Beattie Orwell, Centenarian
Portrait of Beattie Orwell by Phil Maxwell
It was my delight to accompany Contributing Photographer Phil Maxwell to visit one hundred and four year old Beattie Orwell and sit beside her in her cosy flat while she talked to me of her century of existence in this particular corner of the East End.
A magnanimous woman who delights in the modest joys of life, Beattie is nevertheless a political animal who is proud to be one of the last living veterans of the Battle of Cable St – a formative experience that inspired her with a fiercely egalitarian sense of justice and led to her becoming a councillor in later life, acutely conscious of the rights of the most vulnerable in society.
In spite of her physical frailty, Beattie’s moral courage grants her an astonishing monumental presence as a human being. To speak with Beattie is to encounter another, kinder world.
“I am Jewish and both my parents were East Enders, born here. My father’s parents came over from Russia. On my mother’s side, her parents were born here but her grandfather was born in Holland. So I am a bit of a mixture!
My father Israel worked as a porter at the Spitalfields Market and my mother Julia was a cigar maker at Godfrey & Phillips in Commercial St. I grew up in Brunswick Buildings in Goulston St, until I got bombed out. It was horrible, we had a little scullery, too small to swing a cat. My mother had one bedroom and, the three children, we slept in a put-you-up. I had two sisters Rebecca & Esther. Rebecca was the eldest, she very clever at dressmaking. When she was fifteen, she could make a dress. We needed her because my father died when he was forty-four, he had three strokes and died in Vallance Rd Hospital. I was only thirteen. He used to take me everywhere, he was marvellous. He took to me to the West End to visit my aunt, she was an old lady with a parrot and lived on Bewick St. We used to have a laugh with the parrot.
We moved to City Corporation flats in Stoney Lane and I went to Gravel Lane School. It was lovely school, they taught us housewifery. We had a little flat in the school and we used to clean it out, then go shopping in Petticoat Lane to buy ingredients to make a dinner, imagining we were married. The boys used to do woodwork and learnt to make stools and things like that. I loved that school. When I was twelve it closed and I went to the Jewish Free School in Bell Lane. It was very strict and religious. When the teacher wanted us to be quiet, she’d say, ‘I’m waiting!’ It was good, I enjoyed my school life.
I left when I was fourteen and I went to work right away, dressmaking in Alie St. I used to lay out material. I do not know why but I must have heavy fingers, I could not manage the silk. It used to fall out of my hands. I only lasted a week before I left, I could not stand it. Then I went to work with my sister at Lottereys in Whitechapel opposite the Rivoli Picture Palace, they used to make uniforms for solders. I went into tailoring, men’s trousers, putting the buttons on with a machine. We worked long hours and it was hard work. By the time I got married I was earning two pounds and ten shillings a week. I never earned big money. I worked all the way through the war. I gave all the money to my mother and she gave me a shilling back. I used to walk up to the West End. It was threepence on the trolley bus.
I was nineteen in 1936. I was there with all the crowds at the Battle of Cable St. I am Jewish and I knew we must fight the fascists. They were anti-semitic, so I felt I had to do it. I was not frightened because there were so many people there. If I was on my own I might have been frightened, but I never saw so many people. You could not imagine. Dockers, Scottish and Irish people were there. It was a marvellous atmosphere. I was standing on the corner of Leman St outside a shop called ‘Critts’ and everyone was shouting ‘ They shall not pass!’ I was with my friend and we stood there a long time, hours. So from there we walked down to Cable St where we saw the lorry turned over. I never saw the big fighting that happened in Aldgate because I was not down there, but I saw them fighting in Cable St near this turned over lorry. From there, we walked down to Royal Mint St, where the blackshirts were. They were standing in a line waiting for Oswald Mosley to come. So I said to my friend, ‘We’d better get away from here.’
