The New Christmas Dinner Song
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I am grateful to John Foreman, Folk Singer and Printer of the Catnap Press in Camden Town, also known as The Broadsheet King, who kindly sent me his reprint of The New Christmas Dinner Song as originally published by Taylor of Brick Lane in the nineteenth century
John Foreman, The Broadsheet King
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The Smithfield Christmas Eve Meat Auction
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Carnivorous readers will be delighting to learn that – after a few years’ break – the traditional Smithfield Christmas Eve meat auction returns this year hosted by G Lawrence & Co on Grand Avenue in the Central Market from 10am. Blow you can read my account of a visit there with the late photographer Colin O’Brien.
The carnivores of London converged upon Smithfield Market, as they do every year for the annual Christmas Eve auction staged by Harts the Butcher. At ten in the morning, the rainy streets were almost empty yet, as I came through Smithfield, butchers in white overalls were wheeling precarious trolleys top-heavy with meat and fowls over to the site of the auction where an expectant crowd of around a hundred had gathered, anxiously clutching wads of banknotes in one hand and bags to carry off their prospective haul in the other.
Photographer Colin O’Brien met me there. He grew up half a mile away in Clerkenwell during the nineteen fifties and, although it was his first time at the auction, he remembered his father walking down to Smithfield to get a cheap turkey on Christmas Eve more than sixty years ago. Overhearing this reminiscence, a robust woman standing next to us in the crowd struck up a conversation as a means to relieve the growing tension before the start of the auction which is the highlight of the entire year for many of stalwarts that have been coming for decades.
“You can almost guarantee getting a turkey,” she reassured us with the authority of experience, revealing she had been in attendance for fifteen successive years. Then, growing visibly excited as a thought came into her mind, “Last year, I got thirty kilos of sirloin steak for free – I tossed for it!”, she confided to us, turning unexpectedly flirtatious. Colin and I stood in silent wonder at her good fortune with meat.“We start preparing in October by eating all the meat in the freezer,” she explained, to clarify the situation. “Last night we had steak,” she continued, rubbing her hands in gleeful anticipation, “and steak again tonight.”
Yet our acquaintance was terminated as quickly as it began when the caller appeared in a blood-stained white coat and red tie to introduce the auction. A stubby bullet-headed man, he raised his hands graciously to quell the crowd. “This is a proper English tradition,” he announced, “it has been going on for the last five hundred years. And I’m going to make sure everybody goes away with something and I’m here to take your money.”
His words drew an appreciative roar from the crowd as dozens of eager hands were thrust in the air waving banknotes, indicative of the collective blood lust that gripped the assembly. Standing there in the midst of the excitement, I realised that the sound I could hear was an echo. It was a reverberation of the famously uproarious Bartholomew Fair which flourished upon this site from the twelfth century until it was suppressed for public disorder in 1855. Yesterday, the simple word “Hush!” from the caller was enough to suppress the mob as he queried, “What are we going to start with?”
The answer to his question became manifest when several bright pink loins of pork appeared as if by magic in the hatch beside him, held by butchers beneath, and dancing jauntily above the heads of the delighted audience like hand puppets. These English loins of pork were soon dispatched into the crowd at twenty pounds each as the curtain warmer to the pantomime that was to come, followed by joints of beef for a tenner preceding the star attraction of day – the turkeys! – greeted with festive cheers by the hungry revellers. “Mind your heads, turkeys coming over…” warned the butcher as the turkeys in their red wrappers set out crowd-surfing to their grateful prospective owners as the cash was passed hand to hand back to the stand.
It would not be an understatement to say that mass hysteria had overtaken the crowd, yet there was another element to add to the chaos of the day. As the crowd had enlarged, it spilled over into the road with cars and vans weaving their through the overwrought gathering. “I love coming for the adventure of it,” declared one gentleman with hair awry, embracing a side of beef protectively as if it was the love of his life, “Everyone helps one another out here. You pass the money over and there’s no pickpockets.”
After the turkeys came the geese, the loins of lamb, the ribs of beef, the pork bellies, the racks of lamb, the fillet steaks and the green gammon to complete the bill of fare. As the energy rose, butchers began to throw pieces of red meat into the crowd to be caught by their purchasers and it was surreal to watch legs of lamb and even suckling pigs go flying into the tumultuous mass of people. Finally, came tossing for meat where customers had the chance of getting their steaks for free if they guessed the toss correctly, and each winning guess was greeted with an exultant cheer because by then the butchers and the crowd were as one, fellow participants in a boisterous party game.
