Pearl Binder, Artist
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“City and East End meet here, and between five and six o’clock it is a tempest of people.”
At the outbreak of war, it is salutary to recognise the close connections between the East End and Ukraine. Many thousands of the refugees who fled here, escaping pogroms against Jewish people in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, came from this region. Here is just one of those stories.
This is Aldgate pictured in a lithograph of 1932 by Pearl Binder, as one of a series that she drew to illustrate The Real East End by Thomas Burke, a popular writer who ran a pub in Poplar at the time. Among the many details of this rainy East End night that she evokes so atmospherically with such economy of means, notice the number fifteen bus which still runs through Aldgate today. In her lithographs, Pearl Binder found the ideal medium to portray London in the days when it was a grimy city, permanently overcast with smoke and smog, and her eloquent visual observations were based upon first hand experience.
This book was brought to my attention by Pearl Binder’s son Dan Jones who is also an artist. He explained that his mother came from Salford to study at the Central School of Art and lived in Spread Eagle Yard, Whitechapel in the nineteen twenties and thirties. It was an especially creative period in her life and an exciting time to be in London, when one of as the first generation after the First World War, she took the opportunity of the new freedoms that were available to her sex.
In Thomas Burke’s description, Pearl Binder’s corner of Whitechapel sounds unrecognisably exotic today, “It is in one of the old Yards that Pearl Binder has made her home, and she has chosen well. She enjoys a rural atmosphere in the centre of the town. Her cottage windows face directly onto a barn filled with hay-wains and fragrant with hay, and a stable, complete with clock and weather-vane; and they give a view of metropolitan Whitechapel. One realises here how small London is, how close it still is to the fields and farms of Essex and Cambridgeshire.” From Spread Eagle Yard, Pearl Binder set out to explore the East End, and these modest black and white images illustrate the life of its people as she found it.
Her best friend was Aniuta Barr (known to Dan as Aunt Nuta), a Russian interpreter, who remembered Lenin, Kalinin and Trotsky coming to tea at their family home in Aldgate when she was a child. Dan described Aunt Nuta announcing proudly, “Treat this bottom with respect, this has sat upon the knee of father Lenin!” He called her his fairy godmother, because she did not believe in god and at his christening when the priest said, “In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost…”, she added, “…and Lenin”.
Pearl Binder’s origins were on the border of Russia and the Ukraine in the town of Swonim, which her father Jacob Binderevski, who kept Eider ducks there, left to come to Britain in 1890 with a sack of feathers over his shoulder. After fighting bravely in the Boer War, he received a letter of congratulation from Churchill inviting him to become English. Pearl lived until 1990 and Nuta until 2003, both travelling to Russia and participating in cultural exchange between the two countries through all the ups and downs, living long enough to see the Soviet Union from beginning to end in their lifetimes.
Pearl left the East End when she married Dan’s father Elwyn Jones, a young lawyer (later Lord Elwyn Jones and member of parliament for Poplar), and when they were first wed they lived at 1 Pump Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, yet she always maintained her connections with this part of London. “Mum was trying to fry an egg and dad came to rescue her,” was how Dan fondly described his parents’ meeting, adding,“I think the egg left the pan in the process,” and revealing that his mother never learnt to cook. Instead he has memories of her writing and painting, while surrounded by her young children Dan, Josephine and Lou. “She was amazingly energetic,” recalled Dan,“Writing articles for Lilliput about the difficulties of writing while we were crawling all over the place.”
Pearl Binder’s achievements were manifold. In the pursuit of her enormous range of interests, her output as a writer and illustrator was phenomenal – fiction as well as journalism – including a remarkable book of pen portraits Odd Jobs (that included a West End prostitute and an East End ostler), and picture books with Alan Lomax and A.L.Lloyd, the folk song collectors. In 1937, she was involved in children’s programmes in the very earliest days of television broadcasting. She was fascinated by Pocahontas, designing a musical on the subject for Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. She was an adventurous traveller, travelling and writing about China in particular. She was an advocate of the pearly kings & queens, designing a pearly mug for Wedgwood, and an accomplished sculptor and stained glass artist, who created a series of windows for the House of Lords. The explosion of creative energy that characterised London in the nineteen twenties carried Pearl Binder through her whole life.
