So Long, Leonard Fenton
Contributing Writer Gillian Tindall remembers the popular and much-loved actor, Leonard Fenton, from Stepney Green who died last weekend aged ninety-five
Leonard Fenton as Dr Legg in East Enders
When Dr Legg, the GP in East Enders, finally ‘retired’ in 1997, there was universal regret among viewers – even though they could see he was already older than any real-life GP would be. Afterwards, he continued to be referred to as an off-stage presence, like a benign Scarlet Pimpernel, and he made occasional informal reappearances – most notably for the stage-funeral of Mark Fowler in 2004, with whom he had once had ferocious doctorly words about heroin addiction and, in 2010, to counsel Dot Branning about a supposed Romanian foundling.
In real life, Dr Legg was the actor Leonard Fenton. Although his East Enders‘ role was the one for which he was widely celebrated (and even accosted in the street and the Underground by people so convinced of the reality of soaps that they asked for friendly medical advice) he had a life-time of other roles to his credit. One of those actors who never quite reached the very top of the theatrical tree but was nearly always in work and much esteemed by other professionals, Len did seasons with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, worked with Orson Welles, with Jonathan Miller and Samuel Beckett – who personally chose him in 1979 to play opposite Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days at the Royal Court.
His last stage roles were the Duke in The Merchant of Venice at Stratford-on-Avon in 2008 and the demanding part of Vincentio in The Taming of the Shrew at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 2009. By then Len was eighty-three years old, but you would never have guessed it. He went on for several more years specialising in ‘old rabbis’ and only took to retirement in the actors’ home at Denville Hall, the home for aged actors on the northern rim of London, because his diabetes needed more careful management than he could give it alone.
The kindly GP in East Enders was obviously Jewish and the early lives of the doctor and the actor paralleled each other. Dr Legg was supposed to have been born in the East End, a bright boy who got a scholarship to a Grammar School and then to medical school, but had preferred to remain close to his roots in the fictional East London district of ‘Walford’ rather than moving out to a polite suburb.
Similarly, Len Fenton was born (during the General Strike of 1926) in little house in Duckett St, Stepney Green, that his parents and elder sister shared with relatives. When he was eleven, he won a Junior County scholarship to Raines School for Boys in Arbour Sq. A surviving school report, under the name Leonard Feinstein, describes him as “A quiet intelligent pupil. Gives no trouble and works well.” The same report shows that he was particularly good at drawing, singing and languages, but as he showed an aptitude for maths too, plus ‘satisfactory’ work at Chemistry and Physics, the headmaster urged him towards engineering – a destiny that took Len some years and quite a bit of enterprise to escape.
The heart of the Jewish East End in the twenties and thirties was in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Half a mile away, in Duckett St there was only one other Jewish household besides Len’s family, although Len recalls a big block of flats on Stepney Green itself that was “full of our lot. I would rather liked to have lived there.” Possibly it was the presence of this block that drew Mosleys’ Blackshirts down to Stepney Green for a series of threatening marches that were to culminate in the Battle of Cable Street. As a small boy, Len remembered his mother standing in the upstairs window of their house with a baby – one of Len’s younger sisters – in her arms, watching Mosley giving a speech at the corner about how all Jews had substantial bank balances. At this point, she yelled down at him “Sir Oswald, would you like to see my fucking bank balance?” Her husband worked in the garment trade and, like most people in their position, they lived hand to mouth. Various neighbours, who were inclined to side with Mosley in those uncertain times, hastily cried “No, no, Fanny, we don’t mean you!”
Len’s mother had arrived in London as a baby, circuitously, via New York, at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was working in a box factory when she met her husband. Both sets of grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, mother’s from Riga and father’s from Lithuania, and all that generation spoke Yiddish as their household tongue. The family name was originally, Len thinks, something like Resnik, a Russian-Yiddish term to do with tailoring, but it just happened that the neighbour who helped Len’s grandfather to register in London when he arrived in the 1890s suggested ‘Feinstein’ as a suitable name and it was accepted. The change to Fenton happened during the Second World War, when Len’s elder sister Sylvie convinced their father that it would be a good idea. However, the cousins living on the ground floor of the same house, including little Arnold who was six months younger than Len and his constant playmate, did not change their name. Arnold Feinstein, another scholarship boy, grew up to be a distinguished academic scientist and the husband of Elaine Feinstein, the poet. There were many routes out of the ghetto, but the Fenton-Feinstein families always remained close.
