John Thomas Smith’s Cries Of London
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John Thomas Smith is featured in The Gentle Author’s Cries of London which is included in the sale.
John Thomas Smith also known as ‘Antiquary Smith’ (1766–1833)
My interest in the Cries of London originally stemmed from writing about market traders in Spitalfields and thus I was fascinated to discover that – two hundred years ago – John Thomas Smith drew the street hawkers in London and it led him to look back at images from earlier centuries too. Similarly, Samuel Pepys collected prints of the Cries of London of his own day and from the past, which makes me wonder about my illustrious predecessors in this particular cultural vein and whether they also shared my passion for these prints as the only historical record of the transient street life of our ancient city.
A colourful character who claimed to have been born in the back of a Hackney carriage, John Thomas Smith became keeper of prints at the British Museum and demonstrated a superlative draftsmanship in his vivid street portraits – with such keen likenesses that, on one famous occasion, his subjects became suspicious he was working for the police and a mob chased him down the street in Whitechapel.
The prints shown here are Smith’s drawings of prints from the seventeenth century which especially appealed to him, and that he discovered in the course of his work as an archivist.
Bellman (Copied from a print prefixed to ‘Villanies discovered by Lanthorne and Candlelight’ by Thomas Dekker 1616)
“The Childe of Darkness, a common Night-walker, a man that had no man to wait upon him, but onely a dog, one that was a disordered person, and at midnight would beate at men’s doores, bidding them ( in mere mockerie) to look to their candles when they themselves were in their dead sleeps, and albeit he was an officer, yet he was but of light carriage, being known by the name of the Bellman of London.”
Watchman (Copied from a woodcut sheet engraved at the time of James I)
“The marching Watch contained in number two thousand men, part of them being old souldiers, of skill to be captaines, lieutenants, serjeants, corporals &c. The poore men taking wages, besides that every one had a strawne hat, with no badge painted, and his breakfast in the morning.”
Water Carrier (Copied from a set of Cries & Callings of London published by Overton)
“When the conduits first supplied the inhabitants, there were a number of men who for a fixed sum carried the water to the adjoining houses. The tankard was borne upon the shoulder and, to keep the carrier dry, two towels were fastened upon him, one to fall before him and the other to cover his back.”
Corpse-Bearer
“When the Plague was at its height, it was the business of the Corpse-Bearers to give directions to the Car-Men who went through the City with bells, which they rang at the same time crying, ‘Bring out your Dead.'”
Hackney Coachman (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)
The early Hackney Coachman did not sit upon the box as the present drivers do, but upon the horse, like a postilion – his whip is short for that purpose, his boots which have large open broad tops, must have been much in the way when exposed to the weight of the rain. His hat was pretty broad and so far he was screened from the weather. In 1637, the number of Hackney Coaches in London was restricted to fifty but by 1802 it was eleven hundred.”
Jailor (Copied from Essayes & Characters of a Prison & Prisoners by Geffray Mynshul of Grays Inn, 1638)
“If marble-hearted Jaylors were so haplesse happy as to be mistaken and be made Kings, they would, instead of iron to their grates, have barres made of men’s ribs.”
Prison Basket Man (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)
“One of those men who were sent out to beg broken meat for the poor prisoners. This custom which perhaps was as ancient as our Religious Houses has long been done away by an allowance of meat and bread having been made to those prisoners who are destitute of support. It was the business of such men to claim the attention of the public by their cry of ‘Some broken breade and meate for ye poore prisonors! For the Lord’s Sake, pitty the poore!'”
Rat Catcher (Copied from Cries of Bologna, etched by Simon Guillain from drawings by Annibal Carracci, 1646)
“There are two types of rats in this country, the black which was formerly very common but is now rarely seen, bring superseded by the large brown kind, called the Norway rat. The Rat Catcher had representations of rats and mice painted upon a square cloth fastened to a pole like a flag, which he carried across his shoulder.”
Marking Stones (Copied from a woodcut engraved in the time of James I)
“The marking stones were either of a red colour or comprised of black lead. They were used in the marking of linen so that washing could not take the mark out.”
Buy A Brush (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)
“In those days, floors were not wetted but rubbed dry, even until they bore a very high polish, particularly when it was the fashion to to inlay staircases and floors of rooms with yellow, black and brown woods. These floors were rubbed by the servants who wore the brushes on their feet and they are in some instances so highly polished that they are dangerous to walk upon.”