“She was always very busy with all her projects, some of which came about and some of which didn’t.” said Dan quietly, as we leafed through a portfolio, admiring paintings and drawings from his mother’s long career. Then as he closed the portfolio and stacked up all her books and pictures that he had brought out to show me – just a fraction of all of those his mother created – I opened the copy of The Real East End to look at the pictures you can see below and Dan summed it up for me. “I think it was a very important part of her life, her time in the East End. She was really looking at things and using her own eyes and getting a feel of the place and the people – and I think the best work of her life was done during those years.”
A Jewish restaurant in Brick Lane.
A beigel seller in Whitechapel High St.
A Jewish bookshop in Wentworth St.
A slop shop in the East India Dock Rd.
Pearl Binder’s self-portrait
Pearl Binder ( 1904-1990)
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Milly Abrahams, Dressmaker
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Milly Abrahams (nee Markovitch)
At the outbreak of war, it is salutary to recognise the close connections between the East End and Ukraine. Many thousands of the refugees who fled here, escaping pogroms against Jewish people in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, came from this region. Here is just one of those stories.
Photographer Martin Usborne & I took the trip to Wembley to visit Milly Abrahams, whose late brother Joseph Markovitch was the subject of Martin’s book I’ve Lived In East London for Eighty-Six & A Half Years. Milly left the East End more than seventy years ago but, hale and hearty at a hundred years old, her childhood remains vivid to her today.
“I was born in a tenement house in Gosset St, Bethnal Green, but my mother got very ill and we were taken to Mother Levy’s Maternity Home in Underwood Rd, and we stayed there a little while – so my mother told me. In those days parents never told you much. If you asked questions, they’d say in Yiddish ‘What do you want to know for?’
I asked my mother, ‘How did you come over here?’ Somebody brought her over from Krakow and left her here and she went into service – that’s what she said. Krakow was Austria when she was born, but now it’s Poland. Neither of my parents knew what age they were when they came over. My mother had nobody here, though my father came over with his sisters and a brother who died, so I knew all the aunts. My father came from Kyiv, which was Russia then and now it’s Ukraine. He tried to trace my mother’s side of the family because she said something about them going to America, yet he never found anything. So she had nobody.
They met here when she was in service and he lived next door with his sisters. They liked chicken soup but they had to water it down to make it go round. My parents got married with nothing. My father was a sick man who was always ill, he was a presser in the tailoring trade. He had trouble with his hands and I remember my mother putting cream on for him and bandaging them up. So he never really worked, but the Jewish community in the East End were very good. We were never a burden on the State, because we had all these Jewish charities – the Jewish Board of Guardians, the Jewish Soup Kitchen and all that. I went to the Jewish Free School in Bell Lane where I got free uniform, meals and seaside holidays. We used to stay in these big houses by the sea and they brought kosher food from London
Where I lived, we had the Catholics, the Protestants and the Jewish but we were all together. Nobody had any money. The non-Jewish people were very good, they used to sit outside in the street and drink tea with us. We were so happy, we didn’t know anything else. Nowadays people expect to have bathrooms ensuite and three toilets, we had a toilet in the yard. Among Jewish people, if you lived next door and you had a little bit more, you would knock on your neighbour’s door on Friday or Saturday and give them some money, yet nobody would know about it. It was kept quiet.
My father wasn’t religious at all, he was a Communist more-or-less. When we used to smell the neighbours’ bacon and want to run upstair to have some, my mother would tell us we couldn’t have bacon. When the Yiddish Theatre in Whitechapel staged benefits, we used to go along. My parents only spoke Yiddish or broken English and, even now, sometimes I mix up my words. We saw plays with well-known actors entirely in Yiddish but we all understood it.
My mother had four children and she lost one – two girls, Leah and me, two boys, Morrie and Joey, Joseph. Leah was the eldest and I was second, then Morrie and Joey, he was the last. I have to say, my mother did the right thing with Joey. He couldn’t speak clearly, but we understood him because we were used to it. They called them ‘backward’ in those days. My mother sent him to a special school and that’s where he learnt to read and write, but people used to say, ‘Why are you sending him there? It’s the madhouse!’