We went back through Cable St to the place where we started. From there, the news came through ‘They’re not passing.’ We all marched past the place where Fascists had their headquarters – they threw flour over us, shouting – to Victoria Park where we had a big meeting with thousands of people. I had never seen anything like it in my life and I used to go to all the meetings. I never went dancing. My mother used to say, ‘I don’t know where I got you from!’ because I was only interested in politics. I am the only one like this in the whole family. I still know everything that is going on.
I used to go to Communist Party socials in Swedenborg Sq, off Cable St, and – being young – I used to enjoy it. Then I joined the Labour Party, the Labour League of Youth it was called. We used to go on rambles. It was lovely. We went to Southend once. I always used to march to Hyde Park on May Day and carry one of the ropes of our banner. I met my husband John in Victoria Park when I was with the Young Communists League, although I was not a member. They had a Sports Day and my husband was running for St Mary Atte Bowe because he was a Catholic. I met him and we went to a Labour Party dance. We got married in 1939.
We managed to get a flat in the same building as my mother, at the top of the stairs. They were private flats and I remember standing outside with a banner saying, ‘Don’t pay no rent!’ because the owners would not do the flats up. They did not look after us, it was horrible thing for us to have to do but it worked. I laugh now when I think about it. I was always brave. I am brave now.
We got bombed out of those flats while my husband was in the army. I had a baby so they sent me to Oxford where my husband was based with the York & Lancasters. We had a six-roomed house for a pound a week. My mother and sister came with me and they looked after my baby while I went to work in munitions. I was a postwoman too and I used to get up at four in the morning and walk over Magdalen Bridge.
I came back to the East End to try to get a flat here and I got caught in one of the air raids, but I knew this was where I had to live. My mother used to get under the stairs in Wentworth St when there was a raid and put a baby’s pot on her head. The war was terrible.
They sent my husband to Ikley Moor and it was too cold for him, so we came back for good. I managed to get two horrible little side rooms in Stoney Lane, sharing a kitchen between four and a toilet between two. I had no fridge, just a wooden box with chicken wire on the front. I used to go the Lane and buy two-pennorth of ice and put the butter in there. I had to buy food fresh everyday. There was a black market trade in fruit. These flats had been built for the police but the police would not have them, so they let them out to other people. All the flats were named after royalty, we were in Queens Buildings. I watched them building new flats in Cambridge Heath Rd but, before I could get one of them, I was offered a lot of horrible flats. Yet when I got there we were overcrowded, until we got a three bedroom flat at last, because I had two girls and a boy. I lived sixty-seven years there.
My husband never earned much money so I had to carry on working. He had twenty-two shillings a week pension from the army. He did all kinds of things and then got a job in the Orient Tea Warehouse. In 1966, when he was going to be Mayor of Bethnal Green and they would not give him time off, he went up to the Hackney Town Hall and got a job in the Town Clerk’s Office. He was always good at writing, he had lovely hand writing.
I became a councillor and I loved it. Our council was the best council, they were best to the old people. We used to go and visit all the old people’s homes. I never told them I was coming because I used to try and catch them out. We checked the quality of food and how clean it was. I organised dinners in York Hall for all the old people and trips to Eastbourne, but it has all been done away with – they do nothing now.
I was a councillor for ten years from 1972 until 1982. I had to fight to get the seat but I always loved old people, my husband was the same. He was known as the ‘Singing Mayor’ because he used to sing in all the old people’s homes. From when I was forty-two, I used to go round old people’s homes on Friday nights and I still do it. We have dinners together, turkey, roast potatoes and sausages, with trifle for afters.”