Fire Screens (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)
“It appears from the extreme neatness of this man and the goods which he exhibits for sale, that they were of a very superior quality, probably of foreign manufacture and possibly from Leghorn, from whence hats similar to those on his head were first brought into England”
Sausages (Copied from a print published by Overton in the reign of Charles II)
“The pork shops of Fetter Lane have been for upwards of one hundred and fifty years famous for their sausages, but those wretched vendors of sausages who cared not what they made them of in cellars in St Giles were continually persecuting their unfortunate neighbours, to whom they were as offensive as the melters of tallow, bone burners, soap boilers and cat gut cleaners.”
Take a look at John Thomas Smith’s drawings of nineteenth century street traders
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana I
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
A Walk With Clive Murphy
All our titles are half price in our SUMMER SALE. Simply add code ‘SUMMER’ at check out. Click here to visit the SPITALFIELDS LIFE BOOKSHOP
Clive Murphy 1936-2021
Readers are invited to attend Clive Murphy’s funeral next Tuesday 13th July 1pm at East London Crematorium, Grange Road, Plaistow, E13 0HB.
One day, I enjoyed the privilege of accompanying Clive Murphy – the distinguished oral historian and writer of ribald rhymes – on a stroll around Spitalfields visiting some of his favourite haunts. He emerged from his red front door, having descended the stairs from his flat above the Aladin restaurant on Brick Lane where he had lived since 1974, sporting a raffish brown fedora and raincoat, and we headed directly to his usual morning destination, Nude Espresso in Hanbury St.
“It’s the best cafe I know because you don’t meet English people, only Australians and New Zealanders. They’re all so young and fresh and not at all buttoned-up,” Clive explained enthusiastically, as we were seated at a prominent table. And I felt like James Boswell accompanying Samuel Johnson, as the great raconteur let loose his celebrated gift for rhetoric, causing everyone in the small cafe to crane in attention. “I tried to congratulate them on their vocabulary, in the use of ‘titillate’ on the board outside, but then they informed me the actual wording was “open ’til late.'” Clive informed me with a sly smile of self-deprecation.“I remember when they opened and I was the only customer. The owner is Dickie Reed and the food and the coffee are good, and I do hand it to him, because he started here with nothing and now he’s got this place and a roastery and another one in Soho.” said Clive, continuing his eulogy, and only breaking off as a plate of complimentary muffins was placed in front of him.
Then we popped round to Grenson shoes next door where Martha Ellen Smith, the manager, had been working on a linocut portrait of Clive. Despite his uncertainty about the likeness, I gave the picture my approval and congratulated Martha on capturing the spirit of the man. “A friend of mine who spends all day drinking and watching porn says I am becoming a cantankerous old git,” confessed Clive, turning vulnerable suddenly as we left the shop, and requiring vigorous persuasion on my part to convince him of the lack of veracity in such an observation.
Energised by caffeine, our spirits lifted as we strode off down Brick Lane when, to my amazement, I noticed another fellow coming towards us with the same mis-matched shoes as Clive – wearing one brown shoe and one black shoe – which I had been too polite to mention until then. In fact, it was a complete coincidence and, although they were unknown to each other prior to this meeting, both men explained it was because they had problems with ill-fitting shoes, becoming at once affectionate brothers of mis-matched footwear. Yet such is the nature of Brick Lane, this could quickly become an emergent trend in international street style.
We arrived at Sweet & Spicy on the corner of Chicksand St, Clive’s favourite restaurant, where he had been coming regularly for curry since 1974. Here, in the cool of the peaceful dining room, we were greeted by proprietor Omar Butt, wrestler and boxer, who ran this popular curry house started by his father in 1969. Clive recommended the hot spicy lamb and the pilau rice with saffron to me, enquiring the secret of the rice from Omar who revealed the distinctive quality was in the use of raisins, almonds and butter ghee. Pointing out the weight-lifting posters on the wall, Clive informed me that Omar had been preceded by his brother Imran Butt who was “mad for bodybuilding.”
“We used to have useful things like a laundrette, an ironmonger and an electrical shop in Brick Lane,” announced Clive, turning morose as we retraced our steps, “now one half of it is arty-farty shops and the other half curry houses, and there’s nothing else.” Yet his complaint was cut short as we were greeted by the cheery Sanjay, Clive’s friend who worked as waiter in the Aladin restaurant below his flat. “I told him I was going to the supermarket one day and he asked me to bring him a present, so I got him a packet of biscuits,” recalled Clive fondly, humbled by Sanjay’s open-heartedness, “it’s amazing what a packet of biscuits can do.”
