In Search Of Flower & Dean St
Celebrating the publication of Journal of a Man Unknown, I am publishing a series of pieces by Gillian Tindall. Today you can read about her quest for Flower & Dean St where the protagonist of her novel lodges with a family of Huguenot weavers back in the seventeenth century.
Click here to order a copy of ‘Journal of a Man Unknown’ for £10
This is the last call for the launch party at Hatchard’s Piccadilly this Wednesday 19th November 6-8pm. At 7pm, travel writer Colin Thubron will speak in appreciation of Gillian and actor Alan Cox will read from the novel. Drop me a line at spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to be added to the list.
Fishman’s Tobacconist, Flower & Dean St, seventies, by Ron McCormick
It is a disappointing fact that some dwellings are built to be poor, you can find examples all over Britain. But in parts of London, once desirable streets had poverty imposed upon them. The streets of Spitalfields, whose early Georgian houses are now expensive and desirable, were from the Victorian period until well after the Second World War under this shadow. It is only thanks to the energies and determined actions of a few in the sixties and seventies that a number of these streets have survived, but many have not and one of these is Flower and Dean St.
In Tudor times, Spitalfields was actually fields beyond the City wall, though by the late Elizabethan days a sprinkle of individual wealthy gentleman’s houses began to dot the roadside up to Shoreditch and, by the reign of Charles I, there were more of them – typical ribbon development. This ceased during the Civil War but once peace was established, even before the Cromwells were seen off and Charles II was restored, builders got busy again in this desirable-almost-rural setting.
In 1655 two brothers called Fossan, one of whom was a goldsmith, acquired an odd-shaped chunk of land not far from an ancient, muddy track to brick fields, now Brick Lane. Much of the ground was used for tenter fields, where woollen cloth woven locally was hung up to dry. Already the City clothing industry was impinging on the rural land. The Fossans leased the land for ninety-nine years to two builders, John Flower and Gowan Dean. Such was the system under which most of Greater London was created over the next two hundred years. There they built Fossan St, whose name a generation later came to be misunderstood as ‘Fashion St,’ and gave their own surnames to the street just south of it.
Fashion St still exists with the handsome early eighteenth century Christ Church, Spitalfields, and its graveyard just to the north, but its present buildings are of a later date. The original Flower & Dean St is gone as if it had never been.
It must have been a pretty street and a respectable one for much of the next century, when it was mainly occupied by Huguenot silk-spinners. These were protestants who had come to England to find a more welcoming society than the Catholic France of Louis XIV. They arrived in far greater numbers in the 1680s when Louis tore up a legal agreement tolerating Protestantism and real persecution set in. Some arrived across the Channel in dangerously small boats, making their way into the Thames estuary and up the river by night. Nothing in the life of nations really changes.
These hard-working spinners and weavers flourished, and by the mid-eighteenth century many had established themselves in other businesses, entering prosperous British society. Those who remained began to do less well, imports of silk and cotton from India were damaging the home trade. By the middle of the century the houses in Flower & Dean St were being sub-divided into smaller lodgings. There were also questions about their stability, the brickies employer by Flower & Dean were said to have used inadequate mortar.
Fifty years later, the land east of Whitechapel was entirely built up with houses and these were extending further along the Mile End Rd. Within another generation, the hamlets set in countryside that was visible from the Tower of London would be turning inexorably into the great mass of the East End. To the prosperous residents of expanding West London, this might as well have been a foreign country.
In reality, of course, much of the East End was filled with decent hard-working people who themselves regarded such places as Flower & Dean St as dangerous slums. It was now where lodging houses offered a bed for a few pence a night and where, it was said, thieves felt at ease and prostitutes plied their trade, though it is unclear who would seek them out there.
Ford Maddox Brown, the painter, described it as ‘a haunt of vice… full of cut-throats’, and it was a place where policemen were said only to venture in pairs. But the street acquired a sudden and much more general fame when, in 1888, two women who lodged in there in different houses met their demise in the Whitechapel Murders. Enough was enough. With the not-entirely rational logic that has often been applied to places that get a bad reputation, it was decided the street should be pulled down.
Just to add to the drama, during demolition in 1892, two skulls and some bones were found in a box under the yard. More murder victims, it was at once assumed. In reality, the examination of the bones seems to have been cursory and it is likely these relics were from a field-burial hundreds of years earlier.
What rose in the place of Flower & Dean St was Rothschild Buildings, a massive tenement block bestowed on the large newly-arrived population of Jewish people from Eastern Europe. The bestowers were the Rothschild banking family, and it was a classic example of ‘four percent philanthropy’ – a charitable cause, yet one which nevertheless brought in a modest but steady income.
