Henrietta Keeper’s Photographs
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Henrietta Keeper, Singer
Henrietta Keeper (widely known as “Joan”), the vivacious octogenarian ballad singer who performed at E.Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd on Fridays, once invited me to round to her tiny flat to show me her remarkable collection of photographs and meet her daughter Lesley, custodian of the family album.
These pictures show Henrietta’s life as it existed within a small corner of the East End on the boundary of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green in the nineteen fifties. On one side of Vallance Rd was Cranberry St where Henrietta’s mother-in-law Selina lived and took care of her daughters while the family waited for a house of their own. On the other side of Vallance Rd was Selby St where Henrietta’s husband Joe and his brother Jim ran Keeper & Co, making coal deliveries. And at the end of Vallance Rd was New Rd where Henrietta worked as a machinist at Bartman & Co making coats and jackets.
Having grown up in Bethnal Green during the war and brought her own family up though the austerity that followed, Henrietta was a woman of indefatigable spirit. Most remarkable of all, she sang throughout her life, winning innumerable singing competitions and giving free concerts.
Henrietta with fellow machinist Izzie. “When I was nineteen I started here and I became the top machinist,” she explained, “I think my hair looks a bit like Barbara Windsor’s in this picture.”
Henrietta with Mr Bartman at Bartman & Co.
“This is Selina Keeper, my mother-in-law at her house in Cranberry St. She was real Victorian lady. She used to whip the cup of tea off the table before you had finished it!” said Henrietta. And Lesley added, “She had a best front room that she kept under lock and key, and only once – when she unlocked it – did I go in, but she said ‘Get out!’ You couldn’t touch anything. It had to be kept perfect.”
“My husband Joe took this picture of his two best friends George Bastick and Leslie Herbert in Nelson Gardens next to St Peter’s Church, Bethnal Green. What a pity he isn’t in it?”
Coronation Day, 1953, celebrated at Hemming St, Bethnal Green. Lesley is in the blazer on the right hand side of the front row and Henrietta can be distinguished by her blonde hair beneath the Union Jack, peering round the lady in front of her.
“This is Jim Keeper, my brother-in-law, with his horse Trigger. My husband, Joe, worked with him and he had the biggest coal round in the East End – Keeper & Co. Joe was so strong he could carry a two hundredweight sack of coal on his back up the stairs of the buildings with ease. The brothers used to go home to lunch with their mum in Cranberry St and take Trigger with them. She always collected the horse manure for her roses while they were there and when the Queen Mother visited the East End, she leaned over the fence and said ‘This one should win best garden.'”
“Taken in 1947 at Southend, when I was twenty, this is Cathy Tyler, my sister Marie and me – I was known as Minxie at the time and we all sang together like the Andrews sisters. I was a bit shocked when I saw it because you can see I am pregnant. I thought, ‘Is that me?'”
Henrietta (far right) photographed with her workmates by a street photographer around Brick Lane during a lunch break in the fifties.
This is Henrietta’s daughter Lesley visiting Petticoat Lane with her grandfather James Keeper in 1953. “He was a delivery man with a horse and cart, they called it a ‘carman,'” Henrietta remembered, “he was also a cabinet-maker and he brought me beautiful polished wooden boxes that he made.”
Henrietta and her husband Joe with their daughter Lesley on a trip to Columbia Rd.
The two children on the right are Lesley and Linda Keeper playing at Cowboys and Indians with their friends in the nineteen fifties in Cranberry St while they lived with their grandmother. Lesley remembers Mrs Dexter across the road who called out “Play nicely on the debris!” to the children and you can see the bomb site where they played in the back of the photograph. Today Cranberry St no longer exists, just the stub of road beside Rinkoff’s bakery in Vallance Rd indicates where it once was.
Henrietta singing at a Holiday Camp at Selsey Bill in the nineteen sixties.
Henrietta singing at Pelliccis
You may like to read my original portrait
Tree Huts Of Epping Forest
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Who can resist the lure of the forest in summer? Since Epping Forest is a mere cycle ride from Spitalfields, each year I visit to seek refuge among the leafy shades. And, in the depths of the forest, I come upon these makeshift tree huts which fascinate me with the variety and ingenuity of their design.
Who can be responsible? Is it children making dens or land artists exploring sculptural notions? Clearly never weatherproof, they are not human habitations. I wondered if the sprites and hobgoblins had been at work constructing arbors for the spirits of the forest. But then I remembered I had seen something similar once before, Eeyore’s hut at the edge of the Hundred Acre Wood.