Just ninety minutes after it began, the auction wrapped up, leaving the crowd to consolidate their proud purchases, tucking the meat and fowls up snugly in suitcases and backpacks to keep them safe until they could be stowed away in the freezer at home. In the disorder, I saw piles of bloody meat stacked on the muddy pavement where people were tripping over them. Yet a sense of fulfilment prevailed, everyone had stocked up for another year – their carnivorous appetites satiated – and they were going home to eat meat.
As I walked back through the narrow City streets, I contemplated the spectacle of the morning. It resembled a Bacchanale or some ancient pagan celebration in which people were liberated to pursue their animal instincts. But then I realised that my thinking was too complicated – it was Christmas I had witnessed.
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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The Whitechapel Mission At Christmas
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Today I recall a visit to the Whitechapel Mission with my friend the late photographer Colin O’Brien
Before dawn one Christmas Eve, Photographer Colin O’Brien & I ventured out in a rainstorm to visit our friends down at the Whitechapel Mission – established in 1876, which opens every day of the year to offer breakfasts, showers, clothes and access to mail and telephones, for those who are homeless or in need.
Many of those who go there are too scared to sleep rough but walk or ride public transport all night, arriving in Whitechapel at six in the morning when the Mission opens. We found the atmosphere subdued on Christmas Eve on account of the rain and the season. People were weary and shaken up by the traumatic experience of the night, and overcome with relief to be safe in the warm and dry. Feeling the soothing effect of a hot shower and breakfast, they sat immobile and withdrawn. For those shut out from family and social events which are the focus of festivities for the rest of us, and facing the onset of winter temperatures, this is the toughest time of the year.
Unlike most other hostels and day centres, Whitechapel Mission does not shut during Christmas. Tony Miller, who has run the Mission and lived and brought up his family in this building over the last thirty-five years, had summoned his three grown-up children out of bed at five that morning to cover in the kitchen when the day’s volunteers failed to show. Although his staff take a break over Christmas which means he and his wife Sue and their family have to pick up the slack, it is a moment in the year that Tony relishes. “40% of our successful reconnections happen at Christmas,” he explained enthusiastically, passionate to seize the opportunity to get people off the street, “If I can persuade someone to make the Christmas phone call home …”
Tony estimates there are around three thousand people living rough in London, whom he accounts as follows – approximately 15% Eastern Europeans, 15% Africans and 5% from the rest of the world, another 15% are ex-army while 30%, the largest proportion, are people who grew up in care and have never been able to establish a secure life for themselves.
Among those I spoke with on Christmas Eve were those who had homes but were dispossessed in other ways. There were several vulnerable people who lived alone and had no family, and were grateful for a place where they could come for breakfast and speak with others. Here in the Mission, I recognised a collective sense of refuge from the challenges of existence and the rigours of the weather outside, and it engendered a tacit human solidarity. “This is going to be the best Christmas of my life,” Andrew, an energetic skinny guy who I met for the first time that morning, assured me, “because it’s my first one free of drugs.” We shook hands and agreed this was something to celebrate.
Tony took Colin & me upstairs to show us the pile of non-perishable food donations that the Mission had received and explained that on Christmas Day each visitor would be given a gift of a pair of socks, a woollen hat, a scarf and pair of gloves, with a bar of chocolate wrapped inside. Tony told me that on Christmas Day he and his family always have a meal together, but his wife Sue also invites a dozen homeless guests – so I asked him how he felt about the lack of privacy. “My kids were born here,” he replied with a shrug and a smile and an astonishing generosity of spirit, “after thirty years, I don’t have a problem with it.”
Food donations
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
Click here to donate to the work of the Whitechapel Mission
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My Old Christmas Decorations
I do not know when my grandmother bought this glass decoration and I cannot ask her because she died more than twenty years ago. All I can do is hang it on my tree and admire it gleaming amongst the deep green boughs, along with all the others that were once hers, or were bought by my parents, or that I have acquired myself, which together form the collection I bring out each year – accepting that not knowing or no longer remembering their origin is part of their charm.
Although I have many that are more elaborate, I especially admire this golden one for its simplicity of form and I like to think its ridged profile derives from the nineteen thirties when my mother was a child, because my grandmother took the art of Christmas decoration very seriously. She would be standing beech leaves in water laced with glycerine in October, pressing them under the carpet in November and then in December arranging the preserved leaves in copper jugs with teazles sprayed gold and branches of larch, as one of many contrivances that she pursued each year to celebrate the season in fastidious style.