Moral views change and the improvements of one era attract the disapproval of later times. By the seventies, many of the descendants of the original Jewish occupants of the Rothschild Buildings were established in more salubrious northern suburbs and Bangladeshis arrived to take their place. The Buildings were steeped in soot and the lack of bathrooms in the flats was considered unacceptable. They were pulled down leaving only the grandiose brick archway. Today, the site is a dug-out games pitch at the end of the short stub of Lolesworth Close off Commercial St.
Just to the south is Flower & Dean Walk, a modern low-rise pedestrianised development, looking oddly out of place amidst the complex of old alleys and new tower blocks, with the raucous salesmanship of Petticoat Lane a few minutes away. I went for a stroll down there recently on a snowy day. There was a thin mist floating above the whiteness and it seemed as if the monstrously tall constructions that have transformed the City were dissolving into the sky, as if they were disappearing while the older, traditional buildings remained. Would that it were so!
Rothschild Buildings by John Allin, painted in the seventies
This bollard in Lolesworth Close is all that remains of Flower & Dean St
Entrance to the former Rothschild Buildings
Flower & Dean Walk
Flower & Dean Walk
Flower & Dean Estate opened by HRH The Prince of Wales on 18th July 1984
The Gentle Author’s Winter Walks
During the forthcoming festive season, I will be hosting walks offering the opportunity of some gentle exercise and fresh air in the midst of the holiday. And if you are seeking gifts for friends and family we are offering GIFT VOUCHERS for my 2026 tours.
Image courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
Click here to book for my CITY OF LONDON WALK on Sunday 28th December at 2pm
Meet me on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral for a walking tour of storytelling and sightseeing through the alleys and byways of the Square Mile to London Bridge in search of the wonders and wickedness of the City of London.
Click here to book for my SPITALFIELDS WALK on Thursday January 1st at 2pm
Brush away the cobwebs on New Year’s Day with a ramble through two thousand years of culture and history in Spitalfields at the heart of old London.
Click here to buy GIFT VOUCHERS for The Gentle Author’s Tours
John Vanbrugh in Greenwich
Next year will be the tercentenary of the death of John Vanbrugh, the playwright-turned-architect who designed Castle Howard and Blenheim. Charles Saumarez Smith, former Director of the National Gallery and an East End resident, has written a biography John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture. Today he writes about Vanbrugh Castle in Greenwich where Vanbrugh lived at the end of his life. Charles will be talking about Vanbrugh at the Wigmore Hall next Thursday 20th November. Click here for tickets
Vanbrugh Castle
If you walk up the hill in Greenwich Park from the Queen’s House or from Greenwich itself, you may spot the battlements of a small, fortified castle poking above the park wall and wonder what it is. Is it an eighteenth-century folly? Or the house of a nineteenth-century antiquarian?
Vanbrugh Castle, as the house is called, was built by John Vanbrugh as a rural retreat for himself, his new wife and their family in the early 1720s. He signed a lease for a small plot of land, immediately next door to the park, together with an adjacent twelve-acre field on 3rd March 1718, apparently planning to build a set of houses for himself and members of his close family — his two younger brothers, Charles and Philip, both officers in the Royal Navy, and two younger sisters, Victoria and Robina.
It was just at the moment that Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, was promulgating the importance of designing in an orthodox Palladian style. Burlington travelled out to Italy in the summer of 1719 and returned with vast numbers of Palladio’s drawings which he bought from the owner of the Villa Maser. Vanbrugh was perfectly capable of designing in an orthodox Palladian style if required as he demonstrated in his design for the Temple of the Four Winds, one of his last works at Castle Howard. But for his own house, Vanbrugh decided to design in a pseudo-medieval style with a circular turret attached in front, with a very inconvenient, steep staircase, and two corner towers with battlements. What on earth made him do this?
When he was supervising the construction of Blenheim, Vanbrugh had become very attached to living in the ruins of the medieval Woodstock Manor which still survived in the grounds of Woodstock Park. Vanbrugh adapted them for his own use, introducing new windows and making small-scale repairs, including adding a bog-house. When the Duchess of Marlborough discovered that he had spent money on this, she was livid and ordered the ruins to be demolished. But Vanbrugh held his ground and, possibly unwisely, sent her a long paper in which he described how important these medieval ruins were, how full of historical associations, and that they were an important historical landmark in the view from the new palace.
At almost exactly the time that Vanbrugh was making plans for his new house, he also encouraged his friend, Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle, to build a whole line of medieval fortification on the edge of his estate at Castle Howard. These fortifications are in exactly the same style as Vanbrugh Castle, not intended to be authentically medieval, but in the medieval style, a kind of free-form medievalism in which the house is reduced to a bare geometry.
Vanbrugh not only designed a castle for himself but a number of other buildings nearly, including another large-ish house flanked by turrets for his younger brother, Charles, and a very curious single storey building like a castellated bungalow which was known as ‘The Nunnery’, lived in by his unmarried sisters, although in the early 1720s, it was another brother, Philip, who paid the rates. Maybe all three of them lived there together.
