Beano Time
A beano from Stepney in the twenties (courtesy Irene Sheath)
We have reached that time of year when a certain clamminess prevails in the city and East Enders turn restless, yearning for a trip to the sea or at the very least an excursion to glimpse some green fields. In the last century, pubs, workplaces and clubs organised annual summer beanos, which gave everyone the opportunity to pile into a coach and enjoy a day out, usually with liberal opportunity for refreshment and sing-songs on the way home.
Ladies’ beano from The Globe in Hartley St, Bethnal Green, in the fifties. Chris Dixon, who submitted the picture, recognises his grandmother, Flo Beazley, furthest left in the front row beside her next door neighbour Flo Wheeler, who had a fruit and vegetable stall on Green St. (courtesy Chris Dixon)
Another beano from the fifties – eighth from the left is Jim Tyrrell (1908-1991) who worked at Stepney Power Station in Limehouse and drank at the Rainbow on the Highway in Ratcliff.
Mid-twentieth century beano from the archive of Britton’s Coaches in Cable St. (courtesy Martin Harris)
Beano from the Rhodeswell Stores, Rhodeswell Rd, Limehouse in the mid-twenties.
Taken on the way to Southend, this is a ladies’ beano from The Beehive in the Roman Rd during the fifties or sixties in a coach from Empress Coaches. The only men in the photo are the driver and the accordionist. Joan Lord (née Collins) who submitted the photo is the daughter of the publicans of The Beehive. (Courtesy Joan Lord)
Terrie Conway Driver, who submitted this picture of a beano from The Duke of Gloucester, Seabright St, Bethnal Green, points out that her grandfather is seventh from the left in the back row. (Courtesy Terrie Conway Driver)
Taken on the way to Southend, this is a men’s beano from The Beehive in the Roman Rd in the fifties or sixties in a coach from Empress Coaches. (Courtesy Joan Lord)
Beano in the twenties from the Victory Public House in Ben Jonson Rd, on the corner with Carr St. Note the charabanc – the name derives from the French char à bancs (“carriage with wooden benches”) and they were originally horse-drawn.
A crowd gathers before a beano from The Queens’ Head in Chicksand St in the early fifties. John Charlton who submitted the photograph pointed out his grandfather George standing in the flat cap holding a bottle of beer on the right with John’s father Bill on the left of him, while John stands directly in front of the man in the straw hat. (Courtesy John Charlton)
Beano for Stepney Borough Council workers in the mid-twentieth century. (Courtesy Susan Armstrong)
Martin Harris, who submitted this picture, indicated that the driver, standing second from the left, is Teddy Britton, his second cousin. (Courtesy Martin Harris)
In the Panama hat is Ted Marks who owned the fish place at the side of the Martin Frobisher School, and is seen here taking his staff out on their annual beano.
George, the father of Colin Watson who submitted this photo, is among those who went on this beano from the Taylor Walker brewery in Limehouse. (Courtesy Colin Watson)
Pub beano setting out for Margate or Southend. (Courtesy John McCarthy)
Men’s beano from c. 1960 (courtesy Cathy Cocline)
Late sixties or early seventies ladies’ beano organised by the Locksley Estate Tenants Association in Limehouse, leaving from outside The Prince Alfred in Locksley St.
The father of John McCarthy, who submitted this photo, is on the far right squatting down with a beer in his hand, in this beano photo taken in the early sixties, which may be from his local, The Shakespeare in Bethnal Green Rd. Equally, it could be a works’ outing, as he was a dustman working for Bethnal Green Council. Typically, the men are wearing button holes and an accordionist accompanies them. Accordionists earned a fortune every summer weekend, playing at beanos. (courtesy John McCarthy)
John Sheehan, who submitted this picture, remembers it was taken on a beano to Clacton in the sixties. From left to right, you can seee John Driscoll who lived in Grosvenor Buildings, Dan Daley of Constant House, outsider Johnny Gamm from Hackney, alongside his cousin, John Sheehan from Constant House and Bill Britton from Holmsdale House. (Courtesy John Sheehan)
Photographs courtesy Tower Hamlets Community Homes
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Dan Cruickshank At Arnold Circus
Arnold Circus under construction a century ago
We are delighted to announce that Dan Cruickshank is writing a book about the evolution of the Boundary Estate from the ruins of the Old Nichol. He will be giving a lecture, The Quest for Beauty, based upon his forthcoming book on Thursday 29th July 6pm in the bandstand at Arnold Circus.