Beattie Orwell
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
See more of Phil Maxwell’s work here
Phil Maxwell’s Kids on the Street
Phil Maxwell & Sandra Esqulant, Photographer & Muse
More of Phil Maxwell’s Old Ladies
Phil Maxwell’s Old Ladies in Colour
Max Levitas & The Battle Of Cable St
Today is the eighty-fifth anniversary of The Battle of Cable St. Here is my interview with the late Max Levitas remembering that day, accompanied by Phil Maxwell‘s pictures of the fiftieth anniversary in 1986
Max Levitas by Phil Maxwell
Max Levitas became an East End hero when he was arrested in 1934, at the age of nineteen years old, for writing anti-Fascist slogans on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. “There were two of us, we did it at midnight and we wrote ‘All out on September 9th to fight Fascism,’ ‘Down with Fascism’ and ‘Fight Fascism,’ on Nelson’s Column in whitewash,” he told me, his eyes shining with pleasure, still fired up with ebullience at one hundred and two years of age, “And afterwards we went to Lyons Corner House to have something to eat and wash our hands, but when we had finished our tea we decided to go back to see how good it looked, and we got arrested – the police saw the paint on our shoes.”
On September 9th 1934, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was due to speak at a rally in Hyde Park but – as Max was always happy to remind you – he was drowned out by the people of London who converged to express their contempt. It was both fortuitous and timely that the Times reprinted Max’s slogans on September 7th, two days before the rally, in the account of his appearance at Bow St Magistrates Court, thereby spreading the message.
Yet this event was merely the precursor to the confrontation with the Fascists that took place in the East End, two years later on 4th October 1936, that became known as the Battle of Cable St, and in which Max was proud to have played a part – a story he told as an inspirational example of social solidarity in the face of prejudice and hatred. And, as we sat in a quiet corner of the Whitechapel Library, watching the rain fall upon the street market outside, it was a story that I was eager to hear in Max’s first hand account, especially since he was one of last left of those who were there.
Politics had always been personal for Max Levitas, based upon family experience of some of the ugliest events of the twentieth century. His father Harry fled from Lithuania and his mother Leah from Latvia in 1913, both escaping the anti-semitic pogroms of Tsarist Russia. They met in Dublin and married but, on the other side of Europe, Harry’s sister Sara was burnt to death along with fellow-villagers in the synagogue of Akmeyan, and Leah’s sister Rachel was killed with her family by the Nazis in Riga.
“My father was a tailor and a trade unionist,” Max explained in the lively Dublin brogue that still coloured his speech, even after eighty years in the East End. “He formed an Irish/Jewish trade union and then employers blacklisted him, making sure he could never get a job,” Max continued with a philosophical grin, “The only option was to leave Dublin and we lived in Glasgow from 1927 until 1930, but my father had two sisters in London, so we came here to Durward St in Whitechapel in 1931 and stayed ever since.”
With this background, you can appreciate the passionate concern of Max – when he was nineteen and secretary of the Mile End Young Communist League – at a time when the British Government was supporting the Fascist General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. “Even after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, the British Government was developing arms with Germany,” Max informed me, widening his eyes in condemnation and bringing events into vivid reality that I had viewed only as history until he filled them with personal emotion.
“I was working as a tailor’s presser in a small workshop in Commercial St at the time. Mosley wanted to march through Whitechapel because it was where a large number of Jewish people lived and worked, and I knew the only way to stop him was to have unity of the people. I approached a number of unions, Jewish organisations and the Communist League to band together against the Fascists but although they agreed what I was doing was right, they wouldn’t support me.
But I give credit to the huge number of members of the Jewish and Irish communities and others who turned out that day, October the fourth, 1936. There were thousands that came together in Aldgate, and when we heard that Mosley’s intention was to march along Cable St from Tower Hill into Whitechapel, large numbers of people went to Cable St and barricades were set up. The police attempted to clear Cable St with horses, so that the march could go ahead, but the people of Cable St fought back and the police had to give in.
At three o’clock, we heard that police had decided that the march would not take place, because if it did a number of people would be killed. The Fascists were defeated by the ordinary people of Stepney, people who emptied buckets of water and chamber pots out of their houses, and marbles into the street. This was how they stopped Mosley marching through the East End of London. If he had been able to do so, more people would have joined him and he would have become stronger.”