From Gosset St, we moved to Sonning Buildings on the Boundary Estate where we had more room and it was much better. In Gosset St, we slept in one room, my mum and dad and the four of us children. In bed, two of us slept one way and two the other. On Fridays, we used to get out the bath and all have a wash. My father used to help my mother, bathing us with the same water – that’s how it was then.
After I left school at fourteen, I worked as a machinist in a factory in Fournier St making ladieswear. The manager was a nice young bloke but it was hard work. If you talked, they said, ‘Stop talking and get on with your work.’
I belonged to the Brady Club in Hanbury St. We were kept separate and the boys’ club was round the corner somewhere, yet they used to come on their bikes to meet us and take us home on the crossbar. We only got together on Sunday nights when they had dancing.
I met my husband, David, after the war and we married when I was twenty-seven. He was a gunner and he had been in the army for six years, fighting. He was wounded, he went deaf from the gunfire and he got dysentery, but he never had a penny in compensation or a war pension, just a basic state pension.
David was a tailor in ladies tailoring, he didn’t want to be one but in those days you did what your parents told you. So when I got married, I helped my husband as a machinist because his family had a factory. At first, we lived with my mother-in-law in Old Montague St because we couldn’t afford a place of our own.
At last, when my son Alan was three, we moved here to Wembley. I missed the East End but I got used to it here, all these houses were brand new and inhabited by newly-weds from wealthy Jewish families – although we weren’t in that category. They all started having babies, and I had my second son Anthony and my daughter Shelley. The grandparents used to come to visit and bring expensive toys and, as the gardens were open, the children ran into each others’ gardens, saying ‘This is was what my grandma and pa brought me!’ My kids weren’t jealous, they just used to say, ‘Bubba and Nanny are poor.’
Joey never left home, he lived with my mother in Sonning Buildings and they used to come here to visit at weekends. He was lovely little kid, he was the only one of us that wasn’t ginger, he was blond. He never had a proper job, only odd jobs. It was very difficult, but my mother never put him in an institution like a lot of people did in those days. He was always unwell, with chest problems, yet he was always chatty speaking to everyone. He was very interested in Politics and always talking about Money and the Country. Joey and me used to go to the cinema in Hoxton together to see Dick Powell and Ingrid Bergman films. We saw Gone With The Wind and came out crying.”
Milly is on the left and her sister Leah on the right of this family group from the twenties
Milly is in the centre, Leah on the right and Maurice on the left of this family group
Joseph is in the centre, Milly on the left, Leah at the top and Maurice on the right
Milly as a young woman
Milly and her husband David Abrahams, as photographed by Boris of Whitechapel
Milly Abrahams, Dressmaker
Portraits copyright © Martin Usborne
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At Rinkoff’s Bakery
Thank you to everyone who has so far contributed to my crowdfund to launch a COMMUNITY TOURISM PROJECT in Spitalfields as a BETTER ALTERNATIVE to the serial killer tours that monetise misogyny. We have raised three-quarters of our target now and we have twelve days left, so please spread the word.
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Ray Rinkoff braids his Challah
At the outbreak of war, it is salutary to recognise the close connections between the East End and Ukraine. Many thousands of the refugees who fled here, escaping pogroms against Jewish people in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, came from this region. Here is just one of those stories.
“Hold on a few minutes, I’ve got something in the oven!” exclaimed Ray Rinkoff, when Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I arrived at his family-run bakery in Jubilee St, Whitechapel, founded by Hyman Rinkoff in 1911. “I always wanted to be a Baker,” Ray continued, a moment later. “My grandfather was a Master Baker who came over from the Ukraine and opened up in Old Montague St, but – although my father couldn’t boil an egg – the talent was passed on to me.”
In this corner of London, Rinkoff’s Bakery is a major cultural landmark yet they wear their legendary status lightly. In 1906, Master Baker Hyman arrived fleeing the pogroms in Kyiv and opened his shop five years later in Spitalfields opposite Black Lion Yard, lined with jewellers and known then as the Hatton Garden of the East End. All the family, uncles, cousins and aunts lived up above the bakery and worked in the business which flourished there until 1971 – when a compulsory purchase order presaged the demolition of the building, along with the rest of Old Montague St.
