Music Hall Artistes Of Abney Park Cemetery
In summer, I often seek refuge in the green shade of a cemetery. Commonly, I visit Bow Cemetery and recently I visited Highgate Cemetery but sometimes I explore Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington to pay homage to the Music Hall Artistes resting there.
John Baldock, Cemetery Keeper, led me through the undergrowth to show me the memorials restored by the Music Hall Guild and then left me to my own devices. Alone in the secluded leafy glades of the overgrown cemetery with the Music Hall Artistes, I swore I could hear distant singing accompanied by the tinkling of heavenly ivories.
George Leybourne, Songwriter, Vocalist and Comedian, also known as Champagne Charlie (1842 – 1884) & Albert Chevalier (1861- 1923), Coster Comedian and Actor. Chevalier married Leybourne’s daughter Florrie and they all rest together.
George Leybourne – “Champagne Charlie is my name, Champagne Charlie is my name ,There’s no drink as good as fizz, fizz, fizz, I’ll drink every drop there is, is, is!”
Albert Chevalier – “We’ve been together now for forty years, An’ it don’t seem a day too much, There ain’t a lady livin’ in the land, As I’d swop for my dear old Dutch.”
G W Hunt (1838 – 1904) Composer and Songwriter, his most famous works were “MacDermott’s War Song” (The Jingo Song), “Dear Old Pals” and “Up In A Balloon” for George Leybourne and Nelly Power.
G W Hunt
Fred Albert George Richard Howell (1843 – 1886) Songwriter and Extempore Vocalist
Fred Albert
Dan Crawley (1871 – 1912) Comedian, Vocalist, Dancer and Pantomime Dame rests with his wife Lilian Bishop, Actress and Male Impersonator. He made his London debut at nineteen at Royal Victor Theatre, Victoria Park, and for many years performed three shows a day on the sands at Yarmouth, where he met his wife.They married in Hackney in 1893 and had four children, and toured together as a family, including visiting Australia, before they both died at forty-one years old.
Dan Crawley
Herbert Campbell (1844 – 1904) Comedian and Pantomime Star. The memorial behind the tombstone was erected by a few of his friends. Herbert Campbell played the Dame in Pantomime at Drury Lane for forty years alongside Dan Leno, until his death at at sixty-one.
Herbert Campbell, famous comedian and dame of Drury Lane
Walter Laburnum George Walter Davis (1847 – 1902) Singer, Patter Vocalist and Songwriter
Walter Laburnum
Nelly Power Ellen Maria Lingham (1854 – 1887) started her theatrical career at the age of eight, and was a gifted songstress and exponent of the art of male impersonation. Her most famous song was ‘The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery.” She died from pleurisy on 19th January 1887, aged just thirty-two.
Nelly Power – Vesta Tilley was once her understudy
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So Long, Norman Riley
Metalworker Norman Riley was a popular East End character, who was born on 27th October 1938 and died on 8th August this year, aged eighty-two. Norman’s sons Chris & Warren continue the family business under the railway arch in Stepney.
Norman Riley
If you are looking for a corner of the old East End, head over to Stepney where – just south of St Dunstan’s – you will find a few streets lined with neat terraces of brick cottages and a cluster of traditional businesses occupying the crumbling railway arches. This neglected enclave is a fragment that constitutes a reminder of how the entire territory used to be before the bombing and the slum clearances. And, at the heart of it, I discovered Norman Riley, presiding over the family metal work business that he began under an arch fifty years ago in a street that he had known his whole working life.
A notice in flamboyant fairground script, hanging beneath a wrought iron bracket which once suspended the pawnbroker’s sign in the Commercial Rd, announces “Riley & Sons, Metal Work,” and you step through a pillar-box-red metal door of Norman’s own construction to enter his world. “I thought I was going to be downtrodden,” Norman admitted to me later, once he had shown me round the beautiful metal works, “but I’ve come through.”
