At Speakers’ Corner
“I’m old enough to know better and young enough not to care”
Despite the timbre of the message he has been wearing around his neck each Sunday at Speakers’ Corner for decades, Bob Rogers is not the lugubrious fellow you might imagine. Contrary to expectation, he wears it to cheer people up – as he explained to me when I joined him in the park one Sunday.
“It was the winter when British Rail reported ‘The Wrong Kind of Snow’ on the line and that became an Evening Standard headline. The next day, I saw ‘It’s Going to Get Worse,’ on the newsstand as I went through Piccadilly on a bus. So I jumped off and took it from the hoarding and put in my bag because I like the prose style of newspaper headlines,” he explained. “Then I came here on a Sunday in February and everyone looked so miserable that I took it out of my bag and held it up, and it made them all smile. It caught on to such an extent that I am pictured wearing it in guidebooks to London.”
A stalwart of more than half a century at Speakers’ Corner, always in his faded brown corduroy suit with a beret in winter or a bucket hat in summer, and the celebrated notice round his neck, Bob Rogers is an erudite historian and a self-appointed custodian of this celebrated British institution.“Unless I am very unwell, I always come here because it retains its function as a meeting place and you encounter people from all around the world,” he revealed to me, “I keep coming back because I know people here and they know me, so it has a social content as well as a social purpose.”
As if to illustrate this, one of Bob’s pals joined us and, realising I was doing an interview, he took the opportunity to make some points.”These days people are frightened of saying the wrong thing,” he assured me, rolling his eyes contemptuously, “It’s no longer about politics, it’s just a circus of religion – fifty seven varieties of Christianity and fifty-seven varieties of Islam and they all disagree with each other.”
The 1873 reform of the Parks Regulation Act of 1872 conferred legitimacy upon Speakers’ Corner, enshrining the right to give an address though not – as some assume – the right to free speech since speakers are still subject to the law.“I enjoy the weekly privilege of visiting the only place where people can gather without police permission,” Bob confided to me, lowering his voice and casting his gaze around,“When people ask me how many police undercover agents are in the park, I say, ‘Every third man.'”
“Over fifty years ago, I missed a connection on my bus and I looked over the railings and I saw all these people and what got me was the babble of their voices,” he continued, as we stood against the railings watching the excited crowds gathered around the speakers and the hecklers adding drama with their interruptions.“The Catholic Evidence Guild were here one hundred years ago and are here this week and that’s because this is the site of of Tyburn, the place of public executions,” Bob added, gazing through the perspective of time,“Even as we speak they are praying for the Catholic Martyrs.”
Then, swinging his arms wildly and intoning like a priest, Bob enacted the bizarre yet compelling performance style of Nutty Norman, the ‘arms-up’ man, one of the past legends of Speakers’ Corner. “You’d never know he was homeless, he carried all his possessions in a shoulder bag,” Bob revealed, protective of his mentor, “He inducted me to the night buses and sometimes he passed the night at Heathrow.” Gesturing to a charismatic speaker surrounded by an attentive gathering, Bob pointed out Heiko Khoo, a part-German-part-Icelandic ex-bus conductor who famously threw Sir Michael Joseph off his bus, declaring, “I’m not having any Tories on my bus!”
Even as Bob and I chatted, bystanders came over and formed an audience around us, in expectation of a colourful debate and making tangible the rare quality of this special place where we are free to speak with each other as humans, without the need to be introduced.
“Religious people talk about the power of God, I talk about Horse power!”
Omid Mankoo – “People’s lives are really fixated on the sex stuff and they’re neglecting everything else. I’ve written this book and I want to share my secrets.”
Matthew from St Albans – “Jesus told me to come here because the years of his blessing our nation are at an end.”
Christians praying
Christians spreading the Word
Thai people protesting against their corrupt government
Celebrating the Thai Royal Family
Proclaiming the Nigerian Messiah
“If that frightens you, give Jesus a call”
“Don’t be late like the foolish virgins”
Bob re-enacts the gestures of Nutty Norman the ‘arms-up’ man
Heiko Khoo – “I’m not having any Tories on my bus!”
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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On Mothering Sunday
Valerie, my mother
What are you to do on Mothering Sunday if you have no mother? My mother died in 2005 and each year I confront this troubling question when the annual celebration comes around.
If I was religious I might light a candle or lay flowers on a grave, yet neither of these is an acceptable option for me. Contemplating advertisements for Mothering Sunday gifts, I deliberate privately over the tender question as my sense of loss deepens in the approach to this particular day, only for it to dissipate afterwards. This uneasy resolution brings no peace, serving to remind me how much I miss her. It is a feeling which grows with each Mothering Sunday that passes, as the distance in time that separates us increases and the memories fade. I do not expect or wish to ‘get over it,’ I seek to live in peace with my sadness.
I wish she could see where I live now and I could share the joys of my life with her. I have a frustrated instinct to communicate delights, still identifying sights and experiences that I know she would enjoy.