On either side of the Nunnery were two tower houses, known as the White Towers, four stories high in their central section, so, in contrast to the low-level The Nunnery. Imposing, although, as he described the houses in a letter to Lord Carlisle, there was only a single room and closet on each floor. He told Carlisle that he was designing these houses for his sons, although his younger son, John, known as Jack, was dead by 1723.
Plans and outline drawings for these houses survive in a large cache of drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, bought in 1992 with help from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. There are many other outline sketches for small houses in this collection. These are freehand, experimental doodles, in which Vanbrugh tries out different ground-floor room arrangements and how even a small house can be made to look interesting through the use of abstract geometry and with a limited amount of, again abstract, articulation, much in the style of Goose-Pie House which he had built for himself in Whitehall and which Jonathan Swift satirised as being like a mud-pie, copied from children playing in the street.
It seems that in the last few years of his life, when Vanbrugh was no longer involved with Blenheim (he had fallen out terminally with the Duchess of Marlborough in November 1716 and was never allowed back), he focused his attention, instead, on designing smaller houses for himself, his family and friends. It may have been an early form of property development.
An antiquary, William Stukeley, Secretary of the recently established Society of Antiquaries, visited Greenwich in June 1721, not long after Vanbrugh Castle had been built and drew it in exactly the same way that he drew medieval ruins, labelling it ‘Castellum Vanbrugiense apud Grenovicum’. The following August, he returned to draw his brother’s house which he called a ‘castellulum’, a baby castle. It is a very odd idea: an earnest antiquary drawing them as it they were authentic medieval buildings.
Another Scottish antiquary, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, visited in 1727, the year after Vanbrugh’s death. He was equally surprised and wrote:
‘Vanbrugh was a famous architect but of an odd taste. These houses of his consist of great heaps of brick and thick walls but little accommodation within. There is scarcely a room in them above 8 or 10 foot square and some much less. The ornaments are such which the Goths and their successors used to place in Castles and Prisons, viz. battlements, round-towers, little windows and doors. And yet this was the man chosen to build Blenheim House for the Duke of Marlborough!’
Vanbrugh was a very independent-minded man. Was he, when he came to design a house for himself, nostalgic for his youth when he had served in the army? Or was it an elaborate stage-set built to impress his young wife ? He had been a playwright in his youth.
After being kicked out of the ruins of Woodstock Manor by the Duchess of Marlborough, he was no doubt enjoying the fact that he had been able to build a castle for himself, cocking a snook at the Duchess and enjoying the view from his own little castle over Greenwich. I like to imagine him at the gate with his spy-glass.
Photograph by Charles Saumarez Smith
Photograph by Charles Saumarez Smith
Vanbrugh Castle, drawing by William Stukeley 1721
Vanbrugh Castle, drawing by William Stukeley 1722
The Nunnery, drawing by William Stukeley 1721
John Vanbrugh by Godfrey Kneller, c. 1704 and c. 1710 (courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)
Charles Saumarez Smith’s John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture will be published by Lund Humphries on 20th November 2025. An exhibition of Vanbrugh’s drawings opens at Sir John Soane’s Museum on 4th March 2026.
The Great Cat & Dog Massacre
This is an extract selected by Hilda Kean from her book The Great Cat & Dog Massacre – The Real Story of the Second World War’s Unknown Tragedy published by University of Chicago Press
Blue Cross rescue of a cat (Courtesy of State Library of Victoria)
Frequently we hear the Second World War described as “The People’s War” and this phrase has become set in the public imagination, but – too often – the experiences of our own (or our relatives’) cats and dogs at the time are forgotten. Of the start of the war in September 1939, much is remembered. Certainly we remember that at the time school children were evacuated to the countryside, blackout curtains were made and even flower beds were starting to be dug up to create vegetable patches. Yet such positive action was rather different to what happened to cats and dogs at the start of the war.
In September 1939, many animals were killed by their owners. Politician Sir Robert Gower, who was also the president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, argued that at the decisions of ordinary people themselves nearly 750,000 pet animals were killed. Later the RSPCA and Brigadier Clabby, the author of the official history of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, declared that 400,000, representing around 26% of cats and dogs in London alone, pet animals were killed. And this killing happened in the first week of the war in September 1939.
These acts of killing were not imposed by the government, but were undertaken by people taking their pet animals to vets and animal charities. Yet these were not the explicit decisions of the charitable organisations. Prior to the war, the RSPCA organised a conference on horse welfare involving many organisations and – in partnership with the National Air Raid Precautions Committee and with Home Office support – set up a body “to advise on all problems affecting animals in wartime.” Vets were annoyed and, with too little involvement from the government, they issued their own literature arguing that it was their responsibility to persuade people from having their pets killed.