Dan’s talk will touch upon the nature of the notorious Old Nichol and the process by which the nascent London County Council’s pioneering project of publicly funded ‘council’ housing was developed. He will look at the architecture of the Boundary Estate and ‘the quest for beauty as a means of raising the quality of life in the area’ as well as examining who the new tenements were built for. In conclusion, he will focus on the controversial current proposals.
This free event is part of the Friends of Arnold Circus Annual General Meeting. It is open to all, but only FOAC members will be able to vote at the initial business section of the evening’s proceedings.
Click here to reserve your free ticket
The empty space after the site was cleared and before the Boundary Estate was built
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Cherishing the Fabric of Arnold Circus
Up On The Roof With Roy Emmins
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Remembering Roy Emmins (1939-2021) who died last week
On a humid midsummer’s day in Whitechapel, the ideal place to be was up on the roof with Roy Emmins, in his wonderful sculpture garden at the back of the Royal London Hospital. Peering down upon everyone else, looking like ants going about their business with entirely mysterious imperatives, it was a refreshingly liberating experience, and if there was any breeze to be had, you felt its cooling influence up there, wafting the scents of Roy’s flowers over the rooftops. From this lofty roost, Roy looked back fondly to the hospital where for thirty-two years he worked as porter, surrounded by the sculptures that occupied him since he took early retirement from the hospital.
For the last forty years, Roy inhabited this tiny caretaker’s flat, added as an afterthought upon the roof of a streamlined art deco block in Turner St, and it was my pleasure to visit him there. Roy took me up in the lift to the top floor, opened his blue front door and genially ushered me inside. To my delight, I found four small rooms organised meticulously, like cabins on a boat, with all kinds of shelves and cabinets where everything had its place, and every space was embellished with the great variety of Roy’s extraordinary sculptures and paintings, bestowing a magical presence of their own – from tiny birds shaped out of tinfoil to graceful human figures hewn from alabaster.
Each narrow room had windows on either side with views across the roofs and far over the city on both sides. On the south side was a bare roof covered in pigeons who conveniently left fertilizer that Roy gratefully collected for his flourishing garden on the north side. Stocked from Columbia Rd and Watney Markets, Roy’s roof garden possessed an intriguing selection of plants. Hardy varieties that withstand wind and thrive in dry conditions suited this location best, and I admired Roy’s inspired combinations of succulents, miniature trees and colourful border planting, like heucheras, artemisias, gazzanias, ox-eye daisies and mallow, mixed in with potatoes and three kinds of tomato plants.
Yet it was the sculpture that made Roy’s garden pure poetry, his charismatic stone and concrete figures encrusted with lichen and bronze figures patinated green by the elements. At first, you did not spot all of them lurking among the plants, driftwood, shells and pots, but, as they caught your eye, you saw the individual sculptures against the backdrop of the distant cityscape, proposing extraordinary contrasts of scale that fired the imagination.
Roy’s earthly paradise was occasionally shattered when helicopters flew low overhead to land at the nearby helipad on the roof of the hospital. It gave our conversation some pauses for consideration, as we sipped our tea, waiting for the din of the whirring steel monster to pass over.
In time, the authorities at the hospital conveniently moved the helipad away from Roy’s flat, up onto the top of the new gleaming blue towers. The startling modernity of this development existed in bizarre contrast to Roy’s first experience when he began working at the hospital in 1964 as a catering porter, and he remembered delivering milk to the matron’s flat in the eighteenth century west wing, with an old parlour retaining all of its nineteenth century furnishings including an aspidistra on a stand.
To the east, directly across Turner St, sits the deconsecrated church of St Augustine with St Philip, now used as the hospital library and archive, where the Elephant Man’s hat is kept, and Roy pointed out the bronze bell at our eye level, still hanging high upon the rooftop, where once he saw a kestrel perch to pull the feathers off a small bird and devour it for its dinner. To the west, gesturing in the opposite direction, Roy pointed out the former hostel in Fieldgate St that once counted Lenin and Orwell amongst its transient occupants. In this location, rich in every kind of cultural and historical resonance, Roy was alive to all the stories, which served as a colourful background to the quiet home where he spent most of his time in his roof garden at this time of year.
At that time, Roy acquired a new companion, Max, a short-haired black tomcat with a sturdy muscular body and a forthright personality. Previously living the life of a homeless alley cat, with battle scars and mange to prove it, under Roy’s benign influence Max already looked healthier. He had quickly made himself sublimely at home on Roy’s rooftop, even jumping with reckless innocence across the chasm onto the chimney stack of The Good Samaritan pub next door and sunning himself among the chimney pots. As Roy and I enjoyed our tea and idle conversation upon the roof top beneath the sunshine and slow-moving clouds, with astute opportunism Max took advantage of the companionable shade we created, stretching out beneath our seats.
