Henrietta Barnett & The Workhouse Children
John Walker author of Out of Sight, Out of Mind – Abuse, Neglect and Fire in a London Children’s Workhouse, 1854-1907 explores the forgotten achievements of Henrietta Barnett
Photograph by Henrietta Barnett
Aspects of the work of Samuel & Henrietta Barnett as social reformers are well-documented. Samuel is remembered for founding Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Gallery, while Henrietta is celebrated chiefly for establishing Hampstead Garden Suburb.
Yet new evidence reveals Henrietta’s humanitarian achievements in fighting to ameliorate the plight of tens of thousands of workhouse children. Her work easily matches her husband’s in improving conditions for Whitechapel’s poor.
Henrietta Rowlands married the recently-ordained Samuel Barnett in 1873 when she was just twenty-two. They were both from comfortably middle-class backgrounds tinged with significant elements of social concern and reforming zeal. They sought a new parish, away from subrban London, where they could pursue their missionary ambitions. The Bishop of London posted them to St Jude’s, Spitalfields, which he described as “the worst parish in my diocese, inhabited largely by criminals.”
Much of the credit for their subsequent achievements is given to Samuel, his status enhanced by a two-volume biography written by Henrietta. By contrast, Henrietta’s autobiography remains incomplete, an unpublished manuscript gathering dust in the London Metropolitan Archives. If she been as assiduous in publicising her own achievements, perhaps the story that follows would have been appreciated more widely?
One of Samuel’s first actions, on arriving in Spitalfields, was to get himself appointed to the Board of Guardians which was responsible for the large workhouse on Vallance Rd. The Poor Law regime at the time, encouraged by local Guardians, offered no cushion in the form of welfare payments or ‘outdoor relief’ for those who fell on hard times. Destitution meant the workhouse and Whitechapel had one of London’s largest.
In the eighteen-fifties, Whitechapel’s Guardians built a children’s workhouse in Forest Gate to separate the youngsters from what they regarded as the feckless behaviour and bad example of their indolent parents. Many of the buildings survive today and can almost be seen beside the railway line between Forest Gate and Maryland from trains passing from Essex towards Liverpool Street.
This ‘school’ soon housed as many as nine hundred pupils from the ages of two up to fourteen or fifteen years old. Within a few years Whitechapel was subletting places to the Guardians of Hackney and Poplar to accommodate their children. In the second half of the nineteenth century, an estimated fifty thousand East End youngsters passed through.
Conditions were harsh. Children were forcibly taken from their parents and would be lucky to see them for two hours in three months. On arrival at the school, most were separated from their siblings, never to see them again until they left. They were shaven, given soulless uniforms and subsisted upon inadequate diets.
For the first fifty years, the establishment was run by ex-military personnel, whose focus was on discipline and cost-saving rather than child care. Classes of up to ninety pupils were taught largely by unqualified teachers. All activity was undertaken in silence and the dormitories were overcrowded. In modern terminology, it was a ‘total institution’ from which children were permitted no escape. In all but name it was a prison, yet the inmates’ only crime was being born into poverty.
The Forest Gate District School, as it was officially known, was an institution of the kind sometimes called industrial schools, promoted as establishments that taught children trades to keep them from poverty in adulthood. But this was one of many lies. The average age of children was a little over ten years and official reports condemned the ‘industrial’ training as inadequate. In reality, children were employed as free labour – scrubbing acres of floors, peeling tons of potatoes and mending tattered garments – to save staff wages.
After witnessing the conditions at the Forest Gate School, Samuel arranged for Henrietta to become a Poor Law Guardian, as only the second woman to do so. She was immediately appointed an unpaid governor of the school, as the first woman in England to hold such a post. And there she remained, as the only female governor, for the next twenty years.
Henrietta set out to humanise the system, particularly for girls, emphasising that a caring upbringing would have beneficial effects on their own children. Yet her pleas for reform were ignored, met with hostility and dismissed in the words of one patronising school inspector as ‘sentimental follies.’
In response, Henrietta abandoned governors’ meetings and sought to effect change by direct action. She took great delight in ensuring that the matron – the inappropriately named ‘Miss Perfect’ – address all the girls by their first names, rather than by numbers or the all-purpose ‘girl.’ She knew that subjecting girls to whole days polishing a floor or washing uniforms was not adequate training for the occupation most would face on leaving – domestic service. She and Samuel opened another home in Hampstead, where they took a dozen girls at a time and trained them in domestic service skills, in preparation for future employment.