Leaving Brick Lane, we turned down Buxton St towards the rear of the brewery where Clive lived for a year in the headmaster’s study of the derelict St Patrick’s School in 1972, when he first came to Spitalfields. “I had a hurricane lamp, a camp bed and a tea chest.” he said as we reached the threshold of the Victorian Schoolhouse, “There was only electricity three days a week and I had a single cold tap on the floor below. I was scared of the meths drinkers who sat outside on the step because I was all alone, I had never been in the East End before and I had never met meths drinkers before. But then three painters moved in and we became a colony of artists, until I was flooded out.”
“I think would have made a go of it anywhere,” acknowledged Clive, in a measured attempt to sum up his years in the East End, “I don’t think Spitalfields has been especially generous to me, except it was where I met my heroes Alexander Hartog, the tenor and mantle presser, and Beatrice Ali, the Salvation Army Hostel Dweller, and I am grateful because they were both absolute treasures.” These individuals became the subjects of two of the most memorable of Clive’s oral histories.
By now, a blustery wind had blown up in Buxton St. It had been accumulating all morning and caused me to run down the street more than once to retrieve Clive’s hat, but now it required him to hold his fedora in place with his left hand. Yet before we went our separate ways, heading for home, Clive presented me with a packet of liquorice allsorts that he had secreted in his raincoat pocket, and I was delighted to accept them as a souvenir of our walk.
Clive and antipodean friends at Nude Espresso
Clive at Grenson Shoes with Martha and Nathan
Martha Ellen Smith’s lino cut portrait of Clive
The beginning of a trend on Brick Lane, Clive meets Mark who shares his taste in mis-matched footwear
Clive with Omar Butt at Sweet & Spicy in Brick Lane where Clive had been dining since 1974
Clive with his friend Sanjay, waiter at the Aladin Curry House, Brick Lane.
Clive at Old St Patrick’s School in Buxton St where he first lived in Spitalfields in 1972. – “I only had a hurricane lamp, a camp bed and a tea chest.”
Clive encounters a blustery corner in Buxton St.
Clive in his flat above the Aladin curry house on Brick Lane where he lived from 1974.
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Clive Murphy, Oral Historian & Writer of Ribald Rhymes
The Markets Of Old London
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The Markets of Old London is featured in The Gentle Author’s London Album which is included in the sale.
Clare Market c.1900
I never knew there was a picture of the legendary and long-vanished Clare Market – where Joseph Grimaldi was born – until I came upon this old glass slide among many thousands in the collection of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, housed at the Bishopsgate Institute. Scrutinising this picture, the market does not feel remote at all, as if I could take a stroll over there to Holborn in person as easily as I can browse the details of the photograph. Yet the Clare Market slum, as it became known, was swept away in 1905 to create the grand civic gestures of Kingsway and Aldwych.
Searching through this curious collection of glass slides, left-overs from the days of educational magic lantern shows – comprising many multiple shots of famous landmarks and grim old church interiors – I was able to piece together this set of evocative photographs portraying the markets of old London. Of those included here only Smithfield, London’s oldest wholesale market, continues trading from the same building, though Leather Lane, Hoxton Market and East St Market still operate as street markets, but Clare Market, Whitechapel Hay Market and the Caledonian Rd Market have gone forever. Meanwhile, Billingsgate, Covent Garden and Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market have moved to new premises, and Leadenhall’s last butcher – once the stock-in-trade of all the shops in this former cathedral of poultry – closed last year.
Markets fascinate me as theatres of commercial and cultural endeavour in which a myriad strands of human activity meet. If you are seeking life, there is no better place to look than in a market. Wherever I travelled, I always visited the markets, the black-markets of Moscow in 1991, the junk markets of Beijing in 1999, the Chelsea Market in Manhattan, the central market in Havana, the street markets of Rio, the farmers’ markets of Transylvania and the flea market in Tblisi – where, memorably, I bought a sixteenth century silver Dutch sixpence and then absent-mindedly gave it away to a beggar by mistake ten minutes later. I often wonder if he cast the rare coin away in disgust.
Similarly in London, I cannot resist markets as places where society becomes public performance, each one with its own social code, language, and collective personality – depending upon the nature of the merchandise, the location, the time of day and the amount of money changing hands. Living in Spitalfields, the presence of the markets defines the quickening atmosphere through the week, from the Thursday antiques market to the Brick Lane traders, fly-pitchers and flower market in Bethnal Green every Sunday. I am always seduced by the sense of infinite possibility when I enter a market, which makes it a great delight to live surrounded by markets.
These old glass slides, many of a hundred years ago, capture the mass spectacle of purposeful activity that markets offer and the sense of self-respect of those – especially porters – for whom the market was their life, winning status within an elaborate hierarchy that had evolved over centuries. Nowadays, the term “marketplace” is sometimes reduced to mean mere economic transaction, but these photographs reveal that in London it has always meant so much more.