But at the start of the war thousands of animals were killed. The RSPCA, the oldest animal charity in the world, reported the number of dogs and cats being brought in to be destroyed had doubled at its London clinics, and wrote “the work of destroying animals was continued, day and night, during the first week of the war.” The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, well known for its work in East London, noted that destructors were overwhelmed by thousands of animals brought for death to its clinics. Then the National Canine Defence League, set up in the eighteen-nineties to protect dogs at a time of rabies hysteria, reported that, so extensive was the slaughter of dogs, its supplies of choloroform had been exhausted. The Battersea Dogs’ Home killed fewer than other charities, having argued in the Bow and Battersea branches that people should take their animals home. Even at London Zoo there was an initial killing of poisonous snakes, and some birds including kestrels, herons and kites that were observed flying over Regent’s Park. Yet after a few months, many zoo animals were financially sponsored and continuing their lives there at the zoo – even including a dormouse paid for at the cost of a shilling per week !
During the war the government did much to ensure the status of dogs and cats including through BBC broadcasts. By Spring 1942, it was widely publicised that cats were doing work of “national importance.” Again the BBC would praise the NARPAC for offering free identification discs with the animal’s own collar. Less than half-way through the war, over three and a half million animals became registered and wore large blue and white discs.
Internally, civil servants were also working busily explaining to their ministers that “dogs are not to be interfered with” and ensuring the dogs “must be fed.” As a result, dogs could eat thousands of tons of food and cats could drink gallons of milk. If the civil service was to restrict materials for the manufacturing of dog biscuits then, they concluded, people would probably substitute for them other forms of human food! Given that so many people were in favour of their pets, the civil servants allowed genuine breeding to continue. For some months, civil servants thought about increasing dog tax but recognising such a topic was unpopular, they proposed psychological factors should be taken into account. They also rejected going along with the Nazi policy for conscription of the dog population for their war effort!
Vulnerable dogs as well as cats were looked after by the sanctuary organised by the Animal Defence House near Salisbury, which drove them to the countryside from Central London. Some of the dogs were taken to the home of Nina Duchess of Hamilton where they, together with moggies and pedigree cats, found countryside premises away from the London bombing. In their diaries and even in their mass observation interviews, many men and women talked about their own animals. Thus the writer, Fryniwyd Tennyson, took in two new cats- sharing their own food but also supporting their owner’s belief “they know nothing about war.”-
Sometimes the war situation was tragic. Thus Lilian Margaret Hart, living in Bethnal Green Rd with her husband George in the Air Raid Precautions, looked everywhere for Gyp the dog and Timmy the cat but sadly both had died in the bombing. On similar occasions others survived. Thus a parrot from Samuda St on the Isle of Dogs was kept alive in his squashed-up cage by being fed with bacon rind and crusty bread, only to give a wonderful recital of obscene language. Other animals, such as the canaries in the photograph below were rescued from a public house in southeast London. Thus the local community in West Hampstead searched for the mother of a local cat who was found by demolition workers in the debris of a nearby shop who carried her home in a sack. She was thin but was none the worse for her ordeal! In the Poplar air raids, Rip the dog helped find victims with Mr King the local air raid warden and stayed with him next to his small allotment. Together, they regularly visited an air raid shelter comforting those sheltering. As a result of his positive actions, Rip received a Dickin medal for his bravery.
Many animals were looked after and their stories passed on to children of all ages to give them emotional support. As one respondent argued, her father had given her The Photo Book of Pretty Pets for Christmas in 1940 and she recalls “The quality of my life has been enhanced by animals.”
On some occasions, children questioned why people were carrying their pets to a vet for their destruction. As a result of one particular boy becoming upset, his family returned home with the rescued ginger cat who had been about to be killed. Others, such as the late Brian Sewell, art critic, noted the seaside killing of his own dog as a “cold, hard, vengeful aversion lodged” in his long memory.
In diaries and in the records of Mass Observation during the war many adults told their stories. As one young man said to Mass Observation, “Probably dogs do more to uphold morale among their owners than anything else.” In many diaries, animals were witnessed and encouraged. Thus, the well-known Nella Last was an enthusiast about her dog Sol and cat Mr Murphy, explaining that, “To me he is more than an animal: he has kindness, understanding and intelligence and not only knows all that is said but often reads my mind to an uncanny degree.”
Even Winston Churchill publically celebrated his black cat Nelson at 10 Downing St and his ginger cat at his Chartwell home. When Rab Butler, pioneer of the 1944 Education Act, came to his room one night while Nelson was curled up at Churchill’s feet, Winston started the conversation by expressing that, “This cat does more for the war effort than you do!”
For some years the experience of wartime animals, especially in London, had stuck in my head as I rarely found them to be included when I was reading any conventional histories of the war. In my earlier book on Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800, I wrote no more than a few pages about the treatment of the animals in war. This was not through ignorance but because of the paucity of animal material. Although Angus Calder’s The People’s War had talked very briefly of the destruction of animals, his common phrase “people’s war” ignored the effect on animals in the main.