Grandparents and uncles were important too. Len’s mother’s mother, who had been widowed in New York with the baby, come to London and remarried, lived at Bow. Neighbours of theirs organised a synagogue in their front room where the family foregathered on Saturdays. It was from here that an uncle took Len, then aged ten or eleven, on a trip to Watford to hear Thomas Beecham conducting Bizet’s First Symphony in C – for Len, a revelatory experience about what music could be. But, sadly, this thoughtful relative later became known to Len and his sisters as ‘bad uncle’ because he tried to convince Len that he could neither draw and paint, nor sing well enough to envisage it as a career – both of which no-doubt-well-intentioned judgements were untrue.
Len was thirteen in 1939, at the point when the whole Jewish East End began to be swept away, first by war and then by the social changes that war brought. Raines School was evacuated to various places near the south coast: hardly the ideal location in view of the threat of invasion, but such a hasty re-location was common in those times. By the time Len returned to battered and blitzed Stepney towards the end of the war, he was a tall and handsome seventeen-year-old – and his feisty mother, with whom he had not lived since he was a child, was suffering with tuberculosis and possibly diabetes as well. There was no NHS yet but, even if there had been, not a great deal could have been done for her. She died in 1945 and it was the eldest sister Sylvie who took on the maternal role for their father, for Len, his younger brother Cyril (who also died young) and the two pretty and ambitious younger sisters, Corinne and Annie.
National Service loomed at eighteen for all young men of Len’s generation yet, instead of joining the Army as a squaddie, Len was sent, on his head-master’s recommendation and Government approval, to do a two-year degree in Engineering at Kings’ College. He did not relish it at all, but it meant that, when the Army finally claimed him at age twenty, he was given a commission in the Royal Engineers – a new world for him. “I really enjoyed myself,” he recalled, “As an officer I could just oversee things and sign off the paper, while the NCOs did all the work!”
Len’s Army experience led to five years in a civil engineering job in Westminster. This was still unsatisfying for Len, even though the firm in question seems to have been extraordinarily tolerant of their amiable but undevoted employee. Len found that he could take long, dreamy lunch hours walking round the London parks. By then he was living in Clapton and discovered, while changing from tube to bus at Aldgate on his evening commute, that Toynbee Hall ran courses in art and music. He started spending his evenings there, as many other aspirant East Enders had done before him – and a new life began. A starring role singing in a Christmas performance led to the offer of a place at the Webber-Douglas theatrel school, and the boy from Stepney was re-born as an actor and never looked back.
“I was older than most people at drama school,” he explained, “That was useful and I soon learnt to age myself up – I loved making-up.” A Spotlight award in his final year set Len off on a career playing character roles – fulfilling even if he never achieved a minor ambition to take the part of Baron Hard-Up in pantomime. “Trouble is, people don’t associate Dr Legg with slapstick,” he confessed.
Did becoming a celebrity in such a long-running soap affect his chances of other roles? Len felt that it might have kept him out of the theatre, but one would hardly think so given the stage successes of his last years in the profession. Oddly, Dr Legg was almost the only role in Len’s career which was not a character part. “The character wasn’t written to any great depth,” says Len, “so inevitably what came over on TV was a lot of me. I sometimes used to slip in words of my own that weren’t in the script! I think they should have given me a proper wife, though, not just a dead one.” (Mrs Legg was supposed to have been a nurse, killed long ago by a land-mine).
In real life Len married, aged almost forty, to a professional cellist, Madeline Thorner, considerably younger than him. Three sons and a daughter arrived in quick time, in their house in Hampstead Garden Suburb that was a far cry from Duckett St. Although the marriage eventually foundered, Len and Madeline remained friends and it was she who managed to get him into Denville Hall.
Any regrets? “Well, if I’d know how well my voice would last,” he admitted, “I’d have been a singer.” Len still sang beautifully, even in his ninth decade, and possessed an extraordinary ability to imitate dogs and cats well enough to fool the animals themselves. His ability to paint and aptitude for drawing that his headmaster and uncle dismissed long ago came to the fore during Len’s years as Dr Legg, and he continued to paint. The aura of cheerful interest in life, that stood him in such good stead as a small boy in Stepney, still surrounded Len even in his final years.