Moving between his rooftop flat and the studio down in Cable St, where he made his sculptures, it was a modest yet enviable existence Roy carved out for himself. As I said “Goodbye”, he handed me a bag with the noble paper mache lion that I bought from him, which now sits upon my desk as a constant reminder of Roy’s vision. I do not know if Roy Emmins’ placid spirit was the result of the life he has created for himself or whether his personality led him to seek out these calm spaces conducive to his sympathetic nature. So instead I must credit it all to the unique quality of his inventive imagination, creating such a prodigious range of work with constantly renewing delight.
We are seeking a permanent home for Roy’s sculptures where they can be displayed – a museum, a gallery, or a local school or city farm perhaps? If you can help please drop a line to spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
Max contemplates a death-defying leap onto the chimney stack of The Good Samaritan pub next door
Roy Emmins’ paper maché lion
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Rose Henriques, Artist
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Rose Henriques is featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists Who painted London’s East End Streets in 20th Century which is included in the sale.
La Toilette, 1930
At first glance, Rose Henriques’ La Toilette might appear to make a modernist statement about residents confined within uniformly repetitive architecture. But a second look reveals the feisty washerwomen consumed with their energetic task, bringing colour and life to an otherwise restricted world.
Rose Loewe (1889–1972) was born into a prominent Jewish family in Stoke Newington and was gifted musically and artistically. She studied piano in Breslau but, returning to England in 1914, she met Basil Henriques at Oxford and chose to forsake her artistic ambition for a life of altruistic endeavour. She served as a nurse at Liverpool Street Station in the First World War and then as an ambulance driver and air-raid warden, based in Cannon Street Road in the Second World War.
Basil persuaded Rose to join him as his deputy in establishing a Jewish boys’ club in the East End and, after they married in 1916, she ran a girls’ club in parallel until Basil went off to serve as a soldier. She then took charge of the whole endeavour, while also working as a nurse at night. After the war, she and Basil managed a settlement in Berners Street (later known as Henriques Street in their honour), pursuing philanthropic work among the Jewish community for more than half a century in Stepney, where Rose became widely known as ‘the Missus’.
She was a keen self-taught artist and in the midst of a busy life she produced a significant body of work that complemented her social concerns, exhibiting first at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1934, followed by two large solo shows, Stepney in War & Peace in 1947 and Vanishing Stepney in 1961.
Her early spirited oil paintings, La Toilette of 1930 and Coronation Celebrations in Challis Court of 1937 are heartfelt responses to the vigorous community life she encountered in the East End. Yet the tone changed in the forties, with watercolours in a reportage style documenting the appalling destruction and human cost of the blitz that she experienced at first hand.
In August 1945, Rose led one of the first teams of nurses and social workers to enter the Belsen death camp, working to support the rehabilitation of survivors and refugees until 1950.
Formally, Rose & Basil retired from the Berners Street settlement in 1947 but they continued to live there and contribute to its management for the rest of their lives, with Rose taking over the presidency after Basil’s death in 1961.
Rose’s watercolour of 1951, Fait Accompli, is redolent of the optimistic mood of the postwar years and the hopeful ideal of a better life for all.
Newly-built council housing replaces bomb sites and the local community – which appears to include some of the women from La Toilette – can enjoy the conveniences of a modern home, and are spared having to do the washing in the backyard.
Coronation Celebrations in Challis Court, 1937
Nine O’Clock News, The Outbreak of War
The New Driver, Ambulance Station, Cannon St Rd
Next Day, Watney St Market, 1941
Bombed Second Time, The Foothills, Tilbury & Southend Railway Warehouses, 1941
Dual Purpose, School Yard in Fairclough St, Tilbury & Southend Railway Warehouses, forties
Line outside Civil Defence Shelter, Turner St, 1942
Stepney Green Synagogue, forties
The Brick Dump, Exmouth St, forties
Club Row Animal Market Carries On, 1943
Fait Accompli, Berner St, 1951
Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
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The Raybel At Sittingbourne
Any readers seeking an excursion out of London this weekend might like to take a trip to Sittingbourne to view the restoration of Thames Sailing Barge Raybel in dry dock at Lloyd’s Wharf which is open for visitors this Saturday 17th July.
Raybel’s name painted on the barge’s transom
Contributing Photographer Rachel Ferriman & I enjoyed a day trip to Sittingbourne recently, where we were inspired to meet the passionate band of souls who have dedicated themselves to restoring the Thames Sailing Barge Raybel to working order in Milton Creek where she was first constructed in 1927. Gareth Maer filled us in.