Thinking about animals and researching the diary writers, family stories, animal charities and state archives, from that time highlighted the specific plight of animals in London and the East End for me. It also demonstrated the long established (if sometimes erased ) presence of animals, as well as those only thinking themselves and their ancestors as participating in ‘the people’s war.’ Rather than forgetting about this time of varying treatment, perhaps we should choose to think in different ways, remembering cats and dogs as much as humans.
Disc of the National Air Raids Precaution Animals’ Committee
Canaries rescued from a pub in southeast London, September 1940
Joint canine and human fatigue at Southwark Rest Centre c. 1940
Dog at an East End rest centre, September 1940
Families, including children and a dog, at an emergency feeding unit in Chingford, January 1945
A hen is a victim of the bombing in Hackney
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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From ‘Journal Of A Man Unknown’
Today I publish a second edited extract from Gillian Tindall’s novel Journal of a Man Unknown.
We still have a few places available on the guest list for the publication party at Hatchard’s in Piccadilly next Wednesday 19th November 6-8pm.
At 7pm Colin Thubron will speak and Alan Cox will read from the novel.
If you would like to attend please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com and let me know if you plan to bring any guests.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN FOR £10
From Journal of a Man Unknown
When I was a very small boy, in the earliest time I can recall, I thought that I had myself been created out of the land around me: I mean that I thought that I had somehow been born out of that High Weald we customarily call ‘The Forest’, with its great hills of gorse and bracken and heather, its thick-wooded parts of oak and ash and beech and hazel, its meandering streams reddened by the iron washed from the clay banks, and indeed from the earth itself.
And making no distinction between the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air and my small self, I thought that they too had been created particularly out of that heavy, useful soil: the deer that still roamed most plentifully in those days, and also all the lesser beasts, the stoats and weasels, the foxes, the squirrels. And of course all the birds of the air, though I think it puzzled me somewhat that creatures of earth could fly so lightly. Perhaps they were indeed ‘of the air’ rather than being fashioned from the same clay as the animals and me? (And, come to that, grown men too have long speculated on just how birds come to fly, but that is another matter).
This may seem an odd fancy for a small boy to have. But, after all, it says in the Book, which I heard read aloud, that the Lord created all the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air in what sounded to be a busy and craftsman-like way. In just the same well-paced way I had seen my uncles and their occasional labourers build up the layers of the furnace for another bloom of iron, and also the charcoal-burners build their close-packed ovens simply from what was to hand around them.
As to rabbits (which we called conies) being clay I was not sure. They were everywhere, as now, but I was told that they had been brought in as a delicacy by the lords in olden time who hunted across the Weald and had banks of burrows specially built for them in sheltered places, and that was how the big wood near to my uncles’ furnace came to be called Broadstone Warren. And then there were, as still today, the small herds of grazing cattle, each beast of which belongs to someone and is marked accordingly, and for which the owners are allowed to cut litter for the wintering in barns. And then there were the swine – not quite so many now, since folk have taken to building sties – that rooted for acorns in the woods; they too, I was told, all belonged to someone or other though you wouldn’t think it from their air of owning the place.
I suppose it must have been Parson himself (when he began to teach me things out of his own natural inclination that way) who told me by and by that humankind were essentially different from the beasts of the field in that they had a special, different spirit breathed into them.
It was a time I now think of as full of change and meaning, the bridge between our old world and a new one. This may seem just my own idea, being that each man is absorbed in his own life so that his life-span comes to seem to him a hinge between past and future, full of special meaning. But I am sure enough now, from what I have seen and heard and experienced myself over the years, in London and then in the North Country far from here, that I am not deluded about this. I was fortunate to have been born when I was and so to live my prime of life in a world full of new possibilities, new ways of thinking and of doing.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN FOR £10
Culminating a distinguished career spanning more than sixty years, historian Gillian Tindall has written a novel as her final statement. In an astonishing feat of literary imagination, she projects herself back onto one of her forebears to conjure a compelling vision of 17th century England.
The protagonist is a Huguenot metal founder, an occupation that leads him from the Sussex Weald to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and beyond to the North Country. While in London, he lives above a coffee house in Brick Lane and the book conjures a vivid evocation of Spitalfields at the time of the Huguenots.
This is a hymn to those who pass through life not leaving a trace, except in the hearts of those into whose lives they have been cast.
