not exist on any map, which is appropriate, because for Laurie it is a mythic land of adventure and romance. Petticoat Lane was renamed Middlesex St in 1830 to define the boundary with the City of London, although everyone still calls it by its earlier name, now used to refer to all the streets of the market. This unwitting act of popular defiance is characteristic of the independence of spirit that reigns here in these shabby ancient streets of Spitalfields, which were long established before the roads beside the church on the more more fashionable side of the neighbourhood even existed.
Laurie grew up in Petticoat Lane in the post war years, in what is now remembered as the hey day of the Lane when it was a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Ask him anything about Petticoat Lane or its history and he will break into a smile of anticipation at the opportunity you have given him to expound upon his favourite subject, Petticoat Lane. “Yeah!” he exclaims to himself occasionally, when a reminiscence comes into focus and the full emotion of the moment comes back into the present tense. Unlike Marcel Proust, Laurie Allen can truly recall times past, because all his experiences stay present here in Petticoat Lane and he can run through them the way barrow boys once ran through the market, shouting “Wet paint!” to part the crowds.
For the last fifty years, Laurie has lived in a small flat in Wentworth Buildings, fifty yards round the corner from Wentworth Dwellings where he grew up. Introducing his account of life in the three rooms his family inhabited, he described collecting firewood from the Spitalfields Market and his childhood wonder at the faces he saw in the flames.“It had a mystical quality about it,” he told me, raising his head a little as if to avert the heat. The abandoned bombsites were a paradise for young Laurie, and he christened them with evocative names to enrich his adventures there. Raising his eyebrows for dramatic effect, Laurie told me of China Town at the end of Middlesex St, Black Panther over in Devonshire Sq and the American Hole in Leman St, confiding their names as cherished secrets.
When Carol Reed came to Petticoat Lane in 1955 to film his classic movie of the East End, “A Kid for Two Farthings” – set against the vibrant life of the market – Laurie was given half a crown by one of the producers, as one of three boys running around the corner of Wentworth St in the background of a street scene. But the revelation to the eleven year old Laurie was fifties sex kitten Diana Dors, a platinum blonde in a cashmere sweater. Even today he winces to speak of this goddess. “All we had seen were our mothers and sisters, we had never seen a woman that shape before!” he admitted, tenderly raising his hands to his chest with prurient pleasure.
Walking through Petticoat Lane with him today you will be introduced to people worth meeting like Abdulla Fadli, ex-attendant at the former Goulston St baths for thirty nine years. Yet Laurie also recognises those that have gone who are still vivid in his mind. “The characters, the sights and sounds of Petticoat Lane are equal to any I have ever seen.” he informed me authoritatively, in the present tense while speaking of the past. There was Mary Green, selling pickled herrings from the barrel, yet she never changed her greasy stinking clothes. There was Prince Monolulu, the horse tipster who dressed like a primitive tribesman, calling “Pick a horse! Pick a horse!” knowing that one had to win. There was the soulful beigel seller crying, “Buy them hot – because when they’re gone, they’re really gone.” There was Jack Strong, a crockery seller who could fan out a set of plates like playing cards, throw them up in the air and catch them again, still in a fan. There was Jackie Bryan, selling dresses, calling out, “Buy one and I’ll get you into modelling, buy two and I’ll get you into films.” A topical spot of patter when”A Kid for Two Farthings” was being filmed round the corner.
Yet in spite of the compelling life of Petticoat Lane, Laurie saw all his contemporaries leave one by one, “People would get married or take a job out of the East End. The old boys and girls stayed on while the younger elements all moved out to North London to make a better life and buy a house.” outlined Laurie philosophically. “There’s only a couple of us left now.” he admitted with a grin.
I wondered if Laurie’s affectionate memories were a reaction to the poor living conditions that existed in Petticoat Lane, but he is insistent that this is not the case, “I knew nothing better and I wanted nothing better,” he said plainly, looking back over the intimacy and richness of experience that binds him to this place. Seeking an uncontestable example,“It’s just magic when you live with your mum and dad, and have your mates come and call for you to do something nice.” said Laurie.“It didn’t suit me to exit stage left. The East End is my life, I feel comfortable in my bolt hole.” he confirmed, “Even after all the changes, it has still got a lot going for it.”
