Spitalfields Life

Maurice Evans has been collecting fireworks since childhood and now at over eighty years old,  he has the most comprehensive collection in the country – so you can imagine both my excitement and my trepidation upon stepping through the threshold of his house in Shoreham. My concern about potential explosion was relieved when Maurice confirmed that he has removed the gunpowder from his fireworks, only to be reawakened when his wife Kit helpfully revealed that Catherine Wheels and Bangers were excepted because you cannot extract the gunpowder without ruining them.

This statement prompted Maurice to remember with visible pleasure that he still had a collection of World War II shells in the cellar and, of course, the reinforced steel shed in the garden full of live fireworks. “Let’s just say, if there’s a big bang in the neighbourhood, the police always come here first to see if it’s me,” admitted Maurice with a playful smirk. “Which it often isn’t,” added Kit, backing Maurice up with a complicit demonstration of knowing innocence.

“It all started with my father who was in munitions in the First World War,” explained Maurice proudly, “He had a big trunk with little drawers, and in those drawers I found diagrams explaining how to work with explosives and it intrigued me. Then came World War II and the South Downs were used as a training ground and, as boys, we went where we shouldn’t and there were loads of shells lying around, so we used to let them off.”

Maurice’s radiant smile revealed to me the unassailable joy of his teenage years, running around the downs at Shoreham playing with  bombs. “We used to set off detonators outside each other’s houses to announce we’d arrived!” he bragged, waving his left hand to reveal the missing index finger, blown off when the explosive in a slow fuse unexpectedly fired upon lighting. “That’s the worst thing that happened,” Maurice declared with a grimace of alacrity, “We were worldly wise with explosives!”

Even before his teens, the love of pyrotechnics had taken grip upon Maurice’s psyche. It was a passion born of denial. “I used to suffer from bronchitis and asthma as a child, so when November 5th came round, I had to stay indoors.” he confided with a frown, “Every shop had a club and you put your pennies and ha’pennies in to save for fireworks and that’s what I did, but then my father let them off and I had to watch through the window.”

After the war, Maurice teamed up with a pyrotechnician from London and they travelled the country giving displays which Maurice devised, achieving delights that transcended his childhood hunger for explosions. “In my mind, I could envisage the sequence of fireworks and colours, and that was what I used to enjoy. You’ve got all the colours to start with, smoke, smoke colours, ground explosions, aerial explosions – it’s endless the amount of different things you can do. The art of it is knowing how to choose.” explained Maurice, his face illuminated by the images flickering in his mind. Adding, “I used to be quite big in fireworks at one time.” with calculated understatement.

Yet all this personal history was the mere pre-amble before Maurice led me through his house, immaculately clean, lined with patterned carpets and papers and witty curios of every description. Then in the kitchen, overlooking the garden lined with old trees, he opened an unexpected cupboard door to reveal a narrow red staircase going down. We descended to enter the burrow where Maurice has his rifle range, his collections, model aeroplanes, bombs and fireworks – all sharing the properties of flight and explosiveness. Once they were within reach, Maurice could not restrain his delight in picking up the shells and mortars of his childhood, explaining their explosive qualities and functions.

But my eyes were drawn by all the fireworks that lined the walls and glass cases, and the deep blues, lemon yellows and scarlets of their wrappers and casings. Such evocative colours and intricate designs which in their distinctive style of type and motif, draw upon the excitement and anticipation of magic we all share as children, feelings that compose into a lifelong love of fireworks. Rockets, Roman Candles, Catherine Wheels, Bangers, and Sparklers – amounting to thousands in boxes and crates, Maurice’s extraordinary collection is the history of fireworks in this country.

“I wouldn’t say its made my life, but its certainly livened it up,” confided Maurice, seeing my wonder at his overwhelming display. Because no-one (except Maurice) keeps fireworks, there is something extraordinary in seeing so many old ones and it sets your imagination racing to envisage the potential spectacle that these small cardboard parcels propose.

Maurice outgrew the bronchitis and asthma to have a beautiful life filled with fireworks, to visit firework factories around Britain, in China, Australia, New Zealand and all over Europe, and to scour Britain for collections of old fireworks, accumulating his priceless collection. Now like an old dragon in a cave, surrounded by gold, Maurice guards his cellar hoard protectively and is concerned about the future. “It needs to be seen,” he said, contemplating it all and speaking his thoughts out loud, “I would like to put this whole collection into a museum. I don’t want any money. I want everyone to see what happened from pre-war times up until the present day in the progression of fireworks.”