Given the fragility of these glass ornaments, it is extraordinary that this particular decoration has survived, since every year there are a few casualties resulting in silvery shards among the needles under the tree. Recognising that a Christmas tree is a tremendous source of amusement for a cat – making great sport out of knocking the baubles to the ground and kicking them around like footballs – I hang the most cherished decorations upon the higher branches. Yet since it is in the natural course of things that some get broken every year and, as I should not wish to inhibit the curiosity of children wishing to handle them, I always buy a couple more each Christmas to preserve the equilibrium of my collection.
Everlasting baubles are available – they do not smash, they bounce – but this shatterproof technological advance entirely lacks the poetry of these fragile beauties that can survive for generations as vessels of emotional memory and then be lost in a moment. In widespread recognition of this essential frailty of existence, there has been a welcome revival of glass ornaments in recent years.
They owe their origins to the glassblowers of the Thuringian Forest on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic where, in Lauscha, glass beads, drinking glasses, flasks, bowls and even glass eyes were manufactured since the twelfth century. The town is favoured to lie in a wooded river valley, providing both the sand and timber required for making glass and in 1847 Hans Greiner – a descendant of his namesake Hans Greiner who set up the glassworks in 1597 with Christoph Muller – began producing ornaments by blowing glass into wooden moulds. The inside of these ornaments was at first coloured to appear silvery with mercury or lead and then later by using a compound of silver nitrate and sugar water. In 1863, when a gas supply became available to the town, glass could be blown thinner without bursting and by the eighteen seventies the factory at Lauscha was exporting tree ornaments throughout Europe and America, signing a deal with F.W.Woolworth in the eighteen eighties, after he discovered them on a trip to Germany.
Bauble is a byword for the inconsequential, so I do not quite know why these small glass decorations inspire so much passion in me, keeping their romance even as other illusions have dissolved. Maybe it is because I collect images that resonate personally? As well as Father Christmas and Snowmen, I have the Sun, Moon and Stars, Clocks and even a Demon to create a shining poem about time, mortality and joy upon my Christmas tree. I cannot resist the allure of these exquisite glass sculptures in old-fashioned designs glinting at dusk amongst the dark needles of fir, because they still retain the power to evoke the rich unassailable magic of Christmas for me.
This pierrot dates from the nineteen eighties
Three of my grandmother’s decorations. The basket on the left has a piece of florists’ wire that she placed there in the nineteen fifties
This snowman is one of the oldest of my grandmother’s collection
Bought in the nineteen eighties, but from a much older mould
Baubles enhanced with painted stripes and glitter
The moon, sun and stars were acquired from a shop in Greenwich Avenue on my first visit to New York in 1990, amazingly they survived the flight home intact
These two from my grandmother’s collection make a fine contrast of colour
Even Christmas has its dark side, this demon usually hangs at the back of the tree
It is always going to be nine o’clock on Christmas Eve
Three new decorations purchased at Columbia Rd
A stash of glittering beauties, stored like rare eggs in cardboard trays
Russian cosmonauts from the sixties that I bought in Spitalfields Market
My first bicycle, that I found under the tree one Christmas and still keep in my attic
Books For Christmas
If you are seeking Christmas presents for family and friends, you need look no further because Spitalfields Life books make ideal gifts which you can have personally inscribed…
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S LONDON ALBUM
Between the covers of this magnificent red Album with a gilded cover you will discover more than 600 of the Gentle Author’s favourite pictures of London in print for the first time, setting the wonders of our modern metropolis against the pictorial delights of the ancient city, and celebrating the infinite variety of life in the capital.
Take a walk through time with the Gentle Author as your guide – be equally amazed at what has been lost of old London and charmed by the unfamiliar marvels of London today.
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The Gentle Author assembles a choice selection of CRIES OF LONDON, telling the stories of the artists and celebrated traders, and revealing the unexpected social realities contained within these cheap colourful prints produced for the mass market.
For centuries, these lively images of familiar hawkers and pedlars have been treasured by Londoners. In the capital, those who had no other means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.
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The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.
As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.
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“This small, beautiful book is an elegy to companionship. Encompassing both the everyday and the profound, it should be judged no less valid for the fact that the friend in question is a cat.” Times Literary Supplement
Anyone that has a cat will recognise the truth of this tender account by The Gentle Author. Filled with sentiment yet never sentimental, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY is a literary hymn to the intimate relationship between humans and animals.