Some are elaborate constructions that are worthy of architecture and others merely collections of twigs which tease the eye, questioning whether they are random or deliberate. They conjure an air of ritualistic mystery and, the more I encountered, the more intrigued I became. So much effort and skill expended suggest deliberate purpose or intent, yet they remain an enigma.
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My Quilt
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My old cat on my quilt
The great majority of my stories were written beneath this quilt that I made a few years ago and which has special meaning for me. Once dusk gathers on winter afternoons, I retreat to my bed to work, abandoning my desk that has become piled with layers of paper and taking consolation in the warmth and comfort under my quilt, as the ideal snug location to devise my daily compositions. When autumn enfolds the city and rain falls outside, I am happy in my secure private space, writing to you through the long dark nights in Spitalfields.
This is the only quilt I ever made and I make no claims for my ability as a stitcher which is functional rather than demonstrating any special skill. Once I made a shirt that I sewed by hand, copying the pattern from one I already had, and it took me a week, with innumerable unpicking and resewing as I took the pieces apart and reassembled them until I achieved something wearable. It was a beautiful way to spend a week, sitting cross-legged sewing on the floor and although I am proud of the shirt I made, I shall not attempt it again.
My quilt is significant because I made it to incarnate the memory of my mother, and as a means to manifest the warmth I drew from her, and illustrated with the lyrical imagery that I associate with her – something soft and rich in colour that I could enfold myself with, and something that would be present in my daily life to connect me to my childhood, when I existed solely within the tender cocoon of my parents’ affections. My sweetest memories are of being tucked up in bed as a child and of my parents climbing onto the bed to lie beside me for ten minutes until I drifted off.
For several years, after the death of my father, I nursed my mother as she succumbed to the dementia that paralysed her, took away her nature, her mind, her faculties and her eventually her life. It was an all-consuming task, both physically and emotionally, being a housewife, washing bed sheets constantly, cooking food, and feeding and tending to her as she declined slowly over months and years. And when it was over, at first I did not know what to do next.
One day, I saw a woollen tapestry at a market of a fisherman in a sou-wester. This sentimental image spoke to me, like a picture in a children’s book, and evoking Cornwall where my mother was born. It was made from a kit and entailed hours of skillful work yet was on sale for a couple of pounds, and so I bought it. At once, I realised that were lots of these tapestries around that no-one wanted and I was drawn to collect them. Many were in stilted designs and crude colours but it did not matter to me because I realised they look better the more you have, and it satisfied me to gather these unloved artifacts that had been created at the expense of so much labour and expertise, mostly – I suspected – by old women.
I have taught myself to be unsentimental about death itself, and I believe that human remains are merely the remains – of no greater meaning than toenails or hair clippings. After their demise, the quality of a person does not reside within the body – and so I chose to have no tombstone for my parents and I shall not return to their grave. Instead, through making a quilt, I found an active way to engage with my emotion at the loss of a parent and create something I can keep by me in fond remembrance for always.
I laid out the tapestries upon the floor and arranged them. I realised I needed many more and I discovered there were hundreds for sale online. And soon they began to arrive in the mail every day. And the more I searched, the more discriminating I became to find the most beautiful and those with pictures which I could arrange to create a visual poem of all the things my mother loved – even the work of her favourite artists, Vermeer, Millet, Degas and Lowry, as well as animals, especially birds, and flowers, and the fishing boats and seascapes of her childhood beside the Cornish coast.
Over months, as the quilt came together, there with plenty of rejections and substitutions in the pursuit of my obsession to create the most beautiful arrangement possible. A room of the house was devoted to the quilt, where my cat came to lie upon the fragments each day, to keep me company while I sat there alone for hours contemplating all the tapestries – shuffling them to discover new juxtapositions of picture and colour, as each new arrival in the mail engendered new possibilities.
The natural tones of the woollen dyes gave the quilt a rich luminous glow of colour and I was always aware of the hundreds of hours of work employed by those whose needlecraft was of a far greater quality than mine. After consideration, a soft lemon yellow velvet was sought out to line it, and a thin wadding was inserted to give it substance and warmth but not to be too heavy for a summer night.
It took me a year to make the quilt. From the first night, it has delighted me and I have slept beneath it ever since. I love to wake to see its colours and the pictures that I know so well, and it means so much to know that I shall have my beautiful quilt of memories of my mother to keep me warm and safe for the rest of my life.