Laurie Allen’s Petticoat Lane is a place that belongs to him. He is the least alienated person you could meet in the city. “I like people and people seem to like me.” he added, speaking the truth with a modest candour, as if this were explanation enough.
From “A Kid for Two Farthings”
Diana Dors on Petticoat Lane, 1955
New photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Chris Thompson’s Lonely Streets
Today it is my pleasure to introduce the atmospheric streetscapes of Chris Thompson whose exhibition The Painter’s House opens at Townhouse, Spitalfields, next Saturday 26th March
King’s Cross Afternoon
“My paintings conjure subdued drama, brought to life by the patterns of shadow cast when the light changes as the city becomes an arena of abstract lights and shapes, layered and dense. These are timeless moments that are repeated everywhere, reflections flickering on the side of a bridge, a lamp post in the morning sun, silhouettes of houses sharpened as the afternoon sun floods a street. People appear only incidentally but these places are never empty, because they have their their own stories to tell. “
Chris Thompson
Morning Shadows
Evening Sky
Goodwin’s Court
Late Afternoon Walk
Evening Sky II
Pottery Lane
Passageway
On The Corner
Camden Rd Bridge
Camden Lock
King’s Cross Lighthouse
Another Day
Crossroads
The Painter’s House
Paintings copyright © Chris Thompson
Jack Corbett, London’s Oldest Fireman
Jack Corbett, born 1910
“I like the life of a fireman,” boasted Jack Corbett, London’s oldest surviving fireman at one hundred and two years old. Based at Clerkenwell Fire Station for the duration of World War II, Jack and his team were fortunate enough to endure the onslaught of the London Blitz without any fatalities. “It was all coincidental because I happened to live within a mile of the station,” he announced dismissively, as if he just fell into it. Yet the same tenacious spirit that sustained him through the bombing also endowed him with exceptional longevity. “You want to go on living,” was what Jack told himself in the midst of the chaos.
“It’s not easy remembering what you did and didn’t do.” he confessed to me vaguely, casting his mind back over more than a century of personal experiences, “It all seems so bitty trying to put it all together, but it all went like clockwork. It was rather wonderful really.” Jack’s father was in the First World War and, after Jack witnessed the Second World War in London, he cannot escape disappointment now at the persistence of warfare. “It’s a shame after what we went through that people have learnt nothing,” he confided to me in regret. The closure of Clerkenwell Fire Station, the oldest in Britain, met with his disapproval too, “Modern life demands the police, fire service and ambulance yet, if you cut them, the longer it will take for these services to be applied – and that’s foolhardy.” he said, “Clerkenwell Fire Station is well-situated, in one direction is Kings Cross and in the other direction is the City of London.”
In wartime, as one of the firemen responsible for protecting St Paul’s Cathedral from falling bombs, Jack was given access to the entire structure and once he climbed up alone inside the gold cross upon the very top of the dome. Standing in that enclosed space so high over the city, with a single round glass panel to look out at either end of the cross-piece, was an experience of religious intensity for Jack. And now, at such a venerable age he is able to look back on his own life from an equally elevated perspective through time. “I don’t know what people think of me but I guess I’m a little on the starchy side. I try to be a man of principle but it’s not easy.” he admitted to me with a shy grin, “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke and I’ve always been a Christian.”
In 2000, Jack retired from London to live with his daughter Pamela in Maldon in an old house up above the river, surrounded by a luxuriant well-kept garden.”My parents were ordinary people but they produced a good commodity in me – my mother lived to ninety-three and my father to ninety-one.” he assured me in satisfaction, as we sat together admiring the herbaceous border from the comfort of his private sitting room. “Some people would have written their life, but I’m not that type. I’m not bothered,” Jack whispered, thinking out loud for my benefit – however, for the sake of the rest of us, I present this account of his story.
“When I left school at fourteen in Woking, I got a job as a guard boy. It was my first proper job, working for a gentleman. But in the thirties there was a financial crisis and quite a lot of people lost their property. So he said to me, ‘I’ll have to let you go.’ I didn’t realise it was the sack. Then, one wet day, I drove him to Woking Station and he said, ‘You probably realise I’ve got a business in London. Would you like to change your job?’ The business was a glass warehouse in Clerkenwell, Pugh Bros off St John St.