‘Gillian Tindall’s JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN is a novel of rare distinction. Tindall’s voice is richly her own: tender but unsentimental and lit by intimate knowledge of her chosen world.’ Colin Thubron
The Maiden Voyage Of The Raybel
Only a few tickets left now for Tessa Hunkin’s illustrated talk about Hackney Mosaic Project this Saturday at the Bloomsbury Jamboree at the Art Workers’ Guild. Click here to book
For the past few years, Contributing Photographer Rachel Ferriman & I have been making regular trips down to the creek at Sittingbourne to follow the restoration of the hundred-year-old Thames sailing barge Raybel from rotting hulk to seaworthy vessel. So it was a highlight of the summer to be invited upon her maiden voyage from Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey this August.
The day was clear but still when we departing the dock, so the engine was employed to take us out into the Medway where the sails were raised and we drifted across the wide estuary. Although there was no visible evidence on that serene summer afternoon, this was where the Dutch fleet attempted to destroy the English Navy with a surprise raid in 1667, leading to more than 600 casualties and the wrecks scattering the river bed here to this day.
On board our auspicious voyage were Professor Jackie Sully and her brother Ron Sully, grandchildren of George Sully who commissioned the building of the Raybel over a century ago. Once the voyage was underway, I sat down in the hold with Jackie and Ron, and Ron told me the story.
‘It was my grandfather George Frederic Sully who commissioned Raybel to be built at Sittingbourne in 1920. He named it after my father Raymond and his twin sister whose middle name was Isabel.
His father was a shipbroker and my grandfather bought sailing barges and went from strength to strength. Back in the day, we had eighteen or twenty barges, we were bigger than Everards. We were based in Fenchurch St near the Minories in the City of London . In those days you had to have an office in London because all the trade was done on the floor of the Corn Exchange. They went one week and spoke to the merchant and arranged the cargo, signed a charter party and the next week they went back and got paid in gold sovereigns. That’s how the trade was done because the London Docks were the terminus for everything coming into this country and the barge distributed cargos up the east coast.
Raybel was made by the shipwright at Sittingbourne, but another yard we used was Cook’s of Maldon. My grandfather had the Raybel built about one foot shorter than the conventional barge, the reason for that was so it could go through Mountford Lock at Lowestoft to get to Norwich up the Haddisco Cut without going through Yarmouth, because the dues in Yarmouth were twice the dues in Lowestoft. So it was cheaper to take a cargo up to Norwich that way.
He was quite a wealthy man, the first man in Chertsey to own a motor car – but he didn’t drive, he had a chauffeur. It was literally riches to rags in three generations!
My father moved the business from London when the Docks died, by then all the trade was up on the east coast so he opened an office in Norwich for about a tenth of the rent he was paying in London. He took the gear out of the sailing barges and put Gardner engines in them, it was quicker and more efficient, and with an engine they could get a lot more freight in and more cargos. The crews in those days were paid their share after their disbursements, it was 50-60% of the freight and the barge owner had the remainder.
The days of sail were over. It wasn’t quick enough and you were at the mercy of the wind and the tide whereas with with a single screw engine you get to places you couldn’t get to under sail. And they built wheelhouses to make the crew more comfortable while they were at sea. They traded up and these barges went across to the near continent, as well as all the little east coast ports, Maldon, Brightlingsea, Colchester, Wivenhoe and further up to Yarmouth and the Wash bay ports, Boston, Wisbech, King’s Lynne, Sutton Bridge, Fossdyke, and up the Humber. We used to go right up to Gainsborough, I don’t think any trade goes up there any more.
My father was born into it. After his wartime service, he came into the office with his brother Bernard. Grandfather died in 1948 and I was born in 1949.
The industry has demised now, we do not have a British merchant fleet anymore. The transition to containerisation was a big part of it along with the end of the London Docks. Distribution by sea was no longer needed and transport shifted to road. Our barges carried everything from animal feedstuffs, to coal, to scrap and ammunition.
The barges became less cost effective to run – our coasters were 600 tonners and we had a couple of bigger ones and a couple of smaller ones – but we could not increase the load. We had a 250 tonner, the Subaventure, she was the last barge to take malting barley to the Snape Maltings. I had an interesting conversation with an old boy who used to be the pilot to take them up to Snape. He used to scull his dinghy down there and put withies in where the water was deep with an upturned baked bean can on the top and he knew when the baked bean can floated off that there was enough water for the barge to come through. It was fine for a day until some kids went down there and shot all the cans off the withies with an airgun.
My father retired aged seventy-five in 2000, there was still a business then but it got more and more difficult as all the small ports were disappearing. I joined the business in my thirties and I was taught by my father. I had ten great years until we ceased trading. It was a great shame.’
Then Ron sat in silence in acknowledgement of the loss, but also in affectionate reverence for the recovery of the Raybel. So Jackie picked up the story and brought us back to the present moment as we sat there in the cool of the hold of the newly renovated barge, drifting on that warm summer afternoon.
‘After Raybel was decommissioned, it was moored in St Katharine’s Dock for many years as an events venue but then it was just left to rot because they weren’t using it. So it is emotional for us, coming back here now it has been renovated, because I remember being on Raybel before. I remember the smell of it, the moment you are on it you can smell it, and it still has the same smell today.’