“The Raybel is often described as the ultimate evolution of the Thames Sailing Barge. You can trace back the history of these vessels for centuries, with the trade escalating in the mid-nineteenth century, transporting good up to London and back from the estuary.
The basic flat bottom design evolved through the end of the nineteenth century until the twenties when Raybel was built by barge builders Wills & Packham. They decided to experiment with a composite structure, employing an iron frame which was clad with timber. They took inspiration was the Cutty Sark which was constructed with this same approach to structural design. Traditionally, barges were not necessarily very strong because they have no keel but the iron structure mitigated this inherent weakness and is probably why Raybel survived.
There was a mooring space and there was a quayside but we didn’t have a boatyard to do the restoration, so we had to set one up. We needed a dry-dock to bring barge into to do all of the work. We were donated an old dry-dock but we had to go and rescue it from the bottom of the Swale and do some welding repairs so we could bring it up Milton Creek. Essentially, it’s a great big ugly cumbersome metal tray and a little tug boat came along and pushed it up the creek for us. Then it had to be manoeuvred into place and a lot of mud had to be cleared from the creek bottom, so the dry-dock would sink low enough.
You open the gates of the dry-dock and the water comes which lets you sail the barge in. There was only one high tide suitable for this and if had missed we would have to wait another six months for the next one. Once the barge was in the dry-dock, we drained the water out and we could see the whole structure of the vessel.
The first thing we noticed was that the front end of the barge had drooped by a couple of inches, it meant the whole structure was bent out of place. We got a big hydraulic jack to jack it up precisely to its original and correct position.
The main work was always going to be upon the front section of the barge – the bow – which is the weakest part. It’s had a couple of knocks over the last fifty years of cargo carrying.
It is incredible intricate and skilled shipwright work, deciding what you can keep and what needs to go, to bring the barge back into sea-worthy condition. We want to keep as much of the original fabric as possible and we will be able to save most of it. We rely upon the experience of the shipwright to say what can be retained and what must be replaced. There are still skills locally and we have father and son shipwrights from Faversham working here.
Yesterday, they started working on the back end of the bow which is called ‘the apron.’ We are shaping wood exactly as they did a hundred years ago. We are starting on the ribs now and then we will put the planking on top of them – there’s a couple of layers of planking on the inside and the outside – it’s called ‘the wale.’ There’s an inner wale and an outer wale.
It will take until the end of September to complete the bow work and by then we should have done all the ribs on both sides. At that point, we can move on to the longitudinal planking on the hull which is another six or seven months’ work. While that’s going on, we can probably do the deck planking as well.
By April or March next year, we hope the basic structure will be sound, and it will be sealed and seaworthy. The sails and rigging, the ropework, winches and rudder will come after that.
All the way down this creek were once boatyards, a dozen or so doing boatbuilding, repair and maintenance work. Yet the physical evidence is almost entirely obliterated today.
We hope that by bringing Raybel back to Milton Creek where it was built and doing the work here, we encourage Sittingbourne to readopt the barge. We’ve brought it home, back to where it was launched. Although the physical evidence of boatbuilding has gone from here, it still exists in living memory. Everyone we meet has a father or grandfather who once worked in the yards.”
The Raybel in dry-dock covered with tarpaulin
The gangplank
The deck and ribs under repair
Shipwright Josh at work removing some of the ribs
Chipping out rotten timbers
Reuben carries out the rotten timber
The new ribs in place
Reuben spraying the new ribs with a mix of paraffin and cooking oil to protect them
John is removing nails around the forehatch cover, and the lead flashing and bitumen underneath, so the condition of the deck beneath can be assessed.
Raybel’s bow
Master Shipwright Tim
Master Shipwright Tim at work in the fo’c’sle of Raybel
Looking into the fo’c’sle, where much of the work is taking place.
Roger in the engine room
Inside Raybel, once the main cargo hold
Raybel’s ironwork and lining in the main interior.
Patina of layers of paint on the barge’s interior sidings
Light floods into the barge where the port side of the barge is open for work on the ribs.
The barge’s transom
Mark is the restoration project manager
Kevin in the boat yard
Paul standing near some of the salvaged timbers from a broken-up sailing barge, the Westmorland
Paul shows nails from the Westmorland
Fragments of the Westmorland
Westmorland’s bow section
The Raybel in dry dock in Milton Creek
Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman
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So Long, Roy Emmins
Roy Emmins died on Wednesday aged eighty-two
Roy Emmins (1939-2021)
At the furthest end of Cable St are the Cable St Studios where Roy Emmins cloistered himself, working six days every week alone in his tiny workshop. A former porter at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, after more than thirty years service Roy took early retirement to devote himself to sculpture, and his studio was crammed to the roof with innumerable creations that bore testimony to his prodigious talent and potent imagination.