“My father used to bring me the used ones to keep,” confessed Maurice quietly with an affectionate gleam in his eye, as he revealed the emotional origin of his collection, now that we were alone together in the cellar. With touching selflessness, having derived so much joy from collecting his fireworks, Maurice wants to share them with everybody else.

Maurice with his exploding fruit.

Maurice with his barrel of gunpowder

Maurice with his grenades.

Maurice with two favourite rockets.

Firework photographs copyright © Simon Costin

Read my story about Simon Costin, The Museum of British Folklore

Today, I publish my portrait of market traders, Ivan & Irene Kingsley, as a tribute to Ivan who died on Sunday aged eighty-eight.

Ivan & Irene walking through Petticoat Lane Market

Although it may not be apparent to the casual visitor, Middlesex St is the boundary between the Borough of Tower Hamlets and the City of London. It is a distinction of great significance to residents of this particular neighbourhood, because – as Irene Kingsley, who lived there her whole life, put it to me with succinct humour – “When you are in the gutter, you are in Tower Hamlets but when you are on the pavement, you are in the City.”

“I live in the City now, but I spent most of my life in Tower Hamlets.” she added as a qualification, just in case I should take her quip in the wrong spirit. Although Irene had ascended to the lofty heights of a flat in Petticoat Tower on the City side of Middlesex St, she was not bragging that she had gone up in the world, but rather admitting that her heart remained back on the other side of the street where she started out. And when I went to visit her and her husband Ivan, I understood the difference at once, as I climbing the steps from the shabby Petticoat Lane Market into the well-tended courtyard garden of Petticoat Tower, quite a contrast to comparable developments in Tower Hamlets.

In the hallway of their flat on the seventeen floor more plants flourished, these were tended by the Kingsleys. I had only a moment to contemplate them before Ivan appeared to hustle me through the modest yet comfortable flat to the living room where Irene was waiting. Then, as I entered, my eyes were drawn by the yawning chasm of the view over the City from their window. “Everyone goes straight for the view!” Irene declared, exchanging a knowing smile with Ivan. “We used to be able to see the Tower of London, until they built that,” she said, indicating a blue glass block. “And we could see the Monument, before the Gherkin went up,” said Ivan, pointing in the other direction. With such an astonishing prospect, I could understand how anyone might get a little proprietorial.

“We’ve seen a lot of changes in Petticoat Lane.” Irene admitted to me as we sat down, exchanging another a glance with Ivan which was the cue for him to serve tea and biscuits. I knew this was the beginning of her story.

“I was born in Brune House in Toynbee St. My father was a bus conductor and my mother was a seamstress.” she explained, “My grandfather was a cobbler in Artillery Passage and my grandmother had a tea stall in Leyden St, she had seven daughters and they all worked with her, and as time went on all the daughters had their own stalls and they were passed down to grandchildren. I left school at fifteen to work in the office of a clothing factory in Golding St, near Cable St. Until I was fifteen, I lived at Brune House, then I to moved to Herbert House nearby  to live with my aunt, she had a daughter of her own and she took me in because I lost my mother. She treated me just like a mother, she took over as my mother.

In 1956 I went to Los Angeles. I took the Queen Mary to New York and then I went by plane from New York to Los Angeles. I worked in the office of an insurance company and I loved it there but I was very homesick, so after a year I came back to pick up the pieces. I had various office jobs and I enjoyed travelling with girlfriends but I never settled down. When I turned fifty, I decided to go into the market selling baby clothes and that’s where I met my husband…”

At this point Ivan and Irene exchanged big smiles, because this was the part where it became a shared narrative.

“We both started out as casual traders,” continued Irene, still looking at Ivan and saying “casual traders,” as if it were a term of endearment, “You had to put your name down on the list and wait around until there were available pitches and it just happened that while we were waiting we used to go to a cafe together. Then the old lady at the stall next to us, she had a granddaughter and we were both invited to the Bell for a celebration and we haven’t look back since!

This was the moment when Ivan took over.“I am not an East End boy,” he announced, “though until I was seven I lived on Underwood St in Spitalfields and from there we moved to Ford Sq in Whitechapel, until in 1940 when we moved to Stoke Newington which in those days was upmarket. I ran a furniture factory in Newington Green until 1976, when I took a job as milkman and from there I went to work for Conway Trading in Toynbee St. They sold socks and underwear for men, and I learnt about that trade, so when they went bankrupt I put what I had learnt into practice, I used to go up North to the sock makers, buy stock and sell it to the retailers. I even applied for the lease to the Conway Trading shop, but for some reason the council refused me and the place is still empty, all these years later.”

By now, I realised where this was going, because – like Irene – the climax of Ivan’s story was becoming a market trader.