In 2018, when happily settled in Denville Hall, Len was pleased but also amused to be invited back onto East Enders. He was given only a few lines, mainly interchanges with Dot Cotton with whom he had supposedly come to stay. As Len confided to me, his ability to learn a part quickly and retain it had now deserted him, and he could only manage brief passages. “I really haven’t got my head round what’s going on in the plot”, he remarked cheerfully, “but that doesn’t matter.” Essentially, he had been summoned back to be shown dying peacefully.
“Does that feel a little odd?” I asked, knowing how near he must be to the real thing.
“Oh no, darling – quite in the usual line. I’ve died so often on stage, you see!”
Leonard Fenton
Leonard’s mother and father with his elder sister Sylvie as a baby
Leonard and his sister Sylvie with their Uncle
Leonard Fenton’s publicity shot as a young actor
Leonard playing older than his years in the seventies
Leonard’s publicity shot in the eighties
Leonard in the West End
Leonard’s sketch of Samuel Beckett, done while rehearsing Happy Days at the Royal Court in 1979
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Morris Goldstein, the Lost Whitechapel Boy
From Shoreditch To Paddington
The towpath fiddler in Camden
Taking advantage of the crystalline sunlight, I continued my ramble along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal. I walked as far as Paddington Basin, picking up my journey where I cast off in Shoreditch. Swathed in multiple layers of clothing against the cold, I was alarmed to encounter rough sleepers under bridges when I set out but, as the temperature rose, I was astonished to discover a zealous sunbather in Camden. My most inspiring meeting of the day was with fiddler Lee Westbrook who, like me, had also been encouraged to venture out by the sunlight. His music echoed hauntingly under the multiple bridges at Gloucester Ave. And by the time I reached Paddington, it was warm enough to unbutton my coat before taking the Metropolitan Line back again to Liverpool St.
Approaching Bridport Place Bridge
De Beauvoir Rd Bridge
Approaching City Rd Lock
Lock keeper’s cottage at City Rd Lock
At City Rd Lock
Danbury St Bridge
Approaching the Islington Tunnel
Entrance to the Islington Tunnel
Lock Keeper’s Cottage at St Pancras Lock
Bridge at Royal College St
Canalside Terrace in Camden
At Camden Lock
At Camden Lock
Lee Westbrook
Mansions by Regent’s Park
Bridge into Regent’s Park
Mansion in Regent’s Park
Onwards towards Paddington
In Lisson Grove
In Maida Vale
Little Venice
Paddington Basin
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From Limehouse To Shoreditch
I took advantage of yesterday’s January sunshine to enjoy a ramble along the Regent’s Canal with my camera, tracing its arc which bounds the northern extent of the East End. At first, there was just me, some moorhens, a lonely swan, and a cormorant, but as the morning wore on cyclists and joggers appeared. Starting at Limehouse Basin, I walked west along the canal until I reached the Kingsland Rd. By then clouds had gathered and my hands had turned blue, so I returned home to Spitalfields hoping for another bright day soon when I can resume my journey onward to Paddington Basin.
At Limehouse Basin
Commercial Rd Bridge
Johnson’s Lock
Lock keeper’s cottage at Johnson’s Lock
Great Eastern Railway bridge
Great Eastern Railway bridge
Salmon Lane Lock
Barge dweller mooring his craft
Solebay St Bridge
Mile End Rd bridge
Cyclist at Mile End Rd bridge
Looking through Mile End Rd bridge
Mile End Lock keeper’s cottage
Looking back towards the towers of Canary Wharf
At the junction with Hertford Union Canal
Old Ford Lock
Victoria Park Bridge
Victoria Park Bridge
Looking back from Cat & Mutton Bridge
Barge dwelling cat
At Kingsland Rd Bridge
Looking west from Kingsland Rd Bridge
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The East London Group & Photography
With the retrospective at the Beecroft Gallery in Southend until 3rd April, David Buckman – whose book From Bow to Biennale recovered the lost history of The East London Group – considers the use of photography by members of the Group.