The first tapestry I bought.
Seventies silk butterflies from Florida.
From Thailand.
My grandmother had a print of Millet’s “The Angelus” in her dining room for more than sixty years.
Note the tiny stitches giving detail to the lion’s head in this menagerie.
A unique tapestry from a painting of a Cornish fishing village.
From the Czech Republic.
These squirrels never made it into the quilt.
I could not take this wonderful seascape from its frame, it hangs on my bedroom wall today
The Consolation of Schrodinger
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I believe most will agree that life is far from easy and that dark moments are an inescapable part of human existence. When I feel sad, when I feel confused, when I feel conflicted, when it all gets too much and my head is crowded with thoughts yet I do not even know what to do next, I lie down on my bed to calm myself.
On such an occasion recently, I was lying in a reverie and my consciousness was merging with the patterns of the changing light on the ceiling, when I heard small footsteps enter the room followed by a soft clump as Schrodinger landed upon the coverlet in a leap.
I lifted my head for a moment and cast my eyes towards him and he looked at me askance, our eyes meeting briefly in the half-light of the shaded room before I lay my head back and he settled himself down at a distance to rest.
I resumed my contemplation, trying to navigate the shifting currents of troubling thoughts as they coursed through my head but drifting inescapably into emotional confusion. Suddenly my mind was stilled and halted by the interruption of the smallest sensation, as insignificant yet as arresting as a single star in a night sky.
Turning my head towards Schrodinger, I saw that he had stretched out a front leg to its greatest extent and the very tip of his white paw was touching my calf, just enough to register. Our eyes met in a moment of mutual recognition that granted me the consolation I had been seeking. I was amazed. It truly was as if he knew, yet I cannot unravel precisely what he knew. I only know that I was released from the troubles and sorrow that were oppressing me.
When he was the church cat, Schrodinger lived a public life and developed a robust personality that enabled him to survive and flourish in his role as mascot in Shoreditch. After two years living a private domestic life in Spitalfields, he has adapted to a quieter more intimate sequestered existence, becoming more playful and openly affectionate.
At bedtime now, he leaps onto the coverlet, rolling around like a kitten before retreating – once he has wished me goodnight in his own way – to the sofa outside the bedroom door where he spends the night. Thus each day with Schrodinger ends in an expression of mutual delight.
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Schrodinger’s First Year in Spitalfields
Twelfth Annual Report
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We live in such curious and volatile times that – as I reach the end of my twelfth year of writing The Gentle Author – I have become inordinately grateful for my self-appointed task of publishing a story in these pages every day, as a constant in my life and a consolation against disruption.
In the midst of the pandemic, this has been a year of ceaseless fighting to Save The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Save The Bethnal Green Mulberry and Save Brick Lane.
After five years of campaigning to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry it was a profound disappointment when the Secretary of State endorsed Tower Hamlets Council’s decision for it to be converted into a boutique hotel with just a toy foundry in the lobby, making souvenir hand bells. It came as no surprise when I heard an unconfirmed leak that a major private members’ club had granted a lifetime’s membership to a supporter in Whitehall as a gesture of thanks for expediting this. Thus ends more than five hundred years of bell-making tradition in Whitechapel.
After such a catastrophe, it was an enormous relief when we won our Judicial Review at the High Court to Save the Bethnal Green Mulberry. Yet, although we understand Crest Nicholson have applied for an appeal, we do not expect it to be granted. I will keep you informed of the outcome of this.
I am delighted to report that our cuttings of Shakespeare’s Mulberry Tree have taken, thanks to the capable hands of Nurseryman Lyndon Osborne. We will be distributing these to the donors of our legal fund in the autumn when it is best for planting trees. We had originally intended to do this in the summer, but we decided to wait for more root growth, giving these saplings a better chance of survival. We thank our donors for their patience.
As I write to you, the outcome of the Battle for Brick Lane is undecided, despite an unprecedented level of protest and objection. We were pleased when Mayor John Biggs declared his willingness to entertain a community-led master plan for the entire Truman Brewery site which reflects the needs of local people. And it was gratifying when Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, endorsed this approach.
But this notion now seems to have been dismissed as the council again appears to be seeking to approve the Truman Brewery’s planning application for a shopping mall with four floors of corporate offices on top. A council officer is claiming they have no choice but to approve the scheme since the developer would likely win on appeal, even though there are solid legitimate reasons for rejection in planning law. Such a defeatist attitude is a betrayal of the more than 7000 people who wrote letters of objection and most crucially of the Bangladeshi community who will suffer most from this development.