Since he was ten years old, Ray came in to work in the bakery during his school holidays and discovered a natural affinity with baking. “By the time I was twelve, my grandparents would pick me up in their car and bring me in and I got paid £2 a day,” Ray recalled fondly, “I used to help my grandfather Hyman with the baking, serve in the shop and make dough.” At fifteen years old in 1968, Ray wanted to go to Switzerland to train as a patissier but he settled for working at the Floris Bakery in Soho. “But then my dad said, ‘We’ve got problems at the bakery,’ so I came in to the family business and stayed,” Ray admitted to me, “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
“I used to get up at two in the morning and be at work by three, to light the old ovens and warm them for two hours before we could start baking,” he confessed with a shrug, “and then I’d get home at nine at night, for ten years, seven days a week.” These days Ray takes it easy on himself by working a mere twelve hour day, five days a week.
In recent decades Rinkoff’s has operated from Jubilee St with a small shop and a large busy bakery behind, where the next generation have joined the family business. In 1982, Lloyd Rinkoff was only thirteen when his father told him he could either take Hebrew classes or work at the bakery on Sundays, so he chose the latter and stayed. More recently, in 2007, Jennifer Rinkoff joined and has expanded the bakery range to include Linzer biscuits and muffins.
“When you’ve worked hard all your life, you’re very proud of what you’ve got,” Ray assured me in haste, and then he had to run again because he had something in the oven.
Hyman Rinkoff, the founder
Max Rinkoff
The former shop in Jubilee St
The original shop in Old Montague St
Max in Old Montague St
Sylvie & Max Rinkoff
Max at the new bakery in Jubilee St
Rinkoff family group in Jubilee St with Ray (far right)
Lloyd, Jennifer & Ray Rinkoff
Aziz
Timothy, Head Pastry Chef – “I’ve been here thirty years”
Jamal
Sajez
Richard
Jennifer & Ray Rinkoff
New photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Charles Spurgeon’s Londoners
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Champion Pie Man – W.Thompson, Pie Maker of fifty years, outside his shop in the alley behind Greenwich Church
Charles Spurgeon the Younger, son of the Evangelist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, took over the South St Baptist Chapel in Greenwich in the eighteen-eighties and commissioned an unknown photographer to make lantern slides of the street traders of Greenwich that he could use in his preaching. We shall never know exactly how Spurgeon showed these pictures, taken between 1884 and 1887, but – perhaps inadvertently – they became responsible for the creation of one of the earliest series of documentary portraits of Londoners.
Hokey-Pokey Boy – August Bank Holiday, Stockwell St, Greenwich
Knife Grinder – posed cutting out a kettle bottom from a tin sheet
Rabbit Seller
Toy Seller – King William St outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Ginger Cakes Seller – King St, near Greenwich Park
Sweep
Shrimp Sellers – outside Greenwich Park
Crossing Sweeper (& News Boy) – Clarence St, Greenwich
Sherbert Seller – outside Greenwich Park
Third Class Milkman – carrying two four-gallon cans on a yoke, King William’s Walk, Greenwich
Second Class Milkman – with a hand cart and seventeen-gallon churn
Master Milkman – in his uniform, outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Chairmender – Corner of Prince Orange Lane, Greenwich
Kentish Herb Woman – Greenwich High Rd
Muffin Man
Fishmongers
Try Your Weight – outside Greenwich Park
Glazier
News Boy (& Crossing Sweeper) – delivering The Daily News at 7:30am near Greenwich Pier
Old Clo’ Man – it was a crime to dispose of infected clothing during the Smallpox epidemics of the eighteen-eighties and the Old Clo’ Man plied a risky trade.
Blind Fiddler – outside Crowders’ Music Hall Greenwich
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At Taj Stores
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The gentleman on the right is Abdul Khalique, standing with his shop assistant, in the early nineteen fifties outside the very first Taj Stores in Hunton St (now Buxton St). Abdul Khalique’s brother Abdul Jabbar, the founder of the grocery store, commonly known then as “Jabber’s Shop”, was a seaman who came here from Bengal to Spitalfields in 1934 after leaving the navy. He worked in textile sweatshops for two years before opening his store, which he ran with his Irish wife Cathleen.