My picture of her has changed. The painful experience of her final years when she was reduced to helpless paralysis by the onset of dementia has been supplanted by a string of fragmentary images from my childhood – especially of returning from school on summer afternoons and discovering her at work in her garden.
I think of how she raised her head when she smiled, tossing her hair in assertion of a frail optimism. ‘Not too bad, thank you!’ she is admitting, lifting her head to the light and assuming a confident smile with a flash of her eyes. This was her default answer to any enquiry into her wellbeing – whether it was a routine or genuine question – and she maintained it through the years, irrespective of actual circumstances. When life was smooth, it was a modest understatement and when troubles beset her, it was a discreet expression of personal resilience. For her, it was a phrase capable of infinite nuance and I do not believe she ever said it in the same way. Yet although I could always appreciate the emotional reality that lay behind her words, I think for everyone but me and my father it was an opaque statement which efficiently closed the line of enquiry, shielding her private self from any probing conversation. From her I learnt the value of maintaining equanimity and keeping a sense of proportion, whatever life brings.
I realise that I was lucky to have a mother who taught me to read before I started school at four years old. Denied the possibility of a university education herself, she encouraged me to fulfil her own thwarted ambitions and – perhaps more than I appreciate – I owe my life as a writer to her. Yet there is so much I could say about my mother that it is almost impossible to write anything. I recognise that the truth of what she means to me is in a region of emotion that is beyond language, but I do know that what she was is part of who I am today.
Increasingly, I am aware that many of those around me also share this situation of no longer having mothers. Perhaps I should buy them all flowers this Mothering Sunday? Certainly if anyone enquires, I shall reply ‘Not too bad, thank you!’ with a smile and raise my head. In that moment, I shall conjure her robust spirit from deep inside me and she will be present, in my demeanour and in my words, this Mothering Sunday.
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Bishopsgate Tavern Tokens
The Ship Tavern, Bishopsgate
There are some artefacts that, in their detail and evidence of wear, can evoke an entire world. Although no larger than a thumbnail, these modest seventeenth century tavern tokens in the collection at the Bishopsgate Institute bring alive that calamitous era after the English Revolution when London was struck by the Great Plague in 1665 and then the Great Fire in 1666.
Bishopsgate was one of the few parts of the City spared by the Fire. It was lined with ancient taverns, used as points of departure and arrival for those travelling up and down the old Roman road north from the City of London. The part inside the City wall was known as Bishopsgate Within and the part outside the wall was Bishopsgate Without, and beyond, where the muddy road widened, was known as Bishopsgate St. The taverns served as hotels, drinking and dining houses, breweries and stables, couriers and coach offices, places of business and of entertainment, and were such significant centres of commerce that they issued their own currency for use as change.
There is a vibrant graphic quality in these miniature token designs, delighting in combining hand-lettering and familiar imagery with an appealing utilitarian irregularity. Long before universal literacy or the numbering of London streets, buildings were adorned with symbols and easily-recogniseable images like those graven upon the front of these tokens. The reverse carries the date and initials of the owner that issued the token, who may latterly be identified from the vintners’ records.
As well as those from Bishopsgate, there is one here from Spittlegate, now known as Widegate St, and another from Bedlam, now known as Liverpool St, which was formerly the location of the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem – of all the tokens here, The White Hart is the lone tavern that has weathered the centuries to survive into the present era.
After the Fire, rubble was spread upon the marshy land of Spitalfields, preparing it for the construction of the streets we know today, and, occasionally, charcoal is still uncovered when foundations are excavated in Spitalfields, recalling this distant event. In 1632, Charles I gave a licence for flesh, fowl and roots to be sold in Spitalfields and the market was re-established in 1682 by Charles II, defining the territory with a culture of small-scale trading that persists to this day.
Once, tavern tokens were unremarkable items of small monetary value, passed hand to hand without a second thought, but now these rare specimens are precious evidence of another life in another time, long ago in this place.
King’s Head, Spittlegate, Charles I
King’s Head, Spittlegate, issued by Vintner Thomas Avis in 1658
The Beehive, Bishopsgate Without, issued by Thomas Goss, 1652
The Mitre Tavern, Bishopsgate, issued by Robert Richardson 1644
The Flower Pot, Bishopsgate Within, issued by Ascanius Hicks, 1641
The Helmet, Bishopsgate Without, issued by Robert Studd
At the White Hart, Bedlam
The White Hart at Bedlam, issued by EE, 1637
Red Lion Court, Bishopsgate Without, issued by John Lambe
The Black Raven, Bishopsgate Without
The Black Raven, Halfpenny issued by Sam Salway
The Sunne, Bishopsgate Within
Lion Above a Stick of Candles, Bishopsgate Without
Lion Above a Stick of Candles, issued by Ralph Butcher, 1666
At the Sign Of The Boore, Bishopsgate Without
At The Sign Of The Boore, Bishopsgate Without
The Half Moone Brewhouse, Bishopsgate Without
Edward Nourse Next The Bull In Bishopsgate Street, 1666
The Mouth Tavern, Bishopsgate Without, issued by Robert Sanderson, 1638
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Pub Crawl
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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