Henrietta acknowledged the hazards girls might face when placed into service as young as fourteen. She was at the forefront in establishing the Metropolitan Association for the Befriending of Young Servants in the eighteen-seventies. Girls were visited annually in their places of employment, until the age of twenty-one, to ensure they were not physically or sexually abused or exploited, and were assisted in moving to new positions if necessary.
She led Sunday walks across Wanstead Flats and encourage her middle-class friends to visit and read with the children, bringing books to the library and supplying toys. She promoted a London-wide scheme to fund pictures for the bare walls of District Schools. She established the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, obtaining royal patronage in order to raise funds to send children on camping holidays in Essex.
Incrementally and almost by stealth, Henrietta Barnett humanised the conditions, particularly for girls, during her first fifteen years as a governor. But it was in the final five years of her governorship that she was to have her greatest impact on the school and the conditions of all workhouse children.
On New Year’s Eve 1890, twenty-six boys died in a fire in the school and the incident drew national condemnation, leading to changes in fire regulations for workhouses. Henrietta befriended one of the heroes of the fire, Henry Elliott, a porter who rescued other boys from the smoke-filled dormitories.
Although there was an inquest at which the superintendent of the school was praised for his swift action in minimising fatalities, it only later transpired – revealed in Henrietta’s writings – that the children had been locked in their dormitories so the staff could go out to celebrate New Year.
Worse followed three years later when an outbreak of food poisoning swept through the school, killing two children and seriously affecting up to a hundred-and-fifty others. At the inquest, Henry Elliott, hero of the fire, condemned the management for substituting fresh meat with the maggot-ridden meat which caused the poisoning. The governors suspended him as a trouble-maker and, even though his whistle-blowing was proven to be accurate, they fired him.
When the corrupt behaviour of the management which led to both the fire and food poisoning went unpunished, Henrietta Barnett drew upon her personal connections to effect change. Her brother-in-law, Ernest Hart, was editor of the British Medical Journal. Working with Henrietta, he undertook a two-year campaign against what became known as Barrack Schools, and the Forest Gate establishment in particular, which gained traction and attention in decision-making circles.
As her second line of attack, Henrietta provoked a Parliamentary Inquiry into Barrack Schools, led by former Liberal Minister, Anthony Mundella. His 1896 report was condemning, calling for closure and replacement with more child-centric, parent-led institutions. The force of the accumulated evidence was such that the President of the Local Government Board, the government department with oversight of Poor Law establishments, had no choice but to accept the recommendations.
Henrietta’s governorship at the school ended when the Mundella Report was published. But as she left, two of the country’s first working-class guardians and workhouse school governors arrived to complete her work.
They were Poplar’s Will Crooks, a former workhouse boy, and George Lansbury. Both later became Labour MPs but each cut his public service teeth, battling locally and nationally to get the Forest Gate District School shut down. Their plan was to move the children to more suitable accommodation in separate houses run by houseparents in Brentwood. Although cricitised for their extravagance, the homes they established later gained acclaim and royal patronage, becoming the model for twentieth-century children’s homes.
Henrietta Barnett deserves to be credited for this change. Frustrated by years of slow reform, she realised that the abolition of Barrack Schools was the only solution. She pursed the cause with a dedication and determination that changed the lives of tens of thousands of children for the better in East London and far beyond.
In a collection of essays published in 1933, Henrietta summarised what she found at Forest Gate and why it had to change.
“Children in the schools soon develop a stigma. … The whole life is too much like that of a prison or a convent. … the children who are brought up in such dread and artificial surroundings are ill-prepared to fit into a world where growth and change are universal laws.”
The abolition legacy is hers.