These sparse facts, which I learnt from Abdul Jabbar’s nephew Jamal – who never met his uncle – are all that is known of this brave man who travelled across the world and undertook the risky venture of starting a business in another continent, working so hard to build it up until his death in 1969. He would be amazed to visit the Taj Stores today in Brick Lane and see how his modest enterprise has blossomed.
I enjoyed the privilege of a tour of the aisles in the company of Jamal (Abdul Quayum), who has been involved in the family business since he was seventeen years old, and now runs the store jointly with his elder brother Junel (Abdul Hai) and younger brother Joynal (Abdul Muhith).
It is a wonderful experience simply to explore here and savour the rich selection of produce on offer from all over the world in the Taj Stores. I love to study the beautifully organised displays of exotic fruit and vegetables, printed sacks of rice, tall stacks of brightly coloured cardboard packages, cans, bottles and jars – each with their distinctive fragrances. Then there is the cooking equipment, towers of plastic jugs and bowls, steel pots and pans, and scourers. There is a vast intricate diversity of attractive things collected here and it is a phenomenal feat of organisation that the brothers have pulled off, bringing this huge range of supplies together from the different corners of the globe.
Jamal explained to me how the business is run nowadays between the three brothers. Jamal does the hiring and the paperwork, while Joynal takes care of the day-to-day buying and selling, and Junel runs the catering supply and wholesale side of the business.”The beauty of it is, we have different responsibilities. We are a modern muslim family and we treat each other like friends,” says Jamal proudly.
Their father Alhaj Abdul Khalique first came to the United Kingdom in 1952 as a student before becoming involved in running the business with his brother. In 1956, the grocery shop moved to larger premises at 109 Brick Lane and then when Abdul Jabbar died in 1969, Abdul Khalique ran it with his brother Abdul Rahman. The pair were photographed looking every bit the sharp business men they were, in a handsome studio portrait taken at that time.
As the Taj Stores prospered, they moved again in 1979 to the current site at 112 Brick Lane and an era ended in 1994 when Abdul Khalique died. Then the family business passed from the brothers who had emigrated to this country, into the stewardship of the current generation who were born here.
In recent years, the stores have continued to expand with the purchase of the premises next door and the launch of the online business. When I took my portrait of Joynal, Junel and Jamal, the brothers explained to me that they now look back to their roots and, in the tradition of nineteenth century businessmen turned benefactors, they are funding a school and a mosque, building social housing, investing in irrigation and two cancer clinics back in Moulvibazar, Sylhet, Bangladesh – the home town where Abdul Jabbar set out from all those years ago when this story began.
Abdul Jabbar, the founder of Taj Stores
Abdul Khalique and his brother Abdul Rahman who ran the Taj Stores in the fifties
Brothers Joynal, Junel and Jamal who run Taj Stores today
Taj Stores, International Supermarket, 112 Brick Lane, E1 6RL
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In The Rotunda At The Museum Of London
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Have you ever wondered what is in the dark space beneath the rotunda?
I remember the first time I visited the Barbican, it was to see the newly-opened Museum of London and, as I walked up from St Paul’s Cathedral, I was astonished by the towering brick rotunda that confronted me. Only by passing across a bridge over the road could you enter this secret enclave, and within I found a hidden garden spiralling down to a large closed door, just as implacable as the blank walls upon the exterior.
Recently I discovered the use of this vast construction is as a mausoleum to store the fourteen thousand human remains in the Museum’s collection, sequestered there in their dark castle in the midst of the roundabout for eternity. Thus it was the fulfilment of more than thirty years of curiosity, when I walked over to London Wall and paid a visit to the interior of the rotunda.
My hosts were Rebecca Redfern & Jelena Beklavac, two Bioarchaeologists who are Curators of Human Osteology at the Museum and my particular interest was the more than ten thousand ex-residents of Spitalfields who now rest in the rotunda. “We look after them,” Rebecca reassured me. “We make sure that anyone who wants to see them is a bona fide researcher,” Jelena, explained as we sipped tea and nibbled chocolate biscuits in the subterranean office of the Department of Human Osteology, prior to visiting the rotunda.