Billingsgate Market, c.1910
Billingsgate Market, c.1910
Whitechapel Hay Market c.1920 (looking towards Aldgate)
Whitechapel Hay Market, c.1920 (looking east towards Whitechapel)
Porters at Smithfield Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Book sale at Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Caledonian Rd Market, c.1910
Covent Garden Market, c.1920
Covent Garden Market, c.1910
Covent Garden, c.1910
Covent Garden Market, 1925
Covent Garden Market, Floral Hall, c.1910
Leadenhall Market, Christmas 1935
Leadenhall Market, c.1910
East St Market, c.1910
Leather Lane Market, 1936
Hoxton Market, Shoreditch, 1910
Spitalfields Market, c.1930
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to look at these old photographs of the Spitalfields Market by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies
Alfred Daniels, Artist
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Alfred Daniels is featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists Who Painted London’s East End Streets in 20th Century which is included in the sale.
The Gramophone Man, Wentworth St
“I’m not really an East Ender, I’m more of a Bow boy,” asserted Alfred Daniels with characteristic precision of thought, when I enquired of his origin. “My parents left the East End, because they were scared of the doodlebugs and bought this house in 1945,” he explained, as he welcomed me to his generous suburban residence in Chiswick. Greeting me while dressed in pyjamas and dressing gown in the afternoon, no-one could have been more at home than Alfred in his studio occupying the former living room of his parents’ house. I found him snug in the central heating and just putting the finishing touches to a commission that his dealer was coming to collect at six.
I met Alfred at the point in life where copyright payments on the resale of works from his sixty-year painting career meant he no longer has to struggle. “I’ve done hundreds of things to make a living,” he confessed, rolling his eyes in amusement, “Although my father was a brilliant tailor, he was a dreadful business man so we were on the breadline for most of the nineteen thirties – which was a good thing because we never got fat …”
Smiling at his own bravado, Alfred continued painting as he spoke, adding depth to the shadows with a fine brush. “This is the way to make a living,” he declared with a flourish as he placed the brush back in the pot with finality, completing the day’s work and placing the painting to one side, ready to go. “The past is history, the future is a mystery but the present is a gift,” he informed me, as we climbed the stairs to the upstairs kitchen over-looking the garden, to seek a cup of tea.
Alfred had spent the morning making copious notes on his personal history, just it to get it straight for me. “This has been fun,” he admitted, rustling through the handwritten pages.
“My grandfather came from Russia in the 1880s, he was called Donyon, and they said, ‘Sounds like Daniels.’ My grandfather on the other side came from Plotska in Poland in the 1880s, he didn’t have a surname so they said ‘Sounds like a good man’ and they called him Goodman. My parents, Sam and Rose, were both born in the 1890s and my mother lived to be ninety-two. I was born in Trellis St in Bow in 1924 and in the early thirties we moved to 145 Bow Rd, next to the railway station. I can still remember the sound of the goods wagons going by at night.
One good thing is, I gave up the Jewish religion and thank goodness for that. It was only when I was twelve and I read about the Hitler problem that I realised I was Jewish. Fortunately, we weren’t religious in my family and we didn’t go to the synagogue. But I went to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah and they tried to harm me with Hebrew. We were taught by these Russians and if you didn’t learn it they bashed you. That put me off religion there and then. Yet when we got outside the Black Shirts were waiting for us in the street, calling ‘Here look, it’s the Jew boys!’ and they wanted to bash me too. Fortunately, I could run fast in those days.
My mother used to do all the shopping in the Roman Rd market. She hated shopping, so she sent me to do it for her in Brick Lane. It was a penny on the tram, there and back. But they all spoke Yiddish and I couldn’t communicate, so I thought, ‘I’d better listen to my grandmother who spoke Yiddish.’ I learnt it from her and it is one of the funniest languages you can imagine.
Although my parents were poor, my Uncle Charlie was rich. He was a commercial artist and my father said to him, ‘The boy wants to learn a craft.’ So Charlie got me a place at Woolwich Polytechnic to learn signwriting but I spent all day trying to sharpen my pencil. Then he took me out of the school and got me a job as a lettering artist at the Lawrence Danes Studio in Chancery Lane. It was wonderful to come up to the city to work, and his nephew befriended me and we went to art shops together to look at art books. We drew out letters and filled them in with Indian Ink, mostly Gill Sans. Typesetters usually got the spacing wrong but if you did it by hand you could get it right. It was all squares, circles and triangles.