Photograph of boys at the Forest Gate District School in the eighteen-eighties by Henrietta Barnett
The Forest Gate District School
Images of the fire at the school from the Illustrated London News, 1891
Hutton Poplars, the replacement for the Forest Gate District School
Henrietta Barnett
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The Return Of Benjamin Shapiro
Ben Shapiro
In the East End, you are constantly reminded of the people who have left and of the countless thousands who never settled but for whom the place only offered a contingent existence at best, as a staging post on their journey to a better life elsewhere. Ben Shapiro has lived much of his life outside this country, since he left as a youth with his family to go to America where they found the healthier existence they sought, and escaped the racism and poor housing of the East End. Yet now, in later life, after working for many years as a social worker and living in several different continents, he has chosen to return to the country of his formative experience. “I’ve discovered I like England,” he admitted to me simply, almost surprised by his own words.
“I was born in the London Hospital, Whitechapel, in 1934. My mother, Rebecca, was born in Manchester but her parents came from Romania and my father, Isaac (known as Jack), was born in Odessa. He left to go to Austria and met my mother in Belgium. He was a German soldier in World War I and, in 1930, he come to London and worked as a cook and kosher caterer. I discovered that immediately after the war, he went to Ellis Island but he was sent home. In the War, he had been a radio operator whose lungs had been damaged by gas. He spoke four or five languages and became a chef, cooking in expensive hotels and it was from him I learnt never to sign a contract, that a man’s word is his bond. He had an unconscionable temper and by today’s standards we would be called abused children. I once asked my mother if she would leave him and she said, ‘Where would I go with three children?’ I have a younger brother, Charles, who lives in New York now and a younger sister, Frieda, who died three years ago in Los Angeles.
My parents lived in a flat in Brick Lane opposite the Mayfair Cinema, until they got bombed out in World War II. We got bombed out three times. My first school was the Jewish Free School, I went to it until I was four and the war broke out when I was five. My father was in Brick Lane when Mosley tried to march through in 1936 and the Battle of Cable St happened. He remembered throwing bricks at the police. When the war broke, we became luggage tag children and one of my earliest memories was travelling on a train with hundreds of other children to Wales. We lived with a coal miner’s family and, at four or five, he would come home covered in coal dust. His wife would prepare a tin bath of hot water and he would sit in it and she would wash him clean, and then we could all have supper.
Me and my brother were sent back to London when the Blitz was in full swing, but my sister stayed in Aylesbury for the entire duration of the war and the family wanted to adopt her. When I returned with her fifty years later, she met the daughter of the family, her ‘step-sister’ – for the first time since then – and they recognised each other immediately, and fell into each other’s arms.
In London, the four of us lived in a two bedroom flat and my brother and I slept together in one bed. My parents talked Yiddish but they never taught me. In the raids, we took shelter in Whitechapel Underground but my father would never go. He said, ‘I’ve been through one war – if I’m going to die, I’ll die in my bed.’ My father gave me sixpence once to go and see ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ at the cinema, but we got to the steps just as the siren sounded and I waited thirty years to see that film.
Then I was sent off again, evacuated to a Jewish family in Liverpool. On the train there, I met a boy and we decided to ask to be billeted together. We were eight or nine years old and we slept together and, every night, he wet the bed. So we had to hang out our mattress and pyjamas every day to dry them, they didn’t get washed just dried. Once Liverpool became a target for bombing, I got sent home again. After the war, he contacted me and said, he’d had an operation to correct his bladder.
I have distant memories of being sent away again to the countryside, to Ely. When we got to the village green at Haddenham, a man came up to me and asked, ‘Are you Jewish’ and I said, ‘No’ so he said, ‘You can come and live with me then.’ All the children in the school knew I was Jewish and asked ‘Where’s your horns?‘ but I was well cared for and didn’t want to leave in the end. My father never visited or wrote letters, I think it was because he had been in World War I and he was familiar with death, and he could have been killed in the Blitz at any time. If he died, I would have stayed. We were always well fed and I have a theory that my father sent them Black Market food.
Towards end of the war, we were housed by London County Council in Cookham Buildings on the Boundary Estate. I remember looking out of the window and seeing German planes coming overhead. There was flat that was turned into a shelter but we all realised that it would not protect us and, if a bomb dropped, we should all be killed. Above us, there was an obese woman with two children and she never got to the shelter before the all clear sounded.