When Roy opened the door to me, I could not believe my eyes. There were so many sculptures, it took my breath away. With more artefacts than a Pharoah’s tomb, I did not know where to look first. Roy smiled indulgently at my reaction. Not many people made it into the inner sanctum of Roy Emmin’s imagination. He was not a demonstrative man and he had no big explanation, not expecting praise or inviting criticism either. In fact, he had no art world rhetoric at all, just a room packed with breathtaking sculpture.
First to catch my attention were large carvings hewn from tree trunks, some in bare wood, others painted in gaudy colours like sculptures in medieval cathedrals and sharing the same vigorous poetry, full of energetic life and acute observation of the natural world. Next, I saw elaborate painted constructions in papier-mache, scenes from the natural world, gulls on cliffs, fish in the ocean, monkeys in the jungle and more. All meticulously imagined, and in an aesthetic reminiscent of the dioramas of the Natural History Museum but with more soul. I stood with my eyes roving, absorbing the immense detail and noticing smaller individual sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and plaster, on shelves and in cubbyholes. Turning one hundred and eighty degrees, I faced a wall hung with table tops, each incised with relief sculptures. I sat on a chair to collect my thoughts and cast my eyes to the window sill where sat a menagerie of creatures, all contrived with exquisite modesty and consummate skill from tinfoil and chocolate wrappers.
The abiding impression was of teeming life. Every figure quick with it, as if they might all spring into animation at any moment, transforming the studio into an overcrowded Noah’s Ark, with Roy as an entirely convincing Mr Noah. In his work, Roy emulated the supreme creator, reconstructed Eden – fashioning all the beloved animals, imbuing them with life and movement, and creating jungles and forests and oceans – imparting a magical intensity to everything he touches. There was a sublime quality to Roy Emmins’ vision.
Roy’s sculptures are totems, and his carved tree trunks resemble totem poles, with images that evoke the spirits of the natural world and nourish the human spirit too. Even Roy’s tinfoil stags possess an emotionalism – born of a tension between the heroic dignity of the creature he sculpted so eloquently and the humble material from which each figure was fashioned.
It is a paradox that Roy, an English visionary, exemplified in his own personality – which was so appealingly lacking in ego yet tenacious of ambition in sculpture. Originally apprenticed as a graphic artist, he developed Wilson’s disease, which caused him to shake, yet spared him military service. After years attending the Royal London Hospital, a drug was founded to treat his affliction but by then, Roy admitted, he preferred the atmosphere of the hospital to the design studio because it was an environment where he always was meeting new people.
Taking a job as a porter, Roy also attended evening classes at Sir John Cass School of Art in Whitechapel, pursuing painting, ceramics, life modelling, and wood-carving. Once these closed down in 1984, Roy joined a group of wood-carvers who met at the weekends in the garden studio of their ex-tutor Michael Leman in Greenford. When the hurricane came in 1987, they hired a crane to collect fallen trees – and one of these became Roy’s first tree trunk carving.
When he took retirement in 1995, Roy was permitted to retain his caretaker’s flat in Turner St at the rear of the hospital. After a stint at the Battlebridge Centre in King’s Cross, where he had free studio in return for one day a week building flats for homeless people, Roy came to the Cable St Studios. Always working on several sculptures at once, Roy often returned to pieces, reworking them and adding ideas, which may go some way to explain the intensity of detail and richness of ideas apparent in all his sculpture.
Looking at Roy’s work, I wondered what influence it had on his psyche, wheeling patients around for thirty years at the hospital. The sense of wonder at the natural world is exuberantly apparent, but this is not the work of an innocent either. In a major sculpture that sits outside his door entitled “The Shadow of Man,” Roy dramatises the destructive instinct of mankind, yet it is not a simple didactic work because the agents of destruction are portrayed with humanity. Again, it brought me back to medieval carving which commonly subverts its own allegory, picturing villains with charisma, and there was a strange pathos when Roy placed his hand affectionately upon the head of a figure wielding a chainsaw, a contradictory force embodying both destruction and creation.
Roy inherited his love of people from a father who worked his whole life on the railway and ended up manager of the bar on Liverpool St Station, while Roy’s mother was skilled at assembling electrical parts, which she did at home, imparting an ability in intricate work to her son. Each of Roy’s three uncles, a master carpenter, plumber and builder were model makers and Roy’s brother made models too, though, in contrast to Roy, he made ships and cars, mechanical things.