“So I decided to start trading in the market.” he said, speaking like a true zealot, “Sundays was brilliant and when I started, even in the week, it was good. It was a wonderful experience because you met so many different kinds of people, all sorts, and, because you were all working in the gutter together, you got to know each other. We were all friends since we were all in the same position. At one point, the council wanted to stop casual traders for nine months, so we went on strike and marched to Bethnal Green Town Hall and demonstrated there. They realised the market could fold and they couldn’t take away the livelihood from seventy people, so from then on we got licences to trade. It was an education, and it was a hard life too, but while you are working you enjoy it.”

Irene and Ivan had stalls side by side and then they combined stalls, unifying their presence in the market,  just as their lives became intertwined in marriage. “I retired from the market when my husband was seventy-five and I was seventy-two, so we felt we’d done enough,” explained Irene, clasping her hands in satisfaction.

Yet both acknowledged that trading in the Petticoat Lane Market was a highlight of their existence, a source of livelihood, a social education and a romantic adventure too, which all goes to prove that sometimes the gutter can be a better place to be than the pavement.

Ivan (centre) as a young man on Hythe Beach with his family

Irene at Canon Barnett School, 1947 – she is the sixth from the left in the back row

Irene Kingsley, Herbert House, Spitalfields 1957

Irene (left) at Riccione Beach in 1970 with her friends Phyllis Gee, Stella Spanjar and Celina Martin

Ivan returns to Conway Trading on Toynbee St where he worked in the seventies. Ivan tried to lease it from the council forty years ago but they refused and it was been empty until it was redeveloped three years ago

Irene & Ivan Kingsley in their flat in Petticoat Tower

Looking towards the City from Irene & Ivan’s flat in Petticoat Tower

Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman

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Postcards from Petticoat Lane

Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane

The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St

Fred the Chestnut Seller

Vivian & Toto outside The Primrose

You will not meet many who can boast the distinction of being brought up on the teeming thoroughfare of Bishopsgate but Vivian Betts is one who enjoyed that rare privilege, growing up above The Primrose on the corner of Primrose St where her parents were publicans from 1955 until 1974. Yet it was a different Bishopsgate from that of the present day with its soaring glass towers housing financial industries. In her childhood, Vivian knew a street lined with pubs and individual shops where the lamplighter came each night to light the gas lamps.

Living in a pub on the boundary of the City of London, Vivian discovered herself at a hub of human activity. “I had the best of both worlds,” Vivian confessed to me, when she came up to Spitalfields on a rare visit, “I had the choice of City life or East End life, I could go either way. I had complete freedom and I was never in any danger. My father said to me if I ever had any trouble to go to a policeman. But all my friends wanted to come over to my place, because I lived in a pub!”

Vivian knew Bishopsgate before the Broadgate development swallowed up the entire block between Liverpool St and Primrose St. And as we walked together past the uniform architecture, she affectionately ticked off the order of the pubs that once stood there – The Kings Arms, The Raven and then The Primrose – with all the different premises in between. When we reached the windswept corner of Primrose St beneath the vast Broadgate Tower, Vivian gestured to the empty space where The Primrose once stood, now swallowed by road widening, and told me that she remembered the dray horses delivering the beer in barrels on carts from the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.

In this landscape of concrete, glass and steel, configured as the environment of aggressive corporate endeavour, it was surreal yet heartening to hear Vivian speak and be reminded that human life once existed there on a modest domestic scale. Demolished finally in 1987, The Primrose had existed in Bishopsgate at least since 1839.

“My brother Michael was born in 1942, while Bill my father was away in the war, and Violet my mother got a job as a barmaid, and when he came back she said, ‘This is how I want to spend my life.’ Their first pub was The Alfred’s Head in Gold St, Stepney, in about 1946, and she told me she was washing the floor there in the morning and I was born in the afternoon. We left when I was three and all I remember of Stepney was walking over a bomb site to look at all the caterpillars.

In 1955, we moved into The Primrose at 229 Bishopsgate, directly opposite the Spitalfields market – you could look out of the window on the first floor and see the market. My first memory of Bishopsgate was lying in bed and listening to the piano player in the pub below. We had three pianos, one in the public bar, one in the first floor function room and one in our front room. On Sunday lunchtimes at The Primrose, it was so busy you could hardly see through the barroom for all the hats and smoke.

I used to go to Canon Barnet School in Commercial St and, from the age of seven, my dad would see me across Bishopsgate and I’d walk through the Spitalfields Market on my way to school where the traders would give me an apple and a banana – they all knew me because they used to come drinking in the pub. It was a completely Jewish school and, because no-one else lived in Bishopsgate, all my friends were over in Spitalfields, mostly in the Flower & Dean Buildings, so I spent a lot of time over there. And I used to come to Brick Lane to go the matinees at the cinema every Saturday. Itchy Park was our playground – in those days, the church was shut but we used to peek through the window and see hundreds of pigeons inside.