Our flat was damp due to bomb damage and I caught Rheumatic Fever, and was admitted to the Mildmay Mission Hospital and was at death’s door for two months, and then sent to Greyshall Manor, a convalescent home. After that, we qualified for rehousing and we were the first tenants to move into the newly-built Wheler House in Quaker St in 1949. It was comfortable and centrally heated and we had a bathroom. From there, at fourteen years old, I went to Deal St School. It was where I first experienced racial intimidation and bullying, so I told the teacher and he said, ‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you?’ Eventually, I became Head Prefect, which gave me carte blanche to discipline the other pupils.
During the years at Wheler House, I became friendly with the bottling girls from the Truman Bewery who walked past at six in the morning and six at night. I knew some of the Draymen too and they let me feed the horses. Soon after we moved in, my father wouldn’t give me any pocket money, he said, ‘You’ve got to earn it.’ I went down Brick Lane and enquired at a couple of stalls for a job and I had a strong voice, so a trader said, ‘I need a barker,’ and, for about a year, I became a barker each weekend in Petticoat Lane, crying ‘Get your lovely toys here!’ I was opposite the plate man who threw crockery in the air and next to the chicken plucker.
I worked in the City of London as a junior clerk in Gracechurch St, near the Monument, but I feel – if I had stayed – I would still be junior clerk.
The lady next door, she had a friend from America and she sponsored my brother to go there. So then we all wanted to go and, on June 6th 1953, we went down to Southampton and took a boat to New York and then travelled to Los Angeles. It was for health reasons. My mother had been unwell and my father said it would be a better life, which it turned out to be. I was seventeen years old.”
c.1900, Odessa – My father Isaac is sitting in the centre, he was born around 1896 and left in 1906, during the last great pogrom, to go to Vienna
c. 1920, London – My mother Rebecca is on the right with her sister on the left. Her parents were known as Yetta & Maurice
Ben on the left, aged seventeen years old, photographed with his family on the boat going to a new life in America in 1953
Ben and his family were the first people to move into this flat in Wheler House, Quaker St, when the building was newly completed in 1949
Dan Jones’ Portraits
In recent years, Dan Jones has painted a magnificent series of portraits from different eras for East End Tales by the Speed History Writers Group. Many of these are well known but others less familiar, so you can click on any of the names below to learn more about the subjects.
Police Constable James Stewart
Portraits copyright © Dan Jones
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Harold & Walter Steggles At Southend
If you are seeking an excuse for a day trip to Southend, I can think of no better reason than to visit the current exhibition of paintings by East London Group Artists Harold & Walter Steggles, BROTHERS IN ART, at the Beecroft Gallery until 8th January.
Both artists are featured in my book, EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists Who Painted London’s East End Streets in 20th Century.
Harold Steggles (1911-71) and his elder brother Walter were precocious artists who found early success as adolescents. Harold was the second of five children and grew up in Ilford with a father who managed a specialist shoe shop in the Strand and a mother who worked as dressmaker but had always wanted to be a painter.
When Harold left school and found employment as a clerk with a solicitor in Gray’s Inn at fourteen years old, he and Walter took to visiting galleries and viewing the national painting collections together. Soon they were undertaking sketching trips to pursue their shared passion, and reading widely about art, discussing the writings of John Ruskin and Joshua Reynolds.
In 1925, they visited an exhibition of paintings by the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute Art Club at the Bethnal Green Museum and signed up for lessons at the Institute, aged fourteen and seventeen respectively. However, the brothers were quickly disappointed with the tuition and they transferred to John Cooper’s art classes at the Bromley & Bow Institute where he encouraged them to paint scenes in the vicinity of the Institute in Bow. Under his tutelage, both brothers flourished as artists and they were to become the youngest members of the East London Group.
When Harold was just seventeen years old, John Cooper hung eight of his paintings at the East London Art Club exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1928, and Charles Aitken, Director of the Tate Gallery bought one, offering twice the asking price of one guinea.
Photographs of the brothers at this time show them as a pair of smiling handsome youths with short, neat haircuts and near-identical matching suits, sometimes worn with plus fours. Enjoying the fruits of their artistic success, they took motoring trips together and expanded the range of their subject matter to include the rural landscapes of East Anglia.
“All my brother’s pictures found buyers,” wrote Walter in excitement at his younger brother’s triumph when they showed with the East London Group at Lefevre Galleries and, over successive years, Harold contributed more than sixty pictures to these exhibitions. Before long they found themselves sought after by other galleries and Harold became a protégé of the flamboyant aesthete Eddie Marsh who lived near his office in Gray’s Inn as well as accepting a prestigious commission from Villiers David to paint the gentlemen’s clubs of St James.