I would dearly like to return to publishing books and we have been working with David Hoffman on a collection of his superlative photography entitled A PLACE TO LIVE, Endurance & Joy in the East End, 1971 – 1987. David came to live in Whitechapel in 1971 and photographed homelessness, racism, the incursion of developers and the rise of protest. In the process, he discovered his vocation as a photographer and his bold, humane pictures record a lost decade, speaking vividly to our own times.
One of the joys of the past year was a commission from the Spitalfields Trust to reinvent the tours that Dennis Severs gave when he first opened his eighteenth century house to visitors. The discovery of fragmentary recordings and unpublished writings gave a flavour of what they were like, yet also granted me licence to rewrite and reimagine the tours for a new audience. Working with a talented actor, Joel Saxon, brought another level of creativity. Joel seized the opportunity to show off his theatre skills in playing the roles of multiple different residents through time and delivers a bravura performance.
I have been delighted and surprised to receive the greatest demand yet for my writing courses and I look forward to spending autumn weekends meeting many of my readers and hearing your stories.
The lockdowns restricted my ability to undertake interviews and write individual profiles which have always been the heart of my work, but I hope to make up for lost time with a lot more in the next year.
Thus, with these thoughts in mind, ends the twelfth year in the pages of Spitalfields Life.
I am your loyal servant
The Gentle Author
Spitalfields, 27th August 2021
A handful of places are available on my course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on the weekend of 30th & 31st October. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book.
Cover design by Friederike Huber for our first new book, post-pandemic
You may like to read my earlier Annual Reports
I am taking my annual holiday now and will resume with new stories on September 13th
At The House Mill
The House Mill of 1776 at Bromley by Bow is the largest tidal mill in the world and the only remaining mill at Three Mill Island on the River Lea, an artificial island created in ancient times – like Venice – by driving thousands of wooden stakes into the mud, for the purpose of harnessing the powerful tidal surge of the Thames. Daniel Bisson, a Huguenot, built the House Mill for grinding grain to bake bread and the manufacture of gin to supply London, and it functioned here until the end of World War II, before falling into disrepair.
Thirty years ago, William Hill saw the derelict mill from the train and came to explore. He became one of a group of committed volunteers who have been responsible for overseeing the magnificent restoration programme of recent years, and it was he who showed me round. We spent a couple of hours, climbing up and down ladders, and exploring every corner of the huge old mill, including those parts not open to visitors – enabling me to create this photographic record.
Initials of Daniel Bisson, builder of the mill, and his wife Sarah
View down the River Lea
Some of the beams at House Mill are one hundred foot long and may be recycled ships’ timbers
Nineteenth century wooden patterns for casting the machinery of the mill
Stretcher frames from World War I
Hopper where the grain was channelled down to the mill stones
The oasthouses and the clock mill
The Miller’s staircase
Millstones
Pegs where the millers hung their coats
Mill worker in the nineteen thirties
The same spot today
Iron frames for the nineteenth century mill wheels
The Clockmill
Visit The House Mill, Three Mill Lane, Bromley by Bow, London E3 3DU
Volunteers are always required to act as stewards, guides and to run the cafe at the House Mill. If you would like to help, please contact info@housemill.org.uk
Stan Jones Of Mile End
Stan Jones
Such has been the movement of people and the destruction and reconstruction of neighbourhoods in the last century that I often wonder if anyone at all is left here from the old East End. So you can imagine my delight when I met Stan Jones of Mile End who has lived in his house for more than eighty years, moving there at the age of ten from a nearby street.
Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I were enchanted to be welcomed by Stan to his extraordinary home where nothing has ever been thrown away. Every inch of the house and garden has found its ideal use in the last eight decades and Stan is a happy man living in his beloved home that is also the repository of his family history.
Fortunately for us Stan has been taking photographs all this time, starting out in the days of glass plate negatives, and below you can see a few examples of his handiwork. Famously, Stan photographed the exterior of his house from the Coronation in 1953 and his picture was published in The Times, which has led to return visits by the daily newspapers on subsequent occasions of national celebration to record Stan’s unchanging decorations on the front of his unaltered house.