I am fascinated by the creative skills of working men expressed in areas of endeavour parallel to their working lives. Roy’s work exists in the tradition of the detailed handicrafts undertaken by sailors and prisoners, and the model railways of yesteryear, yet in its accomplishment and as a complete vision of the world, Roy’s work transcends these precedents. Roy was a unique talent and a true sculptor who grasped of the essence of his medium.
Showing me a wire and plasticine dancer, with a skirt made from the paper cases manufactured for buns, Roy explained that a figure must have three points of contact with the ground to stand upright. In this instance, the ballerina had one foot pointing forward and a back foot that met the ground at toe and heel. Roy placed the precarious figure on a surface and, just like his spindly tinfoil creatures, it stood with perfect balance.
We are seeking a permanent home for Roy’s sculptures where they can be displayed – a museum, a gallery, or a local school or city farm perhaps? If you can help please drop a line to spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
Sea birds – painted wood and milliput
Rain Forest – painted wood enhanced with milliput
Coral Reef – paper maché and milliput
I spy breakfast – painted wood
Arable Life – Cedar wood
Bush Life – painted wood and milliput
Coral Reef – ashwood
Wood Mouse & Butterfly – painted wood with milliput
Owl – branch and painted milliput
Galapagos – limewood
Hare – painted milliput
Jungle – painted Zeldovia wood
White Horse – paper maché
African Mountain – painted wood and milliput
Stag – paper maché
Roy Emmins with his sculpture ‘The Shadow of Man.’
Roy’s paper maché lion sits upon my desk in Spitalfields.
Marie Iles, Machinist
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Apart from memorable excursions outside London as an evacuee, Marie Iles lived her entire life within a quarter mile of Stepney and it suited her very well. Those wartime experiences taught her the meaning and importance of home, yet living close to Stepney City Farm today she still enjoyed a reminder of the rural world she grew to love as a child.
A natural storyteller, Marie laid out the tale of her formative years for me with confidence and eloquent precision. Blessed with independent thought from an early age, Marie quickly learnt to stand up for herself and to appreciate the moral quality of people’s actions, whilst she was suffering enforced exile from her beloved Stepney amidst the tumultuous events of a world war.
It was the meeting with her husband Fred Iles that provided the sympathetic resolution of Marie’s dislocated early years and resulted in an enduring relationship which sustained them both for over sixty-five years.
“I was born on 9th August 1930 in Fair St, Stepney, while we were living upstairs in two rooms in my nan’s house, and when I was four or five we moved to Garden St. But I usually lived with my nan – whom everyone knew as Aunt Kit – because I loved her so much. I had a happy childhood playing in the streets, games like Hopscotch and Knocking Down Ginger. We was always running around and the police would pick us up and take us to Arbour Sq Police Station and give us bread and jam.
One day, I came indoors and my mum and dad had the wireless going and there was a quiet atmosphere, which was very unusual in our house, and I heard the voice of a man saying, ‘And England is at war with Germany.’ So I says to my mum, ‘Are we at war?’ and she says, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are the Germans coming?’ and she said, ‘Yes, but not to Garden St.’
The siren went when I was out shopping with my nan in the old street at the side of St Dunstan’s church and, all of a sudden, there was bombs dropping and aeroplanes. My nan said, ‘You run home to your mum quick,’ but I wouldn’t leave her. So she said, ‘Run!’ and I ran on the spot to show I was running. Eventually, we got home to Garden St and my mum, who had a phobia that she might be taken ill or die with dirty feet, was saying, ‘Get a bowl of water, I’ve got to wash my feet.’ When the bombing eased up, my nan said, “I’ll take the two girls home where there is an Anderson shelter,’ and, as we came out, it was a terrifying sight – where there had been houses, there was just piles of bricks and rubble, and there was a horrible smell of smoke and, that night, the sky was red with the light of the fires.
We stayed at my nan’s a few weeks after that, until one day I was at my mother’s and she said, ‘You’re going on a holiday, you, Kitty and Johnny.’ We was excited! My mum pinned a label onto each of us with our name and address on it, and filled a carrier bag for each of us with our belongings. We went to school and there was a couple of coaches waiting, and my nan said, ‘Write to us and always say your prayers every night,’ and she put three sixpences in my hand. I thought, ‘I’ve got money and I’m going on holiday,’ and I was pleased. We all got on the coach together, me and Kitty and Johnny. Then, as we were going, I dropped my three sixpences in the excitement and it felt like the end of the world – not because of the money, but because my nan had given them to me.