Energetic and brimming with generous sentiment, Norman occasionally had to break off his monologue whenever the intensity of emotion overcame him. From the stained glass windows that once adorned the bar at Baker St Station now gracing the kitchen, the vast collection of old tools and machines all maintained in working order and cherished, the crisp paint work in colours popular half a century ago and the overall satisfying sense of order and organisation, it was clear that Norman loved his workshop.
Yet I soon discovered that Norman was passionate about everything, eager to wring the utmost from all experiences, as revealed by his constant mantra during our conversation, “It’s part of life isn’t it?” This simple phrase, capable of infinite nuance and proposing a question that can only be answered in the affirmative, had become Norman’s philosophy and his consolation.
“I’m a Walthamstow boy and, although I was born in 1939, I was born lucky. When I go on holiday, people always ask, ‘What’s Norman been up to?’ because things happen to me. My father was a window cleaner but nobody wanted their windows cleaned during the war. I remember my mum said, ‘We’ve got to have some money for the kids,’ and she gave me and my brother an Oxo cube for dinner. The school I went to was rough and ready, but the policemen’s kids, they had lots of pocket money, and if a kind one was eating an apple, you’d say, ‘Two’s up?’ and they’d give you the core to eat. The only thing I had was football, we made a ball out of rags and bits of string. I was always filthy because we had no bath. I feel five hundred years old when I talk like this. Those were cup of sugar days.
We left and went to Nazeing to a live in a derelict cottage. We just put straw down on the floor with sacks and slept on it. I remember the first time I tasted an orange. The Italian Prisoners-of-War were allotted certain amount of fruit and big Tony, he cut his orange in half and gave it to me and my brother. When I was six, I drove up the cows up the lane to be milked and back again. I lay there feeding a lamb in the straw once and cried my eyes out at the beauty of it. I went to school at Bumble’s Green. I went back ten years ago to see the duck pond and they still had the register with me and my brothers name in it and I cried my eyes out again.
My first job, at fifteen years old, was just down the road from here at Bromley Sheet Metal in Lowell Rd. I was in a team of guys and we worked all over the East End, and lagging the gasometers down at Purfleet. We lagged asbestos with metal and we smeared asbestos on our heads to look like Geoff Chandler. I worked in six to eight different power stations in London.
We used to watch Sammy McCarthy box, he was the dockers’ boxer. The docks were going strong then and Sally who lived along the road, she decided to make a cafe in her house for the dockers. You went downstairs to the kitchen to get your food and then ate it upstairs in the living room. Only I never got to eat anything because there was all these dockers slinging it about, they made me laugh so much I couldn’t eat my lunch.
I did National Service and it changed my life. It took me out of my world and into a different arena. I’m still in touch with the guys I was in my tent with in Nicosia. I made friends with Martin Bell, he’s a smashing bloke. I’d never spoken to a kid from a posh school before and he’d never spoken to anyone like me. ‘Up to those days, I’d always looked over the fence at real people,’ he said to me, ‘But when they told me to fuck off, I knew I was one of them.’ I met my wife after I came back but I had some problems staying indoors because I’d lived in a tent so long.
We got married the same day as my mother-in-law, she got married in the old church in Stoke Newington and we got married in the one opposite. We flew over to Majorca and took my bivouac with us. It was completely dark there and we were lighting matches to see, so we got over a wall and pitched the tent on the green with broom handles as poles. When we woke up, we were on a building site with four workmen looking down at us. But they let us stay, and we went down to the sea each day. And that’s how I started my married life. We lived on cornflakes we took with us because we had no spending money.
How I got this arch? It was for rent and I was here for a year and a half, and I loved it. After two years, I wanted to give the lady who owned it some flowers because I was so happy here. But they said, ‘She’s just passed away,’ I asked if it would be possible to buy it, and they said you pay seven years rent and I bought it. It touched me when I got the deeds because they were written on parchment and it was a stable with five stalls and a hayloft, 1849. There were two bombed cottages next door that were derelict because nobody wanted them so I was able to buy them and expand. My two boys came over and did welding when they were twelve years old, and now my sons Chris and Warren work here with me.