Max Levitas spoke of being at the centre of a definitive moment in the history of the East End, eighty years ago, when three hundred thousand people came together to form a human chain – in the face of three thousand fascists with an escort of ten thousand police – to assert the nature of the territory as a place where Fascism and racism are unacceptable. It was a watershed in resistance to Fascism in Europe and the slogan that echoed around Stepney and Whitechapel that day was, “No paseran” – from the Spanish Civil War, “They shall not pass.”
After the war, Max became a highly respected Communist councillor in Stepney for fifteen years and, a natural orator, he remains eloquent about the nature of his politics.“It was never an issue to forge a Communist state like in the Soviet Union,” he informed me, just in case I got the wrong idea,“We wanted to ensure that the ordinary working people of England could lead decent lives – not to be unemployed, that people weren’t thrown out of their homes when they couldn’t pay their rent, that people weren’t homeless, as so many are today, living with their parents and crowded together in rooms.”
Max’s lifelong political drive was the manifestation of a tenacious spirit. When Max arrived in Whitechapel Library, I did not recognise him at first because he could pass for a man thirty years younger. And later, when I returned his photos to his flat nearby, I discovered Max lived up five flights of stairs and it became obvious that he walked everywhere in the neighbourhood, living independently even at his astounding age. “I used to smoke,” Max admitted to me shyly, when I complimented him on his energy.” I stopped at eighty-four, when my wife died – until then I used to smoke about twenty cigarettes a day, plus a pipe and cigars.” Max confessed, permitting himself a reckless grin of nostalgia.
“My mother and father both died at sixty-five,” Max revealed, turning contemplative,“I put that down to the way they suffered and poverty. My father worked around the clock to keep the family going. He died two years after my mother. At that time there was no National Health Service, and I phoned the doctor when she was sick, asking him to come, and he said, ‘You owe me some money. Unless you pay me, I won’t come.’ I said, ‘You come and see my mother.’ He said, ‘You will have to pay me extra for coming plus what you owe.’ But she died before he came and I had to get an ambulance.”
It was a story that revealed something more of the personal motivation for Max’s determination to fight for better conditions for the people of the East End – yet remarkably, in spite of the struggle of those around him and that he himself had known, Max was a happy man. “I’m always happy, because I can say that my life was worth living, ” he declared to me without qualification.
Max Levitas wanted to live as long as possible to remind us of all the things he had seen. “I believe if racists marched through the East End today, people would stop them in the same way,” he assured me with the unique confidence granted only to those who have known one hundred and two years of life.
Max in 1945
Max campaigning in Stepney in the nineteen sixties
Max with his wife on a trip to Israel in the nineteen seventies
The march for the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Cable St in 1986
In Mile End Rd
In Brick Lane
Photos of 50th anniversary copyright © Phil Maxwell
Hairdressers Of The Eighties
I am delighted to publish these photos from A London Inheritance – written by a graduate of my blog course.
A few places are available for my course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on October 30th & 31st. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Leila’s Cafe, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details
Dennis Gents Hair Stylist, note the razor blade sign
Ron’s Gents Hairdressers, Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, is still there but has changed from ‘Hairdresser’ to ‘Barber.’
His & Hers, ‘Executive Mood’ and ‘Avant Garde Mood’ hairstyles offered
June’s Ladies Hair Stylist. STE was the code for Stepney Green, letters were replaced by numbers around 1966.
Dave & Syd Strong, Gent’s Hairdresser
Gent’s Hairdresser moving into Ladies’ Hairdressing
Gent’s Hair Stylist, Puma Court, Spitalfields, run by Kyriacos Cleovoulou from 1962 until 2005.
Apples, Hair Stylist
Peter, Individual Gents Hair Stylist
The Saloon, customers peering out from the left of the window
Gentlemen’s Hairdressing Salon, Carter Lane, City of London
Mario’s Men’s Hairstylist
Hairdresser at 10 Laystall Street, Clerkenwell, with a plaque commemorating Giuseppe Mazzini as ‘the apostle of modern democracy inspired young Italy with the ideal of independence, unity and regeneration of his country.’