Pavilion in Grove Hall Park, Bow, by Harold Steggles
Working photograph by Harold Steggles
Brymay Wharf by Walter Steggles
Working photograph by Walter Steggles
I am often asked about the role of photography in the work of the East London Group, particularly in the paintings of Elwin Hawthorne and Harold and Walter Steggles. They were core members of the band of working class men and women that John Cooper taught at evening classes in Bow in the twenties and thirties who came together to form the Group.
Walter Steggles assured me that sketching was “better than a camera. I only did one picture from a photograph and that was dead” and his sister Muriel – who late in life drove him around looking for subjects – insisted that when her brother asked her to stop the car to sketch a cloud formation, he was “better than a camera.”
Nevertheless, Walter and Harold Steggles were both keen photographers, taking it up shortly before their joint show at Lefevre Gallery in 1938. In the thirties, they also took up motoring – as their family photographs confirm – and they travelled around Britain and to the south of France on painting trips with Harold behind the wheel.
When the house where Walter lived was cleared, ten different cameras were found. According to Alan Waltham, who married Walter’s niece Janeta, there were two or three Praktica cameras, a couple by Kodak and Olympus, and several others.
“Most, if not all, were 35mm, but at some point Wally must have owned cameras that took 120-format film, judging some of the contact prints we have,” Alan explained to me. “Most of the early pictures are in black and white but he switched to colour film early on after the war. We found endless copies of potential landscapes that he must have photographed in later life but, sadly, many of the early photos have little or no annotation.”
The role of photography in picture-making is clearly evident in the work of Elwin Hawthorne, the artist who – along with Walter Steggles – achieved star status when they had paintings in the British Pavilion at the 1936 Venice Biennale. Elwin’s son said, having studied a number of squared-up photographs he holds, “my father did use photography as an aid to his work quite regularly…. My mother had disposed of my father’s camera before I developed an interest in photography at the age of thirteen. It was more than an amateur box camera – I remember it had a Dallmeyer lens, but it was not really a high-quality professional camera.”
The absence of people is a common feature of Hawthorne’s paintings, sometimes infused with melancholic even surreal qualities. Elwin junior feels that his father “might have gone out early in the morning, when conditions were misty, as a way of removing fine detail from the scenes he photographed, though I cannot confirm this.” Lilian, Hawthorne’s widow, who also showed with the Cooper group as Lilian Leahy, told me that Elwin “always carried a camera. Once he almost left it behind in a restaurant at Rottingdean, until I reminded him.”
Walter Sickert lectured Cooper’s Bow students, where Hawthorne heard him speak, and the squaring-up of drawings for transfer to canvas was a common practice, one that Hawthorne would have been accustomed to while working as studio assistant to Sickert from 1928-31. Sickert studied for a time at the Slade School of Fine Art, notable for its tradition of fine draughtsmanship, which John Cooper also attended – taught by that master-draughtsman Henry Tonks – and he believed that drawing was the basis of every picture, urging students to carry a notebook wherever they went.
However, from around 1923, according to Sickert’s biographer Robert Emmons, the ageing artist gradually abandoned drawing and “came to rely more and more for his data on old prints and photographs.” Sickert acquired a huge collection of illustrations, some of which formed the basis of his English Echoes exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1931. The twenty-two exhibits dismayed some of his admirers, familiar with his earlier, more conventionally conceived works. In a letter to The Times in 1929, in justification of his new practice, Sickert pointed out that Canaletto had based his work on tracings made with the camera lucida, Turner’s studio had been “crammed with negatives,” Millet had used photographs and Degas had taken them. While writing that photographs should be used with caution, he also noted that they could serve as valuable documents of record. Emmons comments “Sickert knew well enough what he wanted and was not likely to be squeamish as to how he got it.”
The invention of photography in the nineteenth century posed a problem for some artists and their patrons. If the artist’s role had been to depict reality, how could this be better accomplished with pencil, pen or brush than with the camera? Yet this concern ignored such the possibility of individual inspiration and interpretation, and subsequent numerous art movements, such as Cubism, Pointillism and Surrealism, bear witness to this.
John Cooper and his students might appear to have been unaffected by continental developments in their own pictures, yet they were aware of them. This is evident from the Cubist-influenced mosaic that he and students completed at the Wharrie Cabmen’s Shelter, on Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead, in April 1935, where you can still admire it today while you drink your tea.