My dad opened one of the first carveries in a pub, where you could get fresh ham or turkey cut and made up into sandwiches and, in the upstairs room, my mum did sit-down lunches for three shillings – it was like school dinners, steak & kidney pudding and sausage & mash. She walked every day with her trolley to Dewhurst’s the butchers opposite Liverpool St, she got all her fruit and vegetables fresh from the Spitalfields Market, and she used to go to Petticoat Lane each week to buy fresh fish.

Every evening at 5pm, we had all the banks come in to play darts. On Mondays, it was the ladies of The Primrose darts team and on Wednesdays it was the men’s darts league. And, once each year, we organised the Presentation Dance at the York Hall. Every evening in the upstairs function room, we had the different Freemason’s lodges. Whenever I came out of my living room, I could always see them but I had to look away because it was part of my life that I wasn’t supposed to see. After I left school, I went to work for the Royal London Mutual Insurance Co. in Finsbury Sq – five minutes walk away – as a punchcard operator and, whenever it was anyone’s birthday, I’d say ‘Come on back to my mum’s pub and she’ll make us all sandwiches.’

Then in 1973, Truman’s wrote to my dad and gave him a year’s notice, they were turning the pub over to managers in April 1974, so we had to leave. But I had already booked my wedding for July at St Botolph’s in Bishopsgate, and I came back for that. Eighteen months later, in 1976, my mum and dad asked me and my husband to go into running a pub with them. It was The Alexandra Hotel in Southend, known as the “Top Alex” because there were two and ours was at the top of the hill.

Three months after we moved in, my dad died of cancer – so they gave it to my mum on a year’s widow’s lease but they said that if me and my husband proved we could run it, we could keep it. And we stayed until 1985. Then we had a murder and an attempted murder in which a man got stabbed, and my husband said, ‘It’s about time we moved.’ And that’s when we moved to our current pub, The Windmill at Hoo, near Rochester, twenty-eight years ago. We had a brass bell hanging behind the counter at The Primrose that came off a train in Liverpool St Station which we used to call time and we’ve taken it with us – all these years – but though we don’t call time any more, we still use it to ring in the New Year.

I’ve only ever had two Christmases not in a pub in my life, when you’re born to it you don’t know anything else.”

Vivian told me that she often gets customers from the East End in The Windmill and they always recognise her by her voice. “They say, ‘We know where you come from!'” she confided to me proudly.

The Primrose, 229 Bishopsgate, as Vivian knew it.

Toto sits on the heater in the panelled barroom at The Primrose.

Vivian at Canon Barnet School in Commercial St.

Bill and Vi Betts

“My first Freemason’s Lodge night when I was twelve or thirteen in 1965. My brother Michael with his wife Valerie on the right.”

Vivian stands outside The Primrose in this picture, looking east across Bishopsgate towards Spital Sq with Spitalfields market in the distance.

Vivian was awarded this certificate while a student at Sir John Cass School, Houndsditch.

Vivian on the railway bridge, looking west towards Finsbury Sq.

Vivian outside the door which served as the door to the pub and her own front door.

Vivian’s friends skylarking in Bishopsgate – “They always wanted to come over to my place because I lived above a pub!”

“When I was eight, we went abroad on holiday for the first time to Italy, we bought the tickets at the travel agents across the road and, after that, twelve or fourteen couples would come with us – my parents’ friends – and I was always the youngest there.”

Vivian prints out a policy at the Royal London Mutual Insurance Co. in Finsbury Sq.

“And what do you do?” – Vivian meets Prince Charles on a visit to Lloyd Register of Shipping in Fenchurch St.

“Harry the greengrocer and Tom the horse, they used to get their fruit & vegetables in the Spitalfields Market. My husband Dennis worked for this man when he was about twelve years of age, driving around the Isle of Dogs. He loved horses, and we’ve got a piece of land with our pub now and we’ve kept horses since 1980.”

Bill & Vi Betts in later years.

Vivian Betts at St Botolph’s Bishopsgate where she married her husband Dennis Campbell in 1974.

The Primrose in a former incarnation, photographed in 1912.

Bishopsgate with The Primrose halfway down on the right, photographed in 1912 by Charles Goss.

Bishopsgate today.

Archive photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

You might also like to take a look at these other Bishopsgate Stories

The Romance of Old Bishopsgate

Charles Goss’ Photographs of Bishopsgate

Tallis’ Street Views of Bishopsgate, 1838