The Pleasant Gent’s Hairdresser is still going in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell
Photographs copyright © A London Inheritance
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HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 30th & 31st October 2021
This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.
SALIENT DETAILS
The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 30th-31st October, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.
Lunch will be catered by Leila’s Cafe of Arnold Circus and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £300.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.
PC Tassell In The Pool Of London
Lew Tassell sent me these pictures that he took in the Pool of London on 9th July 1973
Looking west from H.M.S. Belfast
“There were normally three of us policemen on duty on Tower Bridge. Four hours was the longest duty, 07:00hrs-11:00hrs or 11:00hrs-15:00hrs on early turn shift. We used the toilet near the engine room on the north side of the bridge. Up until 1976, steam hydraulics opened and shut the bascules – and it was a fascinating, if noisy experience to step into the engine room and watch the mechanism from the inside.
When the alarm bell was sounded for the bridge to open we had make sure all the traffic was stopped. On one occasion, I received a radio call that there was a ‘disturbance’ on a 78 bus on the south side of the bridge travelling north.
The bascules on the bridge were already being raised when I went to the engine control room and informed them of the problem. They said that, if I was quick, they could stop the raising of the bridge long enough for me to jump across – and that is what I did. I vividly recall running to the edge of the open bascule and seeing the water a long way below and a drop of about five feet and a gap of about three feet to the opposite bascule.
I threw my policeman’s helmet to the other side – I did not want it to fall into the river – and took a running leap, landing safely. There was no such thing as health and safety in those days. I do not have any recollection of the disturbance on the bus, other than it was ‘all quiet on arrival’ by the time I got there.
Slow traffic was often a problem on Tower Bridge and we would be instructed to speed it up by standing between the narrow southbound and northbound lanes, waving the cars, lorries and buses through. Thinking back, this was a totally mad thing to do, not to mention the danger of the noxious fumes I was breathing in.
Commercial traffic in the Pool of London, between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, had all but vanished by the early seventies due to the introduction of shipping containers. The wharves and derricks had either been demolished or were in the process of being redeveloped, and the opening of Tower Bridge was a rare event compared to the fifties and sixties when perhaps it would be opened as many as thirty times times a day.”
Lew Tassell
Looking west towards the new London Bridge built between 1967 – 1972 and opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 17th March 1973.
Looking east from H.M.S. Belfast
Looking east from H.M.S Belfast
Looking East towards a rather grimy looking Tower Bridge, my favourite picture of the day. I spent so much time on that bridge as a young policeman in uniform when it was manned between 07:00hrs and 20:00hrs, often for four hours at a time. Next to the South Tower you can just see the outline of a small box, there was another one by the North Tower on the east side. They were police boxes and supposed to be used when there was inclement weather but more often used to natter during the quiet times. They no longer exist.
Looking east from H.M.S. Belfast.
Looking west from the bow of H.M.S. Belfast.
H.M.S. Belfast Control Room
H.M.S. Belfast taken from the Thames path in front of the Tower of London. The ship is a Town class light cruiser built for the Royal Navy at the celebrated shipyard of Harland & Wolff in Belfast, launched on St Patrick’s Day, 1938. She saw action throughout World War II and was moored on the River Thames, opening to the public in October 1971.
Looking north, the ship La Belle Simone is moored alongside the shore, it was built the previous year and owned by William Levitt, the real estate developer and credited as the father of modern American suburbia. The spire of All Hallows by the Tower can be seen behind the demolition and construction work on the north shore.
The White Tower, Tower of London.
The Monument, this view is now obliterated by the surrounding buildings.