The accompanying pairs of photographs and pictures indicate how East London Group members employed the camera, astutely reorganising and simplifying untidy photographic reality into unforgettable images that become theirs and theirs alone.
The Mitford Castle, 1931 by Elwin Hawthorne
Working photograph by Elwin Hawthorne
Black & white photograph of a colour painting of The Bridge House, Tredegar Rd by Harold Steggles
Working photograph by Harold Steggles
Bow Backwater by Walter Steggles
Working photography by Walter Steggles
Black and white photograph of a coloured painting of ‘Bridge in Bow’ by Harold Steggles
Working photograph by Harold Steggles
Canonbury Grove by Elwin Hawthorne
Working photograph by Elwin Hawthorne
You can read more about the East London Group
Save The George Tavern
For twenty years now, Pauline Forster has worked to restore the magnificent George Tavern in Commercial Rd and fought tenaciously to protect it from developers. Now it is under threat again.
Click here for details of how you can help save the George Tavern
Let me admit, The George in Commercial Rd is one of my favourite pubs in the East End. From the first moment I walked through the door, I knew I had discovered somewhere special.
In the magnificently shabby bar room, with gleaming tiles and appealingly mismatched furniture all glowing in the afternoon light filtering through coloured glass windows, there was not a scrap of the tidying up and modernisation that blights the atmosphere of too many old pubs. There was no music and no advertising – it was peaceful, and I was smitten by the unique charisma of The George.
Curious to learn more, I paid a visit upon the owner, who has been described to me as one of the last great publicans of the East End, and I was far from disappointed to explore behind the scenes at this legendary institution because what I found was beyond what I ever imagined.
Pauline Forster, artist and publican of The George, brought up her five sons in a remote valley in Gloucestershire. It was twenty years ago when she bought The George, and her sons came up to London with her, then in the following decade they all met partners in the bar and moved out. Yet such a satisfactory outcome of events was not the result of any master-plan on Pauline’s part, merely the consequence of a fortuitous accident in which she stumbled upon The George when it was lying neglected and fell in love with it, buying it on impulse a week later, even though it had never been her intention to become a publican.
“It’s a beauty, this building!” she declared to me as I followed her along the dark passage from the barroom, up a winding stair and through innumerable doors to enter her kitchen upon the first floor. “When I came to view it, there were twenty others after it but they only wanted to know how many flats they could fit in, none of them were interested in it as a pub.” she informed me in response to my gasps of wonder as she led me through the vast stairwell with its wide staircase and a sequence of high-ceilinged rooms with old fireplaces, before we arrived at her office lined with crowded bookcases reaching towards the ceiling. “The interior was all very seventies but I was hooked, I could see the potential.” she confided, “I gravitated to the bar and I started possessing it. I sat and waited until everyone else had gone and then I told the agent I would buy it for cash if he called off the auction.”
With characteristic audacity, Pauline made this offer even though she did not have the cash but somehow she wrangled a means to borrow the money at short notice, boldly taking possession, exchanging contracts and moving in three days later, before finding a mortgage. It was due to her personal strength of purpose that The George survived as a pub, and thanks to her intelligence and flair that it has prospered in recent years.“I thought, ‘I’ve got to open the bar, it would be a sin not to,'” she assured me, widening her sharp grey eyes to emphasise such a self evident truth, “I decided to open it and that’s what I did.”
A decade of renovations later, the false ceilings and recently installed modern wall coverings have been stripped away to reveal the structure of the building, and the early nineteenth stucco facade is now revealed in all its glory to the Commercial Rd. “I’m used to taking on challenges and I’m a hardworking person,” Pauline admitted, “I don’t mind doing quite a bit of work myself, you’ll see me up scaffolding chipping cement off and painting windows.”
Yet in parallel with the uncovering of the fabric of this magnificent old building – still harbouring the atmosphere of another age – has been the remarkable discovery of the long history of the pub which once stood here in the fields beside the Queen’s Highway to Essex before there were any other buildings nearby, more than seven hundred years ago. When Commercial Rd was cut through by the East India Company in the early nineteenth century, the orientation of the building changed and a new stuccoed frontage was added declaring a new name, The George. Before this it was known as The Halfway House, referenced by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Reeve’s Tale written in the thirteen-eighties when he lived above the gate at Aldgate and by Samuel Pepys who recorded numerous visits during the sixteen-sixties.