I was always shy but the army opened me up, that and going to all different places. I never wanted to go out because I didn’t know what life held for me. I never thought I’d own a car, I never thought I’d own a house. I’m so lucky, I’m two pound less now than when I come out the army sixty-five years ago – I’m fit, because I’m here every day working.”
This bracket once suspended the pawnbrokers’ sign in Commercial Rd
Norman in his office with his work book
Norman demonstrates his pressing machine
Norman shows off his flipper and his copper hammer
Norman demonstrates his antique jemmy
Norman’s son Chris and his drills
Norman’s anvil
Norman with one of his creations.
The former cork factory across the road
Riley & Sons, Metal Work, 23 Yorkshire Rd, Stepney, E14 7LR
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Learn To Write Your Own Blog
In response to multiple demands from readers, I am announcing another date for my popular course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on the weekend of 30th & 31st October. All the other dates for courses previously announced are full.
The purpose of my course is both to give people confidence in writing and to explore how to create a personal blog.
Spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches, savour freshly baked cakes from historic recipes, discover the secrets of Spitalfields Life and learn how to write your own blog.
This course examines the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.
SALIENT DETAILS
The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 30th & 31st October. The course runs from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.
Lunch will be catered by Leila’s Cafe of Arnold Circus and tea, coffee & cakes baked from eighteenth century recipes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £300.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.
Please note we do not give refunds but if you are unable to attend or if the course is postponed for reasons beyond our control, we will endeavour to book you onto a course at a later date.
Comments by students from courses tutored by The Gentle Author
“I highly recommend this creative, challenging and most inspiring course. The Gentle Author gave me the confidence to find my voice and just go for it!”
“Do join The Gentle Author on this Blogging Course in Spitalfields. It’s as much about learning/ appreciating Storytelling as Blogging. About developing how to write or talk to your readers in your own unique way. It’s also an opportunity to “test” your ideas in an encouraging and inspirational environment. Go and enjoy – I’d happily do it all again!”
“The Gentle Author’s writing course strikes the right balance between addressing the creative act of blogging and the practical tips needed to turn a concept into reality. During the course the participants are encouraged to share and develop their ideas in a safe yet stimulating environment. A great course for those who need that final (gentle) push!”
“I haven’t enjoyed a weekend so much for a long time. The disparate participants with different experiences and aspirations rapidly became a coherent group under The Gentle Author’s direction in a gorgeous house in Spitalfields. There was lots of encouragement, constructive criticism, laughter and very good lunches. With not a computer in sight, I found it really enjoyable to draft pieces of written work using pen and paper. Having gone with a very vague idea about what I might do I came away with a clear plan which I think will be achievable and worthwhile.”
“The Gentle Author is a master blogger and, happily for us, prepared to pass on skills. This “How to write a blog” course goes well beyond offering information about how to start blogging – it helps you to see the world in a different light, and inspires you to blog about it. You won’t find a better way to spend your time or money if you’re considering starting a blog.”
“I gladly traveled from the States to Spitalfields for the How to Write a Blog Course. The unique setting and quality of the Gentle Author’s own writing persuaded me and I was not disappointed. The weekend provided ample inspiration, like-minded fellowship, and practical steps to immediately launch a blog that one could be proud of. I’m so thankful to have attended.”
“I took part in The Gentle Author’s blogging course for a variety of reasons: I’ve followed Spitalfields Life for a long time now, and find it one of the most engaging blogs that I know; I also wanted to develop my own personal blog in a way that people will actually read, and that genuinely represents my own voice. The course was wonderful. Challenging, certainly, but I came away with new confidence that I can write in an engaging way, and to a self-imposed schedule. The setting in Fournier St was both lovely and sympathetic to the purpose of the course. A further unexpected pleasure was the variety of other bloggers who attended: each one had a very personal take on where they wanted their blogs to go, and brought with them an amazing range and depth of personal experience. “
“I found this bloggers course was a true revelation as it helped me find my own voice and gave me the courage to express my thoughts without restriction. As a result I launched my professional blog and improved my photography blog. I would highly recommend it.”