The climax of this run of success for the brothers came with Harold & Walter Steggles’ joint exhibition at Lefevre Galleries in 1938, yet Harold continued his work as clerk. When the war came, both were excluded from service for health reasons and applied to become war artists but were turned down. Instead, Harold was asked by Muirhead Bone to contribute paintings to an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford which were to be sold to benefit the Red Cross.
In 1943, when he was thirty-two, Harold married Lilian Wood, the widow of a Spitfire pilot, even though her father did not approve of Harold being an artist. It was a curious union of contrasting personalities, Harold considerate and quiet, and Lilian, outgoing, keen on tennis and uninterested in art. Harold took legal exams and advanced in his work at the solicitors but considered himself lacking in the necessary education, confiding to his daughter Elizabeth that, if it had not been for the war, he might have carried on with commissions.
Twenty-five years after Harold died at the age of sixty, Walter wrote, “I have not yet recovered from the shock of losing him.”
Grove Road, Bow
Warner Street, Clerkenwell, 1935
Grove Hall Park, Bow, 1933
Blackwall
When Walter Steggles (1908-1997) left school at fourteen, he joined a shipping firm in the City of London, working, “as dogsbody in the superintendent’s department which meant spending periods in the drawing office.” Once he and his younger brother Harold started regular art classes in 1925, such was his enthusiasm that he would take the train from Fenchurch Street Station back to the family home in Ilford for dinner before returning to the East End.
Like Harold, Walter enjoyed the encouragement of John Cooper at Bow, whom he described as “probably the best teacher I ever knew,” recalling how “He would always find a good point to remark on in someone’s work and would say, ‘You are trying to imitate someone not as good as yourself.’” Walter also appreciated the participation of established artists at the classes in Bow, writing “Sickert’s advice has been constantly with me,” and was both challenged and flattered when John Cooper sometimes asked him to take over the class.
At twenty years old, Walter contributed eleven paintings to the East London Art Group Show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1928, three of which were then hung in the Tate. With admirable lack of ego, Walter wrote, “I do not like one man shows, my pictures look better mixed in with others.” He and Harold both exhibited at all the East London Group shows at the Lefevre Galleries between 1928 and 1936, followed by a joint show in 1938, and the two brothers found themselves part of a cosmopolitan artistic milieu that included Ben Nicholson, Charles Ginner, Philip Wilson Steer, George Braque and Raoul Dufy. In the midst of this success, Walter’s crowning achievement was having a painting in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1936.
In 1939, excluded from military service due to asthma and not chosen as a war artist, Walter was transferred to the Ministry of Transport for war work but continued his art studies at Central School of Art. Offered a job as an art teacher by London County Council after the war, instead he returned to work at the shipping company in the City.
After Harold’s marriage, Walter’s sister Muriel sometimes accompanied him on painting trips and she remembered that when he found a scene that he liked, he would sketch it on the spot and then work up the painting at home, also Sickert’s preferred method. Walter wrote, ”sketching is better than a camera, I only did one painting from a photograph and it was dead.”
Inspired perhaps by the presence of Stanley Spencer, Walter moved to Cookham where his parents came to live with him, much to his father’s regret, declaring “We should never have left Romford!” By now his mother was painting prolifically. “My son has his own studio,” she boasted to Stanley Spencer. “He’s lucky, I paint in my bedroom,” replied the old master.
Still working into the nineteen-nineties, Walter wrote, “I sometimes wonder what makes us pursue the arts. It is not money as people in insignificant jobs usually do better.” At the end of a long and sustained painting career, he wrote proudly, “It is sixty-five years since I sold my first picture at a public exhibition. It was bought by Sir Joseph Duveen and was hung at the Tate Gallery in 1929.”
Old Houses, Bethnal Green, 1929
The Railway Fence
Bryant & May Wharf
The Red Bridge
Bow Bridge
The Chapel, Minories
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
Click here to buy a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR
Philip Cunningham At Oxford House
Photographer Philip Cunningham took these lively pictures while working as a youth leader at Oxford House in Bethnal Green in the seventies. They are now the subject of an exhibition entitled Youth of Yesteryear at Oxford House from 22nd September until 17th December.