Spitalfields was the largest cemetery ever excavated in an urban centre, I learnt, and is thus of enormous scholarly and human significance. All the skeletons were recorded spatially and chronologically when they were removed over three and a half years, at the time of the redevelopment of the Spitalfields Market, to create a database of unrivalled scale – permitting the study of human remains from the eleventh century, when the Priory of St Mary Spital was founded, until the Reformation, when the Priory was closed. As well as residents of the Priory, mass burials were found from times of crisis, such as the Famine, when parish churchyards could not cope.
“It’s incredible, they tell us so much about Medieval London – everyday life, the arrival of new diseases, pollution, diet and immigration,” Rebecca revealed, as if she were conveying direct testimony. “It’s a snapshot of people through time,” she added fondly.
I was struck by the use of the word ‘people’ by Rebecca and the phrase ‘such lovely people’ by Jelena, in describing their charges, yet it became apparent that this work brings an intimate appreciation of the lives of the long-dead. “We see the things they suffered and what’s remarkable is that they survived,” Jelena admitted, “People were super-tough and a lot more tolerant to pain.” Rebecca told me of a child afflicted with congenital syphilis who had survived until the age of eleven, evidencing the quality of care provided by the infirmary of St Mary Spital. Equally, there were those with severe, life-threatening head wounds who had recovered, and others with compound fractures and permanent injuries who carried on their lives in spite of their condition. “There must have been quite a lot of interesting looking people walking around in those days,” Jelena suggested, tactfully.
“If you didn’t do what you needed to do, to get food, heat and shelter, you would die,” Rebecca added, “We’ve lost that resilience. Children in Medieval London were riddled with tuberculosis except most recovered.” The outcome of the catastrophies that came upon the City was the genetic transformation of Londoners and, even today, those who are descended from Black Death survivors possess a greater resistance to AIDS and certain cancers. Medieval Londoners were more resistant to infection than their present day counterparts. “People lived in vile conditions but they became hardy and, if you survived to the age of five, you were pretty robust,” Jelena informed me, “Whereas the contemporary culture of cleanliness has disconnected us from our environment.”
Once I had grasped a notion of what is to be learnt from the people in the rotunda, it was time to pay them a visit. So Rebecca, Jelena and I left our teacups behind to trace a path through the Piranesian labyrinth of concrete tunnels beneath the Museum to reach the mausoleum. As the fluorescent tubes flickered into life, all was still within the rotunda and an expanse of steel shelving was revealed, extending into the distance and stacked neatly with cardboard boxes, each containing the mortal remains of a Londoner. “They’re Spitalfields,” indicated my hosts, gesturing in one direction, before turning and pointing out other aisles of shelves, “That’s the Black Death and they’re Romans.” Outside the traffic rumbled and as we passed fire-doors which gave onto the street, I could hear the rush of trucks close by. The identical cardboard boxes were a literal reminder that we are all equal in death.
Extraordinarily, the rotunda was not built to house the dead but simply as a structure to fill the roundabout, yet I am reliably informed the stable low temperature which prevails is ideal for the storage of bones. Inside, it was a curiously unfinished edifice – with raw concrete and a platform from a crane used in the construction still visible and, elsewhere, the builders had left their graffiti. This was a mysterious incidental space for which no plans survive, but that has found its ideal purpose. Entirely lacking in the gothic chills of a cemetery, the rotunda was peaceful and I had no sense of the silent hordes surrounding us, although I am told contract workers sometimes get nervous when they learn what is stored there.
It is the exterior world which which becomes the enigma when you are inside the rotunda, a world composed of distant traffic noise, curiously transmuted snatches of conversation upon the Barbican broadwalk above and the sound of kitchen equipment in the restaurant overhead. But you may be assured that I sensed no discontent among the thousands of supplanted former-residents of Spitalfields, resting there in peace yet with life whirling all around them.
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Joe McLaren, Illustrator
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I am delighted to introduce the logo for my tours with illustration by Joe McLaren, type by Commercial Type and art direction by David Pearson
Joe McLaren at Rochester Castle
“When I realised I was an illustrator and not an artist, it was such a relief because I didn’t have to philosophise any more,” admitted Joe McLaren with a self-effacing smile,“now I do what people pay me to do to earn the butter for my bread.” Yet, in spite of his modest demeanour, Joe’s distinctive graphic illustrations are to be found on book covers in every bookshop in the land.