“An excellent and enjoyable weekend: informative, encouraging and challenging. The Gentle Author was generous throughout in sharing knowledge, ideas and experience and sensitively ensured we each felt equipped to start out. Thanks again for the weekend. I keep quoting you to myself.”
“My immediate impression was that I wasn’t going to feel intimidated – always a good sign on these occasions. The Gentle Author worked hard to help us to find our true voice, and the contributions from other students were useful too. Importantly, it didn’t feel like a ‘workshop’ and I left looking forward to writing my blog.”
“The Spitafields writing course was a wonderful experience all round. A truly creative teacher as informed and interesting as the blogs would suggest. An added bonus was the eclectic mix of eager students from all walks of life willing to share their passion and life stories. Bloomin’ marvellous grub too boot.”
“An entertaining and creative approach that reduces fears and expands thought”
“The weekend I spent taking your course in Spitalfields was a springboard one for me. I had identified writing a blog as something I could probably do – but actually doing it was something different! Your teaching methods were fascinating, and I learnt a lot about myself as well as gaining very constructive advice on how to write a blog. I lucked into a group of extremely interesting people in our workshop, and to be cocooned in the beautiful old Spitalfields house for a whole weekend, and plied with delicious food at lunchtime made for a weekend as enjoyable as it was satisfying. Your course made the difference between thinking about writing a blog, and actually writing it.”
“After blogging for three years, I attended The Gentle Author’s Blogging Course. What changed was my focus on specific topics, more pictures, more frequency, more fun. In the summer I wrote more than forty blogs, almost daily from my Tuscan villa on village life and I had brilliant feedback from my readers. And it was a fantastic weekend with a bunch of great people and yummy food.”
“An inspirational weekend, digging deep with lots of laughter and emotion, alongside practical insights and learning from across the group – and of course overall a delightfully gentle weekend.”
“The course was great fun and very informative, digging into the nuts and bolts of writing a blog. There was an encouraging and nurturing atmosphere that made me think that I too could learn to write a blog that people might want to read. – There’s a blurb, but of course what I really want to say is that my blog changed my life, without sounding like an idiot. The people that I met in the course were all interesting people, including yourself. So thanks for everything.”
“This is a very person-centred course. By the end of the weekend, everyone had developed their own ideas through a mix of exercises, conversation and one-to-one feedback. The beautiful Hugenot house and high-calibre food contributed to what was an inspiring and memorable weekend.”
“It was very intimate writing course that was based on the skills of writing. The Gentle Author was a superb teacher.”
“It was a surprising course that challenged and provoked the group in a beautiful supportive intimate way and I am so thankful for coming on it.”
“I did not enrol on the course because I had a blog in mind, but because I had bought TGA’s book, “Spitalfields Life”, very much admired the writing style and wanted to find out more and improve my own writing style. By the end of the course, I had a blog in mind, which was an unexpected bonus.”
“This course was what inspired me to dare to blog. Two years on, and blogging has changed the way I look at London.”
Old Dame Trot & Her Comical Cat
I must confess that I identify with Old Dame Trot – as illustrated in this early nineteenth century chapbook – knowing all too well how it is to share a home with a large feline personality…
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Old Mother Hubbard & Her Wonderful Dog
Courtesy of Jemmy Catnach of Catnach Press, it is my pleasure to publish this early nineteenth century shaggy dog tale of the devoted Mother Hubbard – believed to be by Sarah Catherine Martin
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Libby Hall, Collector of Dog Photography
Gustave Doré’s East End
Gustave Doré signed a contract to spend three months in London each year for five years and the completed book of one hundred and eighty engravings with text by Blanchard Jerrold was published in 1872, entitled London – A Pilgrimage. Although he illustrated life in the West End and as well as in the East End, it is Doré’s images of the East End that have always drawn the most attention with their overwhelming sense of diabolic horror and epic drama, in which his figures drift like spectres coalesced from the ether.