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The Raybel at the dock at Queenborough
Jackie Sully and her brother Ron Sully, grandchildren of George Sully who commissioned the Raybel
Ron Sully
Benjamin Pollock
Gareth Maeer
Skipper Laurie Watkins
Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman
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The Education Of Audrey Kneller
I am sorry to report that Audrey Kneller died in September aged eighty. Below you can read Audrey’s candid memoir of her years in Spitalfields. In this second of two extracts, Audrey describes her education in Judaism.
Deal St School Trip 1955 – Audrey is third from right, peering round the girl in front
In June 1953, my sister Yvonne & I were enrolled at the Robert Montefiore Primary School in Deal St on the corner of Hanbury St. It was not surprising, given the demographic of the area, that ninety per cent of the pupils were Jewish, so we felt at home in our new environment. I was eight and a half years old, and my sister was eleven.
Yvonne was selected to start the following September at the sister school, Robert Montefiore Secondary Modern in Valance Rd, Whitechapel, which although not a grammar school had a very good reputation. Under the fatherly guidance of headmaster, Mr Nurse, the school turned out first class citizens, well equipped to deal with the pressures of modern living.
Between 1953 and 1956, Yvonne & I walked to school down Fleur-de-Lis St, passing Commercial St Police Station on the left and the little grocery shop on the right, run by a kindly old lady who was always willing to sell us a couple of eggs or four ounces of butter if we ran short. We turned right into Commercial St, dominated by the vastness of the Godfrey Phillips Tobacco Company building, past the local tuck shop and a greengrocers run by two elderly ladies. One was a widow and the other had become a confirmed spinster after her fiancé was killed in the First World War. They told us they were almost killed during the Second World War when an oil bomb fell behind the shop. Luckily, they escaped through the front and lived to tell of their hair-raising experience.
Then we crossed over into Hanbury St and walked down towards Deal St. To a child, the road seemed wide and the walk long, punctuated by intriguing sights, sounds and smells. There was always a great deal of activity inside the workshops to the left and I remember wood shavings on the ground, and hearing the electric saw and smelling the sawdust as I passed. I always kept to the left-hand side of Hanbury St, never deviating from the route.
I noticed several half-ruined houses with no roofs, merely slats of wood where the ceilings had been, allowing the sky to peep through. Were they bombed, I wondered? I assumed this explained why there were so many ruined buildings. A common sight, particularly in Aldgate and Whitechapel, was where the whole side of a building was missing and you could see one bare wall, several storeys high, with fireplaces where the floors had been. I walked with a sense of horror and bewilderment. The war had only recently given way to an austere peace, and the reminders of the damage to life, limb and property moved me deeply.
The sight of my school at the junction of Deal St and Hanbury St told me I was safe. One day, my mother came to have a chat with my teacher and they decided that I was like Schubert with his “Unfinished Symphony.” Although my work was good, I was rather slow and took a long time to finish. Yet they decided that the patience of the recipient was rewarded.
Every night I prayed that I would pass my “11 Plus,” so that I could go the revered grammar school in Spital Sq, the Central Foundation School for Girls. On the day of the exam, I was recovering from flu and had a coughing spell during the maths test. I was off sick when the results came through but I was told that I was eligible for a governors’ place at Spital Sq, subject to passing the entrance examination. I ran home with my head held high and told my family.
Later I realised that governors’ places were for those who had not passed but were termed as “Grammar Marginals,” so we could be given another chance. A couple of weeks later I entered the portals of Spital Sq to sit the examination but found some of the questions above my head, especially the arithmetical ones. Also the interview with the headmistress did not go well. She was not impressed with my replies to questions concerning a future career. So I was not surprised to learn that it was not my destiny to go there, but then another door opened.
A few of us who had not managed to get into Spital Sq were offered governors’ places for a Jewish grammar school in Stoke Newington, subject to an entrance examination, and the idea rather appealed to me. It was the Avigdor School, a privately-run school supported by the London County Council. The examination was incredibly easy, consisting of elementary questions about the Old Testament and, shortly afterwards, I and my fellows were awarded places.
Mr Nurse, my sister’s headmaster, was very disappointed at my decision to go to Avigdor School. He made no secret of this when he met me later at Yvonne’s prize-giving, as he had put my name on the waiting list ahead of hundreds of others to go to Robert Montefiore Secondary Modern. My mother tried to persuade me to change my mind but I was excited at the thought of striking out on my own.
On my first day at the new school, I was asked by the girl sitting next to me, “Are you “frum“?” This is a Yiddish term to describe someone who is religiously observant. In all innocence I answered, “Yes.” In fact, I was more in thought than deed, but Shula was frum and came from an Orthodox family. She immediately became my best friend. Her parents were émigrés prior to the war, her mother from Germany and her father from Hungary.