A narrow yard labelled Aylward St behind the pub, now used as a garden, is all that remains today of the old road which once brought all the trade to The Halfway House. In the eighteenth century, the inn became famous for its adjoining botanic garden where exotic plants imported from every corner of the globe through the London Docks were cultivated. John Roque’s map of 1742 shows the garden extending as far as the Ratcliffe Highway. At this time, William Bennett – cornfactor and biscuit baker of Whitechapel Fields – is recorded as gardener, cultivating as many as three hundred and fifty pineapples in lush gardens that served as a popular destination for Londoners seeking an excursion beyond the city. As further evidence of the drawing power of the The Halfway House, the celebrated maritime painter Robert Dodd was commissioned to paint a canvas of “The Glorious Battle of the Fifth of June” for the dining room, a picture that now resides in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
When you have ascended through all the diverse spaces of The George to reach the attic, you almost expect to look from the dormer windows and see green fields with masts of ships on the river beyond, as you once could. I was filled with wonder to learn just a few of the secrets of this ancient coaching inn that predates the East End, yet thanks to Pauline Forster has survived to adorn the East End today, and I know I shall return because there are so many more stories to be uncovered here. I left Pauline mixing pure pigments with lime wash to arrive at the ideal tint for the facade. “I don’t get time to do my own paintings anymore,” she confessed, “This is my work of art now.”
Pauline Forster, Artist & Publican.
Nineteenth century tiling in the bar.
A ceramic mural illustrates The George in its earlier incarnation as The Halfway House.
Stepney in 1600 showing The Halfway House and botanic garden on White Horse Lane, long before Commercial Rd was cut through by the East India Company in the early nineteenth century.
The Halfway House in the seventeenth century.
The Halfway House became The George and the orientation of the building was changed in the nineteenth century when Commercial Rd was cut through. Note the toll booth and early telegraph mast.
Detail of the stucco facade before restoration.
In the attic, where Pauline lived when she first moved in
Pauline’s collection includes the dried-out carcass of a rat from Brick Lane.
Entrance to the attic
Living room
Living room with view down Commercial Rd
Dining Room
Wide eighteenth century staircase.
Pauline’s bathroom with matching telephone, the last fragment of the nineteen seventies interior that once extended throughout the building.
Kitchen looking out onto the former Queen’s Highway, now the pub garden
Pauline’s dresser
Pauline hits the light-up dancefloor at “Stepney’s” nightclub next door.
The George Tavern, 373 Commercial Rd, E1 0LA (corner of Jubilee St).
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Tony Bock On The Railway
A mischievous trainspotter changes the departure time at Liverpool St Station
“I have always liked railway stations, a focal point of the community – the start and finish of a journey,” Photographer Tony Bock admitted to me, introducing these elegant pictures. “Often the journey was a daily chore, but sometimes it was an occasion,” he added, in appreciation of the innate drama of rail travel.
Tony’s railway photographs date from the years between 1973 and 1978, when he was living in the East End and worked on the East London Advertiser, before he left to take took a job on the Toronto Star, pursuing a career as a photojournalist there through four decades.
“Although plenty has been written about the architecture of railways and the industrial ‘cathedrals’ – from the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is easy to forget the great change the railway brought when it first arrived in the mid-nineteeth century. Liverpool St Station was opened in 1874 and survived largely unchanged into the nineteen seventies.
So, in 1977, when proposals to redevelop the station were suggested, I decided to spend some time there, documenting the life of the station with its astonishing brick and iron architecture. I loved the cleaners, taking a break, and the young lad taking it upon himself to reschedule the next train – ‘Not This Train’! Meanwhile, the evening commuters heading home looked as if they were being drawn by a mysterious force.
Next door to Liverpool St was Broad St Station, only used for commuter trains from North London then and already it was looking very neglected. Only a few years later, it closed when Liverpool St was redeveloped.
Over in Stratford, the rail sheds dated back to the days when the Great Eastern Railway serviced locomotives there. Surprisingly, British Rail were still using some of the sheds in 1977, maintaining locomotives amongst the rubble that eventually became the site of the Olympic Park.