Isn’t it strange? I can’t remember the name of the man who gave me my job and brought me up from my lowly life in Woking to London, where I met my wife, and the story of my life proper began there.
I lived at 330 St John St, from my early twenties, when I first came to London and that’s where I met my wife Ivy. I was the lodger and she was the only daughter of the house, and we went to Sadlers’ Wells Theatre for our first date and we got married in 1935 in the Mission Church in Clerkenwell. She worked at a furrier and she was pregnant with our daughter Pamela when the war started. I was keen to get behind an ack-ack gun, but she reminded me I could get assigned anywhere and not to be so quick. My daughter was due in April 1939, not the best time to be born because of the situation with the war, but my baby, my wife and mother-in-law were evacuated to Woking where I had my original home, so that was alright. They couldn’t come back to London – they wanted to but I explained that bombs were dropping.
When I was enlisted, I joined the City of London Auxiliary Fire Service. They trained you up to a certain level but after the London Fire Brigade lost a lot of their men who were ex-army and ex-navy, when they were called back to the forces, they needed to replace them and I was accepted. So eventually I became a professional. We were always on duty, it was continuous duty during the Blitz, then they granted you four hours break, not every day but when circumstances allowed. Clerkenwell was one of eighty fire stations, so you can imagine the immensity of it. In London, there was a separate water system for the fire service but when that became broken, we had to pump water from the Thames.
I never thought about the danger – I just got on with it, like everybody else. You’d be a strange person if you didn’t know fear but in any situation, you go in and do your duty to the letter. Often, what I found exciting was that you didn’t know what kind of fire you were going to. The job consisted of extinguishing the fire and rescuing life, and rescuing life was the most important because a building can be rebuilt – your priority was saving lives.
We were being bombed in the docks where all the food storage was, so we had a job there and ,when we had to go further downstream to extinguish the oil depot, we had to go through the East End where there were lots of houses on fire, and they used to call us names. Once, we heard a group of five bombs approaching Clerkenwell and I thought one must surely be for us, but it hit the building next door. We couldn’t see inside the fire station for the dust and I really thought that one had my name on it.
When things were cooling off, you could take a weekend and I went down to Woking to see my family. Eventually when things quietened, my wife found a house in Finchley and that’s where we had our son and lived for the next sixty years and where my wife died twelve years ago. We’d been married sixty-seven years. We had a grand life if you come to think of it. I wonder what would have happened without the war – I would have continued working at the glassworks. I was moving up, after three years I was appointed manager of the guys who were going out making deliveries of glass.
After the war, I asked for a transfer nearer home, and they transferred me to Hornsey and I stayed in the fire service until 1965. The average person wanted to get back to ordinary life, but there’d been so much change it wasn’t that easy. You want to go on living and when you have two children, they want to have a life. Now I have eight great-grandchildren, it has all grown like a tree of life from Pamela’s mother.”
Jack Corbett – “I don’t know what people think of me but I guess I’m a little on the starchy side.”
Jack with Freda and Cousin Dot, 1923
Charles Corbett, Jack’s father
Charles and Ann Corbett, 1944
330 St John St where Jack lived when he came to London and met his wife Ivy. Ivy’s parents lived on the ground floor, and Jack and Ivy lived on the first floor after they married.
Jack aged twenty, 1930
Jack in his first car.
Jack and Ivy, 1934
Jack and Ivy’s marriage at Clerkenwell Mission Chapel, 18th May 1934
Jack (on the far left) joined the City of London Auxiliary Fire Service, 1939
Jack (with his back to the camera) pictured fighting a fire at St Bartholomew’s Hospital during the London Blitz.
High Jinks with the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, 1955
Jack returns to Clerkenwell Fire Station, January 2013
Jack with Green Watch at Clerkenwell Fire Station
Jack in his garden in Maldon, aged one hundred and two.
Jack and his daughter Pam
Clerkenwell Fire Station
Photograph of Clerkenwell Fire Station copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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