Shula was part of the generation of British Jewry whose parents had escaped Nazi persecution to form a new community in North London. I learned that Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill was thickly populated by Orthodox Jews of German and Polish origin.
Those of German origin were yekkes while the Poles were the chasidim (pious ones), who dressed in the sombre garb of their forefathers.The women were not allowed to reveal any part of their anatomy except hands, face and ankles, so they wore long sleeves and thick stockings. Married women had their hair cut short and wore sheitels (wigs). By contrast, the yekkes were less strict in their dress, the men dispensed with payos (sidelocks) and the women did wear sheitels but drew the line at sleeveless clothing.
Shula’s family did not view themselves as yekkes or chasidim and, although strictly Orthodox, her mother did not wear a sheitel. Another girl in my class, Caroline Rosenthal, a bouncy girl with curly black hair and rosy cheeks whose family were Orthodox also immediately became my friend. Caroline was exactly a year younger than me but, because she was very bright, she had been moved up a year.
She invited me to stay with her for the week of Pesach or Passover, and it was then that I became acquainted with the way of life of Orthodox Jews. It had a profound effect on me. Until this point, my Jewish education had been sketchy but I was now at a school with a curriculum of Jewish subjects which completely changed my way of thinking.
Over the next four years I became transformed, partly due to the visits to the homes of my religious friends and partly due to my teachings at school. Prayer played a large part in my life and I was able to recite prayers in Hebrew off by heart. Becoming religious was not an easy transition and was not entirely welcomed at home where I found myself alone in my beliefs.
Yet I was happier than I had been for a long time, with reservations. I had achieved almost the impossible in my education but grown detached from my family who, by comparison with my new friends, seemed heathen to me. Although my mother kept a kosher home, I introduced stricter dietary laws. The separation of milk and meat utensils was approved of by my mother but greeted with dismay by my sister. My mother was hard pressed to please us both.
Years later, I realised my decision to go to Avigdor School in the face of my mother’s opposition was in some ways unwise. Although I learned about Judaism, which proved an asset in later life, I had no qualifications and the events which caused me to leave were unfortunate. The London County Council tried to close the school down because of “low standards.” But, years later, I learned from the Jewish Chronicle that the governors had not approved of the interest shown by the teachers in secular subjects and felt the school should confine itself to activities of a religious nature. In 1959, following an article which appeared in the Jewish Chronicle headed “Avigdor School Has Failed,” we heard that the school would close.
For the last year, we had only five pupils in our class. Ultimately, Shula was accepted by our sister school, the Hasmonean Grammar School for Girls in Hendon, while Caroline and l left to go to another grammar school in North London. It was sad that the Avigdor School which was the experiment and brainchild of Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, Principal of the Jewish Secondary Schools Movement, had failed. He was a hero who saved countless people from the Holocaust, risking his life to do so.
My education in Stoke Newington isolated me to an extent from Elder St. I grew away from it, looking forward to each school day when I could ride on the bus northwards to cleaner, fresher air.
Although none of my family were Orthodox, my maternal grandfather, Nathan, was very observant. After his passing, as there were no men to lead the way, observances slipped though my mother and her sisters upheld our faith. When High Holydays arrived, we dressed up in our best clothes and attended Morning Service. After lunch, Auntie Sophie’s front room was the usual place for the family to congregate. Friends, neighbours and children all gathered in their finery for a mootel (chinwag).
At Rosh Hashanah we would wish everyone Happy New Year over a drink of Auntie Sophie’s homemade morello cherry wine and a slice of cake. She lived all her days in and around Spitalfields, devoting herself entirely to her children and their families.
Towards the latter part of 1958, my mother received a Notice to Quit under the 1957 Rent Act. The landlord’s agent had observed the improvements she had made and, realising that she was receiving rent from the two flats upstairs, he reported back to the landlord who immediately gave instructions for her rent to be doubled.
My mother was offered the house for £2,000, which was a fair price at the time, but she could not buy it because of its poor state and the prohibitive cost of the repairs. She sought the help of her nephew who was a chartered surveyor. In those days, single women could not take out mortgages but with his help as a guarantor, they found a property.
We moved out of Elder St in April 1959 to a more comfortable two-storey terrace in Stoke Newington. Although it was as yet still untouched by bulldozer or developer, we knew the writing was on the wall for Elder St because our landlord had plans for number 20 that included demolition.
Playing in Toynbee St in 1952. Audrey is in the front on the left, aged seven and a half, and her sister Yvonne is at the back on the right. Brune House is behind and you can just see the bottom of a big sign advertising Charringtons on The Lord Nelson.
Robert Montefiori School in Deal St is destined to be redeveloped as flats
You may also like to read the first extract of Audrey Kneller’s memoir