We arrived at what I later found out was Denham. We was dropped at the corner of the street, and ladies came over and picked who they fancied. Johnny went with a Mrs Burrell, a lovely little country lady with red cheeks. Kitty and me, we went with Mrs Rook. She had a nice house, that was what we would call ‘posh,’ and she had a grown up son and daughter, Ken and Joyce, and her husband Mr Rook. Yet I hated it, I was so homesick and cried every night for a fortnight but my sister loved it. I asked her, ‘Why don’t you get homesick?’ She said, ‘Because you are here. Wherever you are, I am alright.’ I was her elder sister.
One morning, Mrs Rook said, ‘Why don’t you put on your coats and go out for a walk?’ And the first person we met was Mr Goddard, my headmaster from school in Stepney. He took hold of my hand and asked, ‘Have you got a nice place to stay?’ I said, ‘Yes, but I hate it I miss my home.’ So he said, ‘Look Marie, do you want me to tell your mother what you said and have her worrying about you?’ And I said, ‘ No, don’t tell her,’ and, after that, I was alright and I had a happy time. And that was when I first noticed flowers and the trees opening up. Once there was snow, and Mrs Rook sent me to Denham village for an errand, and I saw these flowers peeking up through the snow – crocuses – and I thought it was a little miracle, that flowers grew in the snow.
Then it seemed the bombing stopped and they took us back to London, and we was there for a while until they sent us off again. They put us on a train at Paddington and we stopped overnight at an army barracks and slept on the floor, and me and Kitty cuddled up under a blanket. Other kids were crying but I wasn’t homesick. In the morning, the soldiers gave us breakfast of ham and hard-boiled eggs and tea and bread and jam. We travelled on and we came to this little village near Rugby called ‘Crick.’ A Mrs Watts picked us out and she lived in Cromwell Cottage, a nice house, and she gave us three meals a day but this lady had no compassion whatsoever. She took us because she didn’t want to do war work. She turned us out at seven-thirty to go to school, and she used to go to the pictures in Rugby twice each week and we had to wait outside in the bitter cold until she came home.
When the summer comes and you’re playing outside, it doesn’t seem so bad. But, one day, we’d had our dinner and were going back to school, and I knew she had a basket of apples in the larder, so I decided to pinch one. We each took bites of the apple, sharing it between the two of us on the way to school. When we got in that evening, she says to me, ‘You thieving Cockney! You come from the slums of London and you don’t appreciate a good home.’ Now I was always a bit of a rebel – I think it was because of growing up with so many brothers – so I thought, ‘I won’t stand for this.’ So I said to Kitty, ‘We’re not going to stay here with this wicked lady.’
Down at the bottom of the hill, lived an old lady and her husband – they must have been seventy. I went there and knocked on the door and asked, ‘Could you take two evacuees?’ She said, ‘Who are they?’ I said, ‘It’s my sister and me.’ She said, ‘Alright, take the old pram and go and get all your things.’ So we went back to Mrs Watts. I said, ‘I’m leaving, I’m going somewhere else to live.’ And her husband, Jack Watts – he was one of the kindest men I ever met – he said, ‘Marie, stop and think what you are doing.’ But I never did, and that night we went down to the old lady and the old man. Talk about ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’! She never cooked, she just gave us a bit of toast sometimes. Then she decided to visit her son and daughter for a holiday, and left us alone there with the old man, her husband. He used to go into the woods all day and cut willow branches and make clothes pegs. Meanwhile, Micky – my little brother – came down because my mother was having another baby up in London. We never had a thing to eat, so we used to go to people’s allotments and pull up raw vegetables and eat them, carrots and even turnips.
There was this plum tree in the garden with this big green plum hanging on it, and before she went the old lady said, ‘I expect to see that big green plum still hanging there when I return.’ But as time went on it got riper and riper, and the day before she was due to return I couldn’t stand it no more. I picked the plum and we all had bites of it – me, Kitty and Micky. Unfortunately, when he knew the owner was due to come home, Micky wet the bed. I took the sheet off and tried to wash it myself but I left it on the line and, when she came home, she asked, ‘What’s this sheet doing on the line?’ And Micky said, ‘I wet the bed,’ and she beat him unmercifully and he hung onto my legs crying, ‘Marie, Marie.’
Once again, rebellion came to the fore, and I said to my brother and sister, ‘Come on, I’m going to walk back to London.’ It was only eighty miles. So, with what money we had, we bought some pears and we were walking up the road and we came to this little bridge and I thought, ‘I can’t walk all that way with these kids, they’re too little.’ I always had a little bag with me and I looked inside and found a stamped addressed envelope that my nan had sent me. It was a Monday, the first day of the school holidays, and I sat down and wrote my tale of woe to my nan, and I posted it and said, ‘Let’s go back.’ And, as the week went on, we seemed to forget about things.