When Uncle Charlie started his own studio in Fetter Lane above the Vogue photo studio, he offered me a job at £1 a week. Nobody showed me how to do anything, I worked it out for myself. He got me to do illustrations and comic drawings and retouching of photographs. At night, we went down in the tube stations entertaining people sheltering from the blitz. I played my violin like Django Reinhardt and he played like Stefan Grappelli, and one day we were recorded and ended up on Workers’ Playtime.
I had been doing some still lifes but I wanted to paint the beautiful old shops in Campbell Rd, Bow, so I went to make some sketches and a policeman came up and asked to see my identity card. ‘You can’t do this because we’ve had complaints you’re a spy,’ he said. It was illegal to take photographs during the war, so I sat and absorbed into memory what I saw. And the result came out like a naive or primitive painting. When Herbert Buckley my tutor at Woolwich saw it, he said, ‘Would you like to be a painter? I’ll put you in for the Royal College of Art. To be honest, I should rather have done illustration or lettering. At the Royal College of Art, my tutors included Carel Weight – he said, ‘I’m not interested in art only in pictures.’ – Ruskin Spear – ‘always drunk because of the pain of polio’ – and John Minton – ‘ a lovely man, if only he hadn’t been so mixed up.'”
Alfred was keen to enlist, “I wanted to stop Hitler coming over and stringing me up !” – though he never saw active service, but the discovery of painting and of his signature style as the British Douanier Rousseau stayed with him for the rest of his life. After Alfred left the East End in 1945, he kept coming back to make sketchbooks and do paintings, often of the same subjects – as you see below, with two images of the Gramophone man in Wentworth St painted fifty years apart.
With natural generosity of spirit, Alfred Daniels told me, “Making a painting is like baking a cake, one slice is for you but the rest is for everyone else.”
The Gramophone Man in Wentworth St, 1950
Sketchbook pages – Cable St, April 1964
Sketchbook pages – Old Montague St, March 1964
Sketchbook pages – Hessel St, April 1964
Sketchbook pages – Old Montague St & Davenant St, March 1964
Sketchbook pages – Fruit Seller in Hessel St, March 1964
Leadenhall Market, drawing, 2008
Billingsgate Market
Tower Bridge, 2008
The Royal Exchange, 2008
Crossing London Bridge, 2008
In Alfred’s studio
Alfred Daniels, Artist (1924-2015)
You may also like to read about
A Return Visit to Alfred Daniels
Happy 90th Birthday, Alfred Daniels!
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Summer Book Sale
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At Fairlop Fair
Fairlop Fair is traditionally held in Hainault Forest in Essex on the first Friday in July, as I learnt recently from this booklet published by William Darton of Holborn Hill in 1811. I am grateful to Sian Rees for drawing my attention to this. Fairlop Fair 2021 is being held on 31st July this year.
Images courtesy University of California Libraries
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Dennis Severs’ Tour
‘I am going to take you through the picture frame and into another world…’
During lockdown, I have been working for a year on a secret project which I can now reveal to you. The Spitalfields Trust commissioned me to re-imagine the tours that Dennis Severs gave when he first opened his house to visitors in the last century. Over six months last year, I wrote the script and, through the spring and early summer of this year, I have been rehearsing with actor Joel Saxon in preparation for the launch on Thursday 29th July.
Each room was arranged by Dennis Severs to illustrate a scene in the life of an imaginary family of immigrants who lived in the house since it was built in 1725. The famously evocative tours that he gave, telling his tall tales of old London, became celebrated and David Hockney described it as ‘one of the world’s five great experiences.’ Yet after twenty years, Dennis Severs grew tired of it, inviting visitors to walk around his house in silence and imagine their own stories instead.
Over the past year, Dennis Severs’ House was closed for the first time since it opened to the public in the early eighties. This provided the opportunity for spring cleaning and repairs that had not been possible before. In this process, a cache of Dennis Severs’ cassette recordings was discovered that provided a tantalising fragmentary glimpse of his tours. Taking inspiration from these recordings and studying Dennis Severs’ book ’18 Folgate St’ and his unpublished novel, I wrote a new script that reimagines the tours for another century.
It has been my great delight to reintroduce theatre to the house and conjure it back to life. Once you learn the story, you understand why each room is as it is. When Dennis Severs created a cast of characters for his house, he never expected to become part of the drama himself yet – twenty years after his death – this is precisely what has happened.
Working with actor Joel Saxon, I have created an intimate piece of promenade theatre for an audience limited to just six, transporting you through time and into other worlds to encounter the spirits that linger in Dennis Severs’ House.
Tickets can be booked at www.dennissevershouse.co.uk
Photographs © Lucinda Douglas Menzies