“In the early seventies, I was trying to get into art school but living in a small house in Mile End Place where there was no room to paint, so a friend suggested that I tried the art studio at Oxford House. I gave it a go and found myself surrounded by THARGS (Tower Hamlets Arts Group) who were mostly Abstract Expressionists.
Upstairs was an antiquated dark room used by kids from the youth club which was under the art workshop. I soon became involved and worked there for nearly five years. During this time, I gained a place at Ravensbourne Art College and used their darkroom equipment which was all new.
The tutors at Ravensbourne encouraged me to ‘Photograph everything!‘ and that was I started to do, which was how and why many of these pictures were taken. They capture an era and an effervescent energy that I still find inspirational.”
Philip Cunningham
Victor
Caretaker
Joe
Bob Drinkwater
Pat Leeder
Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham
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Philip Cunningham at Mile End Place
Philip Cunningham’s East End Portraits
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People You May Meet On My Tour
My walking tour of Spitalfields is full this weekend but a few tickets remain for Saturday 25th & Sunday 26th September 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 no more than an hour and a half, but walking through two thousand years of history and encountering just a few of the people who have made the place distinctive. Here is a selection of those that we may meet. Click here for further information
Linda Carney, Machinist
Harry Landis, Actor
Udham Singh
Mary Wollstoncraft
Charles Dickens
Millie Rich (Photo by Patricia Niven)
Emilia Bassanio Lanier (Portrait by Nichols Hilliard)
Sir John Betjeman & Dan Cruickshank
Neville Turner
Audrey Kneller
Boy wearing Horace Warner’s Hat
Jessica & Rosalie Wakefield
Henrietta Barnett
Charlie Chaplin
Paul Gardner
Sandra Esqulant
Mavis Bullwinkle
Abdul Khalique
Joginder Singh
Nicholas Culpeper
David Prescott
Joan Lauder, the cat lady of Spitalfields
A Walk With Suresh Singh
We are proud to be the publishers of A MODEST LIVING, Memoirs of a Cockney Sikh, London’s first Sikh biography, telling the story of one family in Spitalfields over seventy years. Author Suresh Singh will be in conversation Stefan Dickers at Rich Mix this Sunday 19th September at 2pm. (Click here for tickets)
In the meantime, Suresh and I enjoyed a ramble round Spitalfields recently to visit some of his favourite places.
“I love Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East. It was the library I used to go to every Friday when I was at primary school. You could sit and read. It was just lovely. Upstairs was the art and music library. They had big oversize books of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, the Impressionists, Matisse, Degas and Le Corbusier’s book about Chandigarh.
It was amazing to have this in Brick Lane, at the end of my street. You were given freedom to look at the books and could borrow twelve books and five records at a time. The librarian in the music library would order whatever you requested. Even if you asked for ‘Yes’ album, he would get it by next week. My dad had a record player and I learnt to be really careful with a record because when you returned it they would meticulously check it.
The library was a whole world. It taught me to read quietly. It exposed me to books that I might never have found. My mum and dad could not read or write. We had no books at home. I liked the art section because the books had pictures and I learnt that pictures told stories as well as words. The librarians always helped me and I could spend hours there. It was a sanctuary from the mayhem outside, a kind of university of the ghetto.”
“Christ Church School, Brick Lane, was my primary school. I loved it when I came back after a long visit to India at six years old. I have frightening memories of it too, as the place I had to go to after the freedom I had experienced in our village. My mum used to walk me here every day and I would walk home for dinner at Princelet St and come back again. School dinners were so bland but my mum gave me dal and roti.
The water fountain used to work and we could drink from it. I remember it as so high, my friends had to give me a lift up so I could drink from it. You pressed the button and it worked. There were little fish that lived in there.
Later on, Eric Elstob – a friend whom I worked for in the renovation of his house in Fournier St – was treasurer of the school and he restored the railings, which was lovely. A couple of years ago, they were repainting them blue and I asked them to paint a bit of my bike with the same colour to remind me of the great memories I have of this school. We used to have great jumble sales at Christmas. You could climb through the school and out through the back, past the gardens of the houses in Fournier St and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church into Itchy Park, and out into Commercial St and Spitalfields Market. I loved it because it was a backstreet school.”