Finally, from the very earliest days of railways, I found three posters on the wall in the London Dock, Wapping. The one in the centre is from the Great Northern Railway, dated 1849, the other two from the North Union Railway Company, dated 1836, and it is still possible to read that one hundred and twelve pounds or ten cubic feet would be carried for three shillings according to the Rates, Tolls and Duties. The North Union operated in Lancashire and only lasted until 1846. How did these posters survive, they were likely one hundred and thirty years old. I wonder if anyone was able to salvage them?
I suppose there is an irony that I am writing this today in my home which is a village railway station built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1904. The building now sits in woods, since the local branchline is long gone. Yet any station – grand or modest – will always carry a significance for the community they are part of.”
Farewells at LIverpool St
Ticket collecting at Liverpool St
Cleaners, taking a break, at Liverpool St.
Commuters at Broad St Station.
Waiting for a train at Victoria Station
Wartime sign in the cellar of Broad St Station, demolished in 1986.
Stratford Railway works, now engulfed beneath the Olympic site
Repair sheds at Stratford
Engine sheds at Stratford
Railway posters dating from 1836 in London Dock, Wapping
Photographs copyright © Tony Bock
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Stephen Watts, Poet
An exhibition inspired by Stephen Watts’ work, EXPLOSION OF WORDS, created by Hannes Schüpbach, opens at the Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, this Friday 28th January and runs until Saturday April 17th
“I remember coming out of the tube in Whitechapel in 1974 and being overwhelmed,” recalled Stephen Watts affectionately, his deep brown eyes glowing with inner fire to describe the spiritual epiphany of his arrival in the East End, when coming to London after three years on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. Today Stephen lives in Shadwell and has a tiny writing office in the Toynbee Hall in Commercial St where I paid him a call upon him.
“Migration is in my awareness and in my blood,” he admitted, referring to his family who were mountain people dwelling in the Swiss Alps on the Italian border – living twelve hundred feet above sea level – and his grandfather who came to London before the First World War, worked in a cafe in Soho and then bought his own cafe. “I realised this was an area of migration since the seventeenth century when the farm workers of Cambridgeshire, Kent and Suffolk began to arrive here, and I immediately felt an affinity for the place,” Stephen continued, casting his thoughts back far beyond his own arrival in Whitechapel, yet wary to qualify the vision too, lest I should think it self-dramatising.
“It is very easy to be romantic about it, but I think migration has been the objective reality for many people in the twentieth and twenty-first century. So it seemed to be something very natural, when I came to live in Whitechapel.” he revealed with an amiable smile. Yet although he allowed himself a moment to savour this thought, Stephen possesses a restless energy and a mind in constant motion, suggesting that he might be gone at any moment, and entirely precluding any sense of being at home and here to stay. Even if he has lived in his council house in Shadwell for forty years, I would not be surprised if the wind blew Stephen away.
A tall skinny man with his loose clothes hanging off him and his long white locks drifting around, Stephen does present a superficial air of insubstantiality, even other-wordliness. Yet when you are in conversation with Stephen you quickly encounter the substance of his quicksilver mind, moving swiftly and using words with delicate precision, making unexpected connections. “In the Outer Hebrides the unemployment rate was twenty-five per cent and it was the same in Tower Hamlets when I arrived,” he said, informing me of the parallels with precise logic, “also Tower Hamlets had large areas of empty water then, just like the North Uist.” drawing comparison between the abandoned dockland and the Hebridean sea lochs, in regions of Britain that could not be more different in ever other respect.
We took the advantage of the frosty sunlight to make a half hour’s circuit of the streets attending Brick Lane and these familiar paths took on another quality in Stephen’s company, because while I tend to be always going somewhere, Stephen has the sense to halt and look around – indicative of certain open-ness of temperament that has led him befriend all kinds of people in pubs and on the street in Whitechapel over the years. I took this moment to ask Stephen if he chose to be a poet. “I made a choice when I quit university after a year and went to live in North Uist,” he said as we resumed our pace, “and then I made a choice to be a poet. But as a choice it was unavoidable, because I realised that it was so much part of me that not to have done it would be a denial of my humanity.”