Police Constable Lew Tassell, City of London Police, 1971
Photographs copyright © Lew Tassell
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Autumn In Spitalfields
A few tickets left for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S WALKING TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS on Sunday October 3rd at noon. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book.
Map of the Gentle Author’s Tour drawn by Adam Dant
Join me on a ramble through Spitalfields taking less than two hours, but walking through two thousand years of history and encountering just a few of the people who have made the place distinctive.
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The rain is falling on Spitalfields, upon the church and the market, and on the streets, yards and gardens. Dripping off the roofs and splashing onto the pavements, filling the gutters and coursing down the pipes, it overflows the culverts and drains to restore the flow of the Black Ditch, the notorious lost river of Spitalfields that once flowed from here to Limehouse Dock. This was the watercourse that transmitted the cholera in 1832. An open sewer piped off in the nineteenth century, the Black Ditch has been co-opted into the drainage system today, but it is still running unknown beneath our feet in Spitalfields – the underground river with the bad reputation.
The shades of autumn encourage such dark thoughts, especially when the clouds hang over the City and the Indian Summer has unravelled to leave us with incessant rain bringing the leaves down. In Spitalfields, curry touts shiver in the chill and smokers stand in doorways, peering at the downpour. The balance of the season has shifted and sunny days have become exceptions, to be appreciated as the last vestiges of the long summer.
On such a day recently, I could not resist collecting these conkers that were lying neglected on the grass in the sunshine. And when I got home I photographed them in that same autumn sunlight to capture their perfect lustre for you. Let me confess, ever since I came to live in the city, it has always amazed me to see conkers scattered and ignored. I cannot understand why city children do not pick them up, when even as an adult I cannot resist the temptation to fill a bag. In Devon, we raced from the school gates and down the lane to be the first to collect the fresh specimens. Their glistening beauty declared their value even if, like gold, their use was limited. I did not bore holes in them with a meat skewer and string them, to fight with them as others do, because it meant spoiling their glossy perfection. Instead I filled a leather suitcase under my bed with conkers and felt secure in my wealth, until one day I opened the case to discover they had all dried out, shrivelled up and gone mouldy.
Let me admit I regret the tender loss of summer, just as I revel in the fruit of the season and the excuse to retreat to bed with a hot water bottle that autumn provides. I lie under the quilt I sewed and I feel protected like a child, though I know I am not a child. I cannot resist dark thoughts, I have a sense of dread at the winter to come and the nights closing in. Yet in the city, there is the drama of the coloured lights gleaming in wet streets. As the nights draw in, people put on the light earlier at home, creating my favourite spectacle of city life, that of the lit room viewed from the street. Every chamber becomes a lantern or a theatre to the lonely stranger on the gloomy street, glimpsing the commonplace ritual of domestic life. Even a mundane scene touches my heart when I hesitate to gaze upon it in passing, like an anonymous ghost in the shadow.
Here in Spitalfields, I have no opportunity to walk through beech woods to admire the copper leaves, instead I must do it in memory. I shall not search birch woods for chanterelles this year either, but I will seek them out to admire in the market, even if I do not buy any. Instead I shall get a box of cooking apples and look forward to eating baked apples by the fire. I am looking forward to lighting the fire. And I always look forward to writing to you every day.
John Claridge’s Soho Faces
Only a few tickets left for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S WALKING TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS on Sunday October 3rd at noon. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book.
Map of the Gentle Author’s Tour drawn by Adam Dant
Join me on a ramble through Spitalfields taking less than two hours, but walking through two thousand years of history and encountering just a few of the people who have made the place distinctive.
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Spike Milligan, Comedian & Writer
Contributing Photographer John Claridge’s exhibition SOHO FACES opens at the House of St Barnabas in Greek St, Soho, W1D 4NQ, on Thursday 7th October.
“I started taking portraits of people at The French House in the seventies when I took a picture of Gaston Berlemont. Then, while taking Spike Milligan’s portrait, we got to talking about Soho. At the time, I was living in Frith St, so Ronnie Scott’s and The French were both very familiar to us and, even then, both of us voiced our sadness at changes we saw – lovely delicatessens, independent restaurants and specialists shops closing down, all of which had been there for years.