Joe and I were standing on top of Rochester Castle with panoramic views across the Medway and he explained that this part of the country has strong family connections for him. “My grandfather, Bernard Long, joined the Merchant Navy in Chatham at fourteen in 1925 and retired at sixteen to join the Royal Navy. By the end of World War II, he was Captain of a minesweeper and then he retired to Leyton where he became a police detective,” Joe revealed, “My mother remembers visiting them in their small house in Vicarage Rd.”
After graduating from Brighton College of Art and a spell in London, Joe and his girlfriend moved to a remote house in Lower Higham, upon the dramatic landscape of the Kent Marshes, where she had family and he found himself caring for the abandoned church of St Mary’s which Dickens featured in ‘Great Expectations.’ “I used to ring the bells once a year on New Year’s Eve,” Joe informed me fondly, “and we turned it into a cinema and showed David Lean’s film there. ‘Great Expectations’ was my first Dickens novel and I loved it, even though I had to read it at school.” Subsequently, Joe featured the church of St Mary’s in his cover design for a new edition of the novel.
While in London, David worked in the basement of Smythson in Bond St, applying the gold letters to monogrammed leather cases. “In 2008, I saved up enough money to live for three months and left to become a freelance illustrator,” he recalled, “If I ran out of money, I would have gone back to my old job but, after a couple of weeks, David Pearson rang up to commission me and it went from there. We’ve been friends ever since.” Book designer David Pearson compares Joe McLaren’s work to that of Reynolds Stone, the celebrated wood engraver who supplied vignettes for the covers of early Penguin Books, and Joe has created motifs in a comparable vein for David’s contemporary reinventions of Penguin designs.
“I have been influenced by Edward Bawden and he was influenced by heraldry,” Joe confessed, “Everything I do is in a flat space, so it doesn’t matter where the light’s coming from, you are portraying the thing itself.” There is a certain unique clarity of line and an intensity of image which characterises Joe’s work, making it instantly recognisable, catching the eye and then holding its focus.
Yesterday, Joe was working on a scraperboard view of Rochester Castle when I interrupted him. Few use scraperboard anymore, it has become a degraded technique that is consigned to children’s kits in craft stores, yet Joe excels in exploiting its unique graphic potential. Invented a hundred years ago, it was an innovation for engravers when images could be reproduced for printing using photographic technology and there was no longer any need to engrave onto metal plates.
Standing there upon the outcrop over the Medway on that bright autumn day, the sunlight imparted a crisp edge to the buildings, highlighting the lively textures and contrasted forms of the diverse architecture in Rochester and giving everything the appearance of a Joe McLaren illustration. In this inspiring environment, with family history and literary association enriching a landscape full of visual drama, Joe has found his home.
Selected Poems of John Betjeman, commissioned by Miri Rosenbloom for Faber & Faber
Secret Lives of Buildings by Edward Hollis, commissioned by David Pearson for Portobello Books
We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen, commissioned by Suzanne Dean for Vintage
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad by George Orwell, commissioned by David Pearson for Penguin
Why Look at Animals? by John Berger, commissioned by David Pearson for Penguin
Memory Place by Edward Hollis, commissioned by David Pearson for Portobello Books
The Once and Future King by T.H. White, commissioned by Clare Skeats for Voyager Classics
Silver by Andrew Motion, commissioned by Suzanne Dean for Vintage
The Christmas Books by Charles Dickens, commissioned by David Pearson for Whites Books
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, commissioned by David Pearson for Whites Books
Logo for the Owl Bookshop, commissioned by David Pearson
Illustrations for Alice in Wonderland for Whites Books
Illustrations for Potty! a cookery book by Clarissa Dickson Wright, for Hodder & Stoughton
Illustrations courtesy of Joe McLaren
Here follow some snaps from my Rochester trip
Eastgate House in Rochester High St
Lodging House for Poor Travellers, founded 1579 in Rochester High St
Old wooden house in the Cathedral Close, Rochester
Charles Dickens’ writing cottage transplanted from his garden to a park in Rochester.
Old yard off Rochester High St