Most inspiring to me was Stan’s sense of modest satisfaction with his existence in his small house backing onto the railway line. Mercifully untroubled by personal ambition, Stan has immersed himself in domesticity and creative pastimes, and enjoyed fulfilment at the centre of his intimate community over all this time. Such is his contentment that not even a World War with bombs dropping from the sky could drive Stan out of his home. Stan never had any desire to go anywhere else because he found that all which life has to offer may be discovered in a back street in Mile End.
“I was born nearby in Coutts Rd in 1929 and I came here with my mother and father in March 1939, so I have lived in this house for eighty years. I have no brothers or sisters and I never married. I did have one cousin until last December, but he has gone now and my closest relative is his daughter who lives in Hornchurch.
My mother was Ethel and father was Arthur, they were both from Stepney. My grandparents all lived in Stepney, just across the other side of Mile End Road. My mother was one week older than my father but they both passed away within nine weeks of each other in 1978, when they were seventy-five.
My father was an engineer, repairing steam lorries, until he got a job with the council as mace bearer to the Mayor. Also he was personal messenger to the Town Clerk of Stepney, all through the war he carried messages around on a bike.
My mother was a machinist until the day she got married, then she never went out to work any more. Before fridges and freezers, women had to go out shopping every day to buy food and look after the children. He had to work to feed her, keep her in clothes and pay the rent, which was about a pound a week. That was their life.
I had a happy childhood but it was very lonely, I never had friends, I always had hobbies indoors. I hardly got any education. I only went to Malmesbury Rd School for a few months before the war started and the schools shut down. Most children were evacuated but I never went away, I did not want to. I was here right through the war. I went back to school for about six months after the war and that was my education because you left school at fourteen in those days. I must have educated myself because I did not have much schooling.
On the first night of the air raids, a row of houses down this road got a direct hit. Most nights, I was in the Anderson shelter with my mother. We were down there when the bomb fell just along the road and when a flying bomb hit the railway bridge and ripped it in half and the two halves were lying in the road. I must have been frightened but I cannot remember.
My father did not go into the army because the Town Clerk was a barrister and made him exempt. Instead, he was in the Home Guard out on duty at the Blackwall Tunnel or wherever.
My mother was not well after the war and she was not keen to push me in to work, so I was about fifteen before I started work at a shopfitters in Commercial St. I was with them for forty-eight years, that was my working life. I started in packing, then became a despatch manager and finally warehouse manager, keeping check of stock.
I had a Brownie box camera, and I took pictures if we went out for a day at the seaside and at local celebrations. My photograph of this house decorated for the Coronation in 1953 was published in The Times. But I did not go out a lot as I say, because a lot of my photography was not actually taking pictures. I did a lot of black and white processing for other people. I had a dark room upstairs and, in summer, when people were taking photos I was the one upstairs developing their films. This was all for neighbours, people at work, you know. If they took them to the chemist, they would have to wait a week to get them back, but they got them back next morning from me!
Never being married, I was not pushed into a better paid job. In 1946 my first week’s wages were £2.50 and a rise was twelve and a half pence. It improved as the years went on, although not top wages. I never had a pension scheme but, for my loyalty, they gave me a monthly allowance.
I am very happy here in this house. Most of the others have been extended, but this one is as it was built.”
Stan at home
Arthur & Ethel Jones at their wedding on Christmas Day in 1928
Ethel at Brighton in the thirties
Arthur with Stan at Brighton in the thirties
Stan in his pedal car in the thirties
Stan’s photograph of his childhood dog
Stan’s photograph of a train at the end of his garden – ‘Sometimes our cats strayed onto the railway tracks and never came back, one returned without a tail!’
Arthur Jones stands at the centre of this group of steam lorry drivers in the thirties
Arthur Jones escorts the Mayor of Stepney and King George the Sixth with the Queen Mother to visit the bombing of Hughes Mansions in Vallance Rd
The Mayor’s chauffeur comes to pick up Arthur for his mace-bearing duties
Arthur stand on the left as Clement Attlee speaks
Arthur Jones leads the procession through Stepney to St Mary & St Michaels Church
Ethel & Arthur Jones in the back garden
Stan shows the glass plate of his famous photograph
Stan’s photograph of his parents in 1953 that was published in The Times
Stan’s recent decorations for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee
Stan Jones outside his house today
Stan’s photograph of entertainment for the Coronation Party in Mile End, 1953
Stan’s photograph of the conga at the Coronation Party in Mile End, 1953
Stan’s photograph of a display at the shopfitters where he worked
Stan’s photograph of mannequins
Stan as a youth
Ethel & Arthur Jones in later years
Stan Jones in his garden today
Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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