On Friday morning, it was pouring with rain and we got up and came downstairs, and she’d cooked us a big bowl of porridge. She says to me, ‘You’ve written to your granny. You’ve got a letter, your brother’s coming down to pick you up and take you home.‘ I don’t think I ever felt as happy in all my life as I did that morning. Next morning was Saturday. We all got up, didn’t wash, and got all our things together and sat on the grass verge outside the cottage. Jimmy wasn’t on the first bus that came or the second and, by one o’ clock, I was beginning to think, ‘He’s not coming.’ We waited there all this time, and the old woman and old man never called us in to give us a drink or anything.
The four o’ clock bus came and, all of a sudden, I looked up and there was Jimmy coming down the hill. He had a navy blue suit and a red shirt and his tie was blowing in the wind. I said, ‘We’re ready! We’re ready!’ He said, ‘I’ve got to let the lady know that I’m taking you.’ So he went inside and she said, ‘I’ve had a terrible time with those children.’ And he brought us back to London, and back to my dad and my mum who was in hospital having a new baby, Paul. So I went round to stay with my nan ’til my mum came home and I was beside myself with joy.
Garden St had got bombed and my mum and dad moved to Albert Gardens but my mum never liked it because it was number thirteen, so they moved again to an eight bedroom house – because by then I had seven brothers and one sister – at forty-six Stepney Green. Jimmy went into the army and got wounded in Normandy, Bobby went to Scotland in the army, Johnny was sent to Germany and Micky was sent to Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Then we got the rockets – the doodlebugs – and that was almost as terrifying as the bombs. You’d hear the engine of a plane and then it stopped and you’d sit there in deathly silence and suddenly there’d be a big explosion. I know it’s a wicked thing to say but you’d think, ‘Thank God it’s not us.’
Then gradually, everyone came back home again to live in Stepney Green and, after everything settled down, I went to work in the rag trade as a machinist. And when I was nineteen, I met my lovely Fred. I was coming home from Victoria Park with my friend Betty and, as we walked past The Fountain pub in the Mile End Rd, there was a coach outside. My friend said, ‘Would you like a ride in a coach?’ And, all of a sudden, Fred appeared in the door of the pub with a pint of beer in his hand and called out to the driver, ‘These two girls are looking for a ride.’ I had never been in a pub but Fred said to me, ‘Hang on, wait ’til I’ve finished this pint and I’ll walk along with you.’ So I said to my friend, ‘Who does he think he is? We don’t know him.’ We carried on walking and I heard footsteps running behind us and I knew it was Freddie and his mate. He came alongside me and said, ‘I’ve got a camera. Would you like me to come round and take your photo?’ And my friend said, ‘Take no notice of him, he’s just making it up. He hasn’t got a camera.’ Freddie said, ‘Do you mind? I’m not speaking to you. I’m speaking to her.’
And when I turned and looked at him, I fell in love with him. They say there’s no such thing as love at first sight but there is. I arranged to meet him the next night on the corner but, when I arrived, he wasn’t there – I didn’t realise he was on the other side of the road, waiting to see if I’d turn up. So I went back home and my mum was looking out the window, and she saw what happened and she said to him, ‘You’re late, young man!’ And we courted for four years because we couldn’t get anywhere to live and then we got married at St Dunstan’s, Stepney, on 1st August 1953. We got two rooms at the top of a block of flats, Dunstan House, Stepney Green. The toilet was on the landing and the sink too, but we thought it was our little paradise.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t have children, our only regret in life. But my sister Kitty, and her son Alan and his wife Susan, they’ve always shared everything with us, and looked after us through thick and thin. And every year, we go to stay with Kitty and we have a really lovely old traditional Christmas. There’s nothing we like better than to go down memory lane together, it helps to keep us all close.”
Marie & Fred in their kitchen in Rectory Sq, Stepney.
Marie, Johnny and Kitty at Denham with Mrs Rook – “I loved the country life, especially when it was conker season and there were ripe apples. If my family had been there, I’d never have left.”
Marie’s sister Kitty, hop-picking with her grandfather after the war.
Marie hits a hole in one.
Marie & Fred’s wedding, 1st August 1953
On honeymoon in Ramsgate August 1953
Marie & Fred go Flamenco.
Kitty with her children, Marie and her mother in the fifties.
Marie and her dog Rufus when they lived in the prefab in Ashfield St.
Marie & Fred at a family wedding in the eighties.
Marie & Fred enjoy an adventure on the river.
The three evacuees grown-up – Johnny, Marie and Kitty.
Fred & Marie celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary on 1st August 2013
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