In 2004, I decided to document the customers at The French in earnest. For me, it was the one place in Soho that still held its Bohemian character, where people truly chose to share time and conversation, and I became aware that many I had once chinked glasses with were no longer around.
These portraits of the regulars are a cross-section of those who sat for me, but there is no rhyme or reason to my selection.”
– John Claridge
Molly Parkin, Painter & Novelist
Gaz Mayall, Musician
Lisa Stansfield, Simger & Songwriter
Eddie Gray, Jazz Violinist
Lesley Lewis, Owner of The French House
Kenny Clayton, Jazz Pianist
Fergus Henderson, Chef & Restauranteur
Georgina Sutcliffe, Actor
John Phillips, Journalist
Norman Balon, Landlord of the Coach & Horses
Millie Laws, Reflexologist
George Baker, Actor
Oliver Bernard, Poet
Clare Shenstone, Artist
Peter Boizot, Founder of Pizza Express
Peter Owen, Publisher
Vanessa Fenton, Dancer at the Royal Ballet & Choreographer
Sebastian Horsley, Artist
Burt Kwouk, Actor
Kevin Petillo, Television Producer
Pinkietessa, Costume maker
James Birch, Art Dealer
Jay Landesman, Nightclub Owner, Writer & Publisher
Anna Lujan Sanchez, Dancer with Ballet Rambert
Freddie Jones, Actor
Paul Lawford, of The Rubbishmen of Soho
Alison Steadman, Actor
Gaston Berlemont, Former Publican at The French House
Paul Barlow, Cyclist
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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At the Salvation Army in the Eighties
The Voluntary Poverty Movement
Last chance! Only a few tickets left for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S WALKING TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS on Sunday October 3rd at noon. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book.
Map of the Gentle Author’s Tour drawn by Adam Dant
Join me on a ramble through Spitalfields taking less than two hours, but walking through two thousand years of history and encountering just a few of the people who have made the place distinctive.
Click here for further information
Kingsley Hall where Mahatma Gandi stayed in Bow, designed by Charles Voysey
Robert Nurden discovered his grandfather’s involvement with the Voluntary Poverty Movement recently while researching his biography Between Heaven and Earth: A Journey with my Grandfather.
Imagine four earnest people praying together round a simple wooden table on which lie notes and coins, and food and clothing, while in a corner of the bare room waiting for the ceremony to end, stand a group of London’s poorest.
You are witnessing a meeting of the Voluntary Poverty Movement. In 1921, a band of revolutionary Christians – more grandly known as the Brethren of the Common Table – met in Bow to share what was superfluous to their own needs with the needy. It was an initiative in which the rich sought to dispense their wealth and make themselves poor. Only in this way, they claimed, could they understand what it meant to be destitute. Yet, as it played out over the next few months in the back streets of the East End, this short-lived piece of pie-in-the-sky idealism constitutes one of the most hypocritical acts in the the history of do-gooding.
All started well. The Daily News, the Star, the Evening Standard, and other English-speaking newspapers across the world, covered the launch of this lofty but practical take on Christianity. The Evening Standard noted that the group were even prepared to “face exploitation” by less needy people claiming handouts with the definition of ‘need’ left to the conscience of each individual. Salt Lake City’s Deseret News declared “Millionaires & Paupers Join in Self Denial.”
The leader of the Voluntary Poverty Movement was Muriel Lester, an heiress from Loughton in Essex, who with her sister Doris had been working to alleviate the condition of the working class in Bow. She is remembered for her friendship with Mahatma Gandhi and it was she who hosted his visit in 1931.