In Bishopsgate
In Wentworth St, Spitalfields
Riverside St
In Bluegate Fields
A City Thoroughfare
Inside the Docks
In Houndsditch
Turn Him Out, Ratcliff
Warehousing in the City
Billingsgate Early Morning
Off Billingsgate
Refuge – Applying For Admittance
Brewer’s Men
Hay Boats On The Thames
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Where Handel & Hendrix Were Neighbours
Jimi Hendrix’ bedroom in Brook St
Did you know that George Frideric Handel once lived at 25 Brook St in Mayfair and James Marshall (Jimi) Hendrix lived next door at number 23? – thus rendering it irresistible not to speculate how these two musical legends might have co-existed.
On moving into a new home, no-one can know if it will be their ultimate address – as Brook St was for both Handel & Hendrix. Handel was thirty-eight years old when he moved into number 25 in 1723, the same year that he was appointed Composer of Music to the Chapel Royal. He visited London twice in his twenties, but it was when his patron Queen Anne died and George I became King of Great Britain that Handel came to London for good.
Hendrix was twenty-six years old in January 1969 when he moved into the top flat at number 23 rented by his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham, at the time he was giving his final performances with The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Seeing the blue plaque for Handel encouraging Hendrix to go out and buy ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’ and ‘Messiah’ on LP.
Handel lived thirty-six years in his house, growing in success and producing an entire repertoire of opera and oratorio, but Hendrix died within two years of moving in. In what proved to be his final months, the flat at number 23 offered Hendrix a peaceful enclave to socialise in private and focus on his songwriting.
Those of a literal-minded disposition might assume Handel was much tidier that Hendrix, preferring an austere minimalist interior by contrast to the lush textiles chosen by Hendrix & Etchingham, and purchased nearby at John Lewis in Oxford St. Yet the truth is that Hendrix’ flat has been reconstructed from photographs while very little is known of Handel’s domestic arrangements. We may observe that Handel & Hendrix shared a foppish love of long velvet coats and big curly hair.
It is too obvious to imagine Handel taking a sturdy broom handle to clout his bedroom ceiling when he grew sick of the sound of Hendrix’s record player in the early hours, although it is equally conceivable to envisage Handel waking from his slumbers in delighted surprise to hear his own music emanating – as if by magic – from above, when Hendrix gave his copy of ‘Messiah’ a night-time spin upon the turntable.
Handel & Hendrix both presented large public personalities, but their neighbouring residences in Brook St offered them the opportunity to retreat and pursue their devotion to the craft and struggle of innovative musical composition in private in the middle of London. On the eve of his death on 18th September 1970 at the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill, Jimi Hendrix wrote a lyric entitled ‘The Story of Life’ – ‘The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye. The story of love is hello and goodbye. Until we meet again.’
Disregarding the two hundred years which separate them, I shall now cherish the fancy of old Handel paying a visit upon young Hendrix and the two pals sitting crossed-legged together upon scatter cushions in their curls and velvet finery, while alternating puffs upon a shared roll-up and quaffing red wine as Hendrix extemporises on his guitar and blind Handel conducts in approval by twirling a drunken finger in the smoke that curls in the air.
In George Frideric Handel’s bedroom at 25 Brook St
Hendrix in his bedroom at 23 Brook St, 1969 © Barrie Wentzell
In Hendrix’ bedroom
Handel – ‘Handel & Hendrix shared a foppish love of long velvet coats and big curly hair’
In Handel’s bedroom
In Hendrix’ bedroom
In Handel’s bedroom (Portrait bust courtesy of The Royal Collection)
Jimi Hendrix’ windows were on the top floor at the left and Handel’s were on the first floor at the right
Visit Handel & Hendrix in London, 25 Brook St, Mayfair, W1K 4HB
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