Returning to the Toynbee Hall, Stephen allowed me the privilege of a peek into his tiny room on an upper floor, not much larger than a broom cupboard. The walls were lined with thin poetry books in magnificent order, arrayed in wine boxes stacked floor to ceiling and standing proud of the walls to create bays, leaving space only for one as slim as Stephen to squeeze through. It was a sacred space, the lair of the mountain man or a hermit’s retreat. It felt organic, like a cave, or maybe – it occurred to me – a shepherd’s hut carved out of the rock. And there, up above Stephen’s head was an old black and white photo of shepherds on a mountain road, taken in the Swiss Alps whence Stephen’s family originate and where even now he still returns to visit his relatives.
Stephen’s room is a haven of peace in the midst of Whitechapel, yet he delights to complement his life in here by working alongside Bengali and Somali poets in all kinds of projects in schools around Tower Hamlets, and pursues translation alongside his own poetry too, as means to “invite difference” into his work. Possessing a natural warmth of personality and brightness of temperament which make you want to listen and hang off his words, Stephen has a genuine self-effacing charm.“I don’t believe in being a professional poet in the sense of promoting myself, being a poet is about becoming embedded in humanity.” he proposed modestly, presuming to speak for no-one than himself, “And that’s why I lived in the East End and that’s why I still find it inspiring – because of the tremendous range of human presence in Whitechapel.”
BRICK LANE
(after the death of Altab Ali, and for Bill Fishman)
Whoever has walked slowly down Brick Lane in the darkening air and a stiff little rain,
past the curry house with lascivious frescoes,
past the casual Sylheti sweet-shops and cafés
and the Huguenot silk attics of Fournier Street,
and the mosque that before was a synagogue and before that a chapel,
whoever has walked down that darkening tunnel of rich history
from Bethnal Green to Osborne Street at Aldgate,
past the sweat-shops at night and imams with hennaed hair,
and recalls the beigel-sellers on the pavements, windows candled to Friday night,
would know this street is a seamless cloth, this city, these people,
and would not suffocate ever from formlessness or abrupted memory,
would know rich history is the present before us,
laid out like a cloth – a cloth for the wearing – with bits of mirror and coloured stuff,
and can walk slowly down Brick Lane from end to seamless end,
looped in the air and the light of it, in the human lattice of it,
the blood and exhausted flesh of it, and the words grown bright with the body’s belief,
and life to be fought for and never to be taken away.
Song for Mickie the Brickie
Mickie I met down Watney Street and he whistled me across.
“How are you” he said
—and of course really meant “have you a little to spare for some drink”—
but could not bear to ask.
We walked through the decayed market,
a yellow-black sun gazed down over Sainsbury’s as I went to look for change.
Ten pound was hardly enough to get him through the dregs of that bitter day.
We stood on the corner where for centuries people have stood.
Many worlds passed us by.
When he had been in hospital he’d taken his pills and been looked after and had not got worse.
Now he’s barely getting by.
He walks out of the rooming house in Bethnal Green when it gets too loud inside.
His scalp’s flaking and he needs a reliable level and a small brickie’s trowel.
That woman’s son’s inside for good.
That one’s man is a chronic alcoholic.
This one’s on her own and better for it.
But how can you know anyone’s story when every day you walk by without stopping.
Charlie Malone was a good friend. So was John Long.
Now they’re resting in Tadman’s Parlour
—and first thing in the morning Mickie’ll go and say to them words that cannot be answered.
Those are the best words, but they’re hardest to bear.
To me he says : “Always—always—stop me—always—come across.”
And what is the point of centuries of conversation if no-one’s ever there to hear.
FRAGMENT
… And so I long for snow to
sweep across the low heights of London
from the lonely railyards and trackhuts
– London a lichen mapped on mild clays
and its rough circle without purpose –
because I remember the gap for clarity
that comes before snow in the north and
I remember the lucid air’s changing sky
and I remember the grey-black wall with
every colour imminent in a coming white
the moon rising only to be displaced and
the measured volatile calmness of after
and I remember the blue snow hummocks
the mountains of miles off in snow-light
frozen lakes – a frozen moss to stand on
where once a swarmed drifting stopped.
And I think – we need such a change,
my city and I, that may be conjured in
us that dream birth of compassion with
reason & energy merged in slow dance.
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
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