“I have fond memories of the rectory at 2 Fournier St when Eddie Stride was Rector. It is one of the few Hawksmoor houses. I helped Eddie wash the steps with Vim when the tramps pissed all over them. There used to be queues outside and Irene Stride made sandwiches for them.
It was a place where Eddie made me feel very welcome. I rang the bell or knocked on the door, and he would always open it to me. The door was never closed. I could always go in and play in the garden. Later on, there were big power meetings at the rectory when Eddie became the chairman of the Festival of Light. So you would meet people like Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse, Cliff Richard and Lord Longford coming and going. It was always an open house.
I was brought up as a Sikh but there were no gurdwaras in Spitalfields, and my dad said ‘You need some moral purpose,’ so he send us to Sunday school and that was how I became friends with Eddie Stride. He was a great friend to our family. He helped me get grants for further education from the Sir John Cass Foundation which led me to study architecture. I loved that time and these steps mean a lot to me. It is amazing how Vim can clean Portland stone. ”
“I always knew the Hanbury Hall as 22a Hanbury St. In those days, Christ Church was closed because it was unsafe and this was used for services instead. There was a youth club at the top of the building on Thursdays and Fridays and we had our Sunday school in the hall.
Because it was built as a Huguenot chapel, everyone used to say that this hall is older than the church and sometimes that used to scare me late at night. There were these big wooden doors that closed with a hasp and I always feared someone might come down the winding stone staircase. Later, when I was doing carpentry work, Eddie gave me the task of housing the remains of the smallpox victims that they found when they were cleaning out the crypt.
When I started a group, we were allowed to rehearse in the vestry at the back. This place was a playground for me but also a church where services were held until the eighties. Then I helped move the furniture from here back to Christ Church. I remember we put the communion table on casters and I had to clear out all the copies of Lord Longford’s pornography report which were being stored in the church.
This hall was a treasure because it had a lovely atmosphere but also a haunted atmosphere too. It was the main meeting point for all of us in Spitalfields at that time.”
“Once, the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane was a dark scary corridor for me. It was my route from my home in Princelet St to my secondary school, Daneford in Bethnal Green. At that time, it used to smell of hops and it was dark and dirty. I got beaten up by a bunch of fascist skinheads at the corner of the brewery where it meets Buxton St. I still try to avoid this route but like a magnet it draws me through. I used to run through or cycle because to go round the other way was much longer and sometimes more scary- you would have to cut past Shoreditch Station and round the back to Cheshire St.
So this was the quickest route but it was like going through a factory. The brewery was always there in my childhood. The smell and the noise were twenty-four hours, and it was always dark beneath the brewery walls. The brewery was a landmark and I remember smoke coming out of that chimney. It was a place that you had no choice but to pass through. At the other end of the brewery was where the skinheads hung out but at this end was the Bengali area where I felt safer. Every day I hoped I would not get my head kicked in as I went to school.
As a kid, I found these long brewery walls interminable. I walked and walked and thought, ‘Will I ever get through to the end?’ It still scares me in a way.”
“I used to pass Franta Belsky’s sculpture in Bethnal Green every day when I walked along the little passageway to Daneford Secondary School. Today, I am wearing the tank top my mum knitted when I was eleven and I remember wearing it to a non-school uniform day all those years ago.
I always used to see this sculpture out of the side of my eye. My friends would say, ‘You go on Singhey, I dare you to touch her breasts and come back down again.’ But slowly I began to appreciate the beauty of it and began looking at books of Henry Moore and David Smith. It was a lovely thing to see before you went to school every day. It comforted me to see a woman and her baby because I thought, ‘That’s how my mum cares for me.’ It gave me a sense of security. I thought, ‘How amazing that we have a piece of sculpture outside our school.’ It made me feel proud because of the sculpture. My dad used to take me to Hyde Park where there were Henry Moores next to the Serpentine. I thought, ‘We’re on a par with the West End here in Bethnal Green.’
I slowly started loving it. I loved her plait and it reminded me of when I had a topknot. I appreciated it in different types of light and I still love it today.”
Suresh Singh & Jagir Kaur at 38 Princelet St last summer (Photograph by Patricia Niven)
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