Muriel told the Standard: “We ask no questions as to character, and welcome both saint and sinner, preacher and purloiner, dukes and dockers, clergy and convicts… We have no connection with any religious body. None of them will look at us. We came into existence because we realised that it isn’t enough to give away money. We feel we have no right to possess it.”
“Our invitation … is not into enforced poverty but into a very glorious alternative, involving a drastic readjustment in your affairs … we invite you into this condition that the needs of others, whether in our own country or abroad, may generously be supplied by the overflowing of your treasure.”
The other signatories were Rosa Hobhouse, Mary Hughes and the Rev Stanley James. They met in an old chapel that Muriel had bought on the site where Kingsley Hall was built in 1928, where Gandhi stayed, on the corner of Powis Rd and Bruce Rd in Bow.
But the four signatories completely failed to practise what they preached. They did not “reshape their lives” in line with their vow of poverty, and the press discovered these failings and lambasted them for their hypocrisy.
Journalists realised that Muriel was relying on her sister Dorothy, who did not join the movement, for financial support. The recent death of their father Henry, a wealthy shipbuilder, had made them beneficiaries of his huge estate. Although Rosa’s husband Stephen had renounced his claims to his family’s Somerset estate, he and his wife set up a family trust which cushioned them from any hardship.
Mary Hughes, who was the daughter of Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, retained control over an inheritance which included substantial properties in Buckinghamshire, although she did make these available as homes for the unemployed and “fallen women.” In reality, none of them had made any significant sacrifice.
Only one – the fourth signatory, Rev Stanley James – had done so, yet the resulting burden fell not on him but on his wife and family. It is here that I must declare an interest: Stanley is my mother’s father and I learned of his involvement while researching his life for the biography I was writing, Between Heaven and Earth: A Journey with my Grandfather. At the time of his participation in this ill-fated enterprise, he and my grandmother Jess, and their seven children were living a life of poverty in a remote cottage in the Mendips.
Stanley wrote nine books and was editor of the Crusader, a pacifist journal. He wrote in his autobiography that conditions at the family cottage “were as primitive as those of a prairie shack, but no one seemed to mind”. This view was not shared by others. There was no running water, so they had to collect it from a nearby spring, and they had to subsist what they grew in the garden. The kitchen was a lean-to at the back of a house that suffered from severe damp problems throughout. The seven children were forced to share beds, sleeping top-to-tail.
With Stanley absent most of the time, my grandmother’s life was one of drudgery and hardship. My mother remembers how, when the postman arrived, all the children rushed to the door, hoping he was delivering a cheque in payment for Stanley’s writing.
There is no evidence that my grandmother knew her husband was re-directing the little money they had to the poor of the East End. In his later writings, Stanley never mentioned that he was a member of the movement. Perhaps he was ashamed of the way he had abandoned his own family in order to pursue this idealistic cul-de-sac? Quite how much money he contributed to the cause is unknown, nor is it known for how long he continued this arrangement. One assumes that his contributions petered out like those of the other more affluent participants.
Yet Muriel Lester, when interviewed by the Daily News, was in no doubt that Stanley’s unusual background made him a perfect appointment. “A great work was done by the Rev Stanley James, who served as a soldier in the Spanish-American war, worked as a cowboy in the Wild West, and nearly starved time out of number,” she said. She could also have told the reporter that he had been a shepherd, newspaper reporter, navvy and hobo in Canada, and, back in England, a preacher, pacifist, communist and supporter of women’s emancipation.
The Voluntary Poverty Movement was not the only doomed East End enterprise that Stanley joined. At the Catholic Darby Rd Mission near Tower Bridge, he encouraged Dockers to take Mass after work when they were exhausted. This proved another disappointment as Stanley admitted ruefully, “They preferred billiards to the Bible.”
Reverend Stanley James
Muriel Lester
Mahatma Gandi welcomed by Muriel Lester at Kingsley Hall, 1931
Tapestry depicting Mary Hughes (in a red cape)
Mary Hughes’ former Dew Drop Inn in Spitalfields