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A handsome photography book collecting together Colin O’Brien’s portraits of the Travellers’ Children in London Fields.
These pictures record an extraordinary meeting between a photographer and a group of Irish Travellers’ children in London Fields in 1987, yet the subject of Colin O’Brien’s tender and clear-eyed photographs is no less than the elusive drama of childhood itself.
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“a timely reminder of all that modern Britishness encompasses” The Observer
In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh Singh tells the candid and sometimes surprising story of his father Joginder Singh who came to Spitalfields in 1949.
Joginder sacrificed a life in the Punjab to work in Britain and send money home, yet he found himself in his element living among the mishmash of people who inhabited the streets around Brick Lane.
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The Gentle Author presents a magnificent selection of pictures – many never published before – revealing the evolution of painting in the East End and tracing the changing character of the streets through the twentieth century.
“A fragment of the riches flowing from a continued fascination with London’s topography” – Evening Standard
“Harvested from the thirties to the present day, Spitalfields Life’s gorgeous collection of East End paintings is more knees-up than misery-fest” – Hackney Citizen
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Follow in the footsteps of all those who came before, with a keen eye and an open heart, to discover the manifold wonders of Spitalfields.
Adam Dant has populated The Gentle Author’s Tour with portraits of more than fifty people – both the living and the dead – who have lived and worked in Spitalfields over the past two millennia.
Ramble through two thousand years of culture in the heart of London and discover some of the people and places that make this historic neighbourhood distinctive.
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AS Jasper’s tender memoir of growing up in the East End of London at the beginning of the twentieth century was immediately acclaimed as a classic when it was described by the Observer as ‘Zola without the trimmings.’
In this definitive new edition, A Hoxton Childhood is accompanied by the first publication of the sequel detailing the author’s struggles and eventual triumph in the cabinet-making trade,The Years After.
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The Gentle Author picks up the threads of Christmas fiction from Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas and George Mackay Brown to weave a compelling tale of family conflicts ignited and resolved in the festive season.
In Old Stepney
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Albert Gardens
In spite of the bombing, the slum clearances and redevelopments, the East End is still with us. In Stepney, there is an entire quarter of early nineteenth century terraces and squares that have survived the changes of the twentieth century. They are magnificent examples of the human quality of streetscape cherished by East Enders and also plangent reminders of what has been lost.
The Peacock, Aylward St
Corner of Antil Terrace and Senrab St
Corner of Antil Terrace and Dunelm St
Corner of Dunelm St
Senrab St
Who will rescue The Royal Duke, 474 Commercial Rd, designed by W.E. Williams, 1879
Shepherd Boy in Albert Gardens, dated 1903, “Fonderies d’art du Val D’Orne, Paris”
In Albert Gardens
South East corner of Albert Gardens
North West corner of Albert Gardens
South East corner of Arbour Sq
In Arbour Sq Gardens
South West corner of Arbour Sq
North West corner of Arbour Sq
Terrace in East Arbour St
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Robson Cezar’s Solar-Powered Houses From Whitechapel Market
Over recent years, we have featured the evolution of Spitalfields artist Robson Cezar‘s wooden houses made from boxes collected for him by the stallholders at Whitechapel Market. This year, Robson has reached the ultimate realisation of his design by fitting his recycled houses with solar panels, which means they charge in daylight and light up automatically at dusk. And they will do this more or less indefinitely.
Robson has enjoyed employing the colours, printed lettering and images of fruit and vegetables on the boxes, and made windows from coloured mushroom crates. Each house is a day’s work and he has been working for months to create this spectacular new collection. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie visited Robson’s studio in Bow to photograph the houses and take his portrait.
Robson has made two kinds of houses fitted with solar panels. He has made a collection of sturdy cardboard ones of similar design but each with different colours, lettering and images. These are £48 each. You can buy these from our online shop by clicking here
He has also made twenty larger wooden houses of unique design, photographed individually below. These are £140 each. We are selling them on a first-come-first-served basis, so if you would like one please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com giving your first, second and third choice, and we will supply payment details.
These houses are sculptures not toys and we do not recommend them for children under the age of twelve.
If you place your house in a sunny spot it will light up every night automatically
Robson and his houses
The houses lit up by solar power
Robson Cezar’s cardboard houses
Sideways view of the cardboard houses showing the solar panels
Sideways view of the wooden houses showing the solar panels
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Robson Cezar in his studio
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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