Remembering Mr Pussy In Winter
Today is the last day of our Valentine’s sale with all titles in the Spitalfields Life Bookshop at half price until midnight. Half of our titles are sold out and others are running low, so – with weeks of lockdown yet to come – this is the ideal opportunity to complete your collection.
Enter the code VALENTINE at checkout to claim your discount.
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Today I remember my old cat, Mr Pussy. The biography I wrote of him, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, is included in the sale.
On dark winter nights, Mr Pussy seldom stirred from the chimney corner. Warmed by a fire of burning pallets, he had no need of whisky to bring him solace through the dark hours, instead he frazzled his brain in a heat-induced trance. Outside in the streets, Spitalfields might have lain under snow, the paths might have been coated in sheet ice and icicles might be hanging from the gutters, but this spectacle held no interest for Mr Pussy. Like the cavemen of ancient times, his sole fascination was with the mesmerising dance of flames in the grate. And as the season descended towards its nadir in the plunging temperatures of the frozen byways, at home Mr Pussy fell into his own warm darkness of stupefaction.
When Mr Pussy grew old and the world was no longer new to him, his curiosity was ameliorated by his love of sleeping. Once he was a brat in jet black, yet he became a gentleman in a chenille velvet suit, as tufts of white hair increasingly flecked his glossy pelt. One summer, I noticed he was getting skinny and then I discovered that his teeth had gone which meant he could no longer crunch the hard biscuits that were always his delight. Extraordinarily, he made little protest at this starvation diet, even as he lost weight through lack of food. I learnt to fill his dish with biscuits and top it up with water, so that he might satisfy his hunger by supping the resulting slush. And through this simple accommodation – plus a supplement of raw meat – his weight was restored to normal and he purred in gratification while eating again.
Once Mr Pussy was a wild rover, ranging over the fields in Devon, disappearing for days on end and returning proudly with a dead rabbit in his mouth. Yet in the end, he did not step beyond the end of the alley in Spitalfields and, in sub-zero temperatures, he only ventured outside to do his necessary business. Sprinting up the stairs and calling impatiently outside the door of the living room, he was ever eager to return to the fireside and warm his cold toes afterwards, sore from scraping at the frost in the vain attempt to dig a hole in the frozen earth. Like a visionary poet, Mr Pussy acquired a vivid internal life to insulate himself against the rigours of the world and, in the absence of sunlight, the fire provided his imaginative refuge, engendering a sublime reverie of peace and physical ease.
Yet Mr Pussy still loved to fight. If he heard cats screeching in the yard, he would race from the house to join the fray unless I could shut the door first and prevent him. Even when he had been injured and came back leaking blood from huge wounds, he appeared quite unconcerned. Only two small notches in his ears persisted as permanent evidence of this violent tendency, although I regularly checked his brow for tell-tale scratches and the occasional deep bloody furrows that sometimes caused swelling around his eyes. But I could stop him going out, even though it was a matter of concern to me that – as he aged and his reflexes lessened – he might get blinded in a fight one day, losing one of his soulful golden eyes. Since he was blissfully unaware of this possibility, I had no choice but to take consolation from his response when he could not eat, revealing that Mr Pussy had no expectations of life and consequently no fear of loss. His nature was to make his best accommodation to any exigency with grace.
Be assured, Mr Pussy could still leap up onto the kitchen counter in a single bound. He could still bring in a live mouse from the garden when he pleased and delightedly crunch its skull between his jaws on the bedroom floor. If I worked late into the night, he would still cry and tug on the bed sheets to waken me in the early morning to see the falling snow. When the fancy seized him, he could be as a sprightly as a kitten. Come the spring, he would be running up trees again, even if – in the darkest depth of winter – he only wanted to sleep by the fire.
When I was alone here in the old house in Spitalfields at night, Mr Pussy became my sole companion, the perfect accomplice for a writer. When I took to my bed to keep warm while writing my stories, he was always there as the silent assistant, curled into a ball upon the sheepskin coverlet. As the years passed and Mr Pussy strayed less from the house, I grew accustomed to his constant presence. He taught me that, rather than fear for his well-being, I needed to embrace all the circumstances and seasons that life sends, just as he did.
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AS Jasper, Writer & Cabinet Maker
All titles in the Spitalfields Life Bookshop are half price in our Valentine’s sale. Some are already sold out and others are running low, so – with weeks of lockdown yet to come – this is the ideal opportunity to complete your collection.
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A.S. Jasper’s A Hoxton Childhood & The Years After comprise an authentic testimony of the survival and eventual triumph of a protagonist who retains his sense of decency against the odds. A Hoxton Childhood is a tender memoir of growing up in Hoxton before the First World War, while The Years After details the author’s struggles and successes in the Shoreditch cabinet-making trade.
Albert Stanley Jasper
“The initials stand for Albert Stanley, but he was always know as Stan, never Albert,” admitted Terry Jasper, speaking of his father when we met at F. Cooke’s Pie & Mash Shop in Hoxton Market. A.S. Jasper’s A Hoxton Childhood was immediately acclaimed as a classic in 1969 when The Observer described it as “Zola without the trimmings,” and now Spitalfields Life Books is publishing a handsome new definitive edition accompanied for the first time by the sequel, The Years After.
“In the late sixties, my mum and dad lived in a small ground floor flat. Looking out of the window onto the garden one morning, he saw a tramp laying on the grass who had been there all night. My dad took him out a sandwich and a cup of tea, and told him that he wouldn’t be able to stay there” Terry recalled, “I think most people in that situation would have just phoned the police and left it at that.” It is an anecdote that speaks eloquently of Stan Jasper’s compassionate nature, informing his writing and making him a kind father, revered by his son all these years later.
Yet it is in direct contrast to the brutal treatment that Stan received at the hands of his own alcoholic father William, causing the family to descend in a spiral of poverty as they moved from one rented home to another, while his mother Johanna struggled heroically against the odds to maintain domestic equilibrium for her children. “My grandmother, I only met her a couple of times, but once I was alone with her in the room and she said, ‘Your dad, he was my best boy, he took care of me.'” Terry remembered.
“There are a million things I’d like to have asked him when he was alive but I didn’t,” Terry confided to me, contemplating his treasured copy of his father’s book that sat on the table between us, “My dad died in 1970, he was sixty-five – It was just a year after publication but he saw it was a success.”
“When he was a teenager, he was a wood machinist and the sawdust got on on his lungs and he got very bad bronchitis. When I was eight years old, the doctor told him he must give up his job, otherwise the dust would kill him. My mum said to him that this was something he had to do and he just broke down. It was very strange feeling, because I didn’t think then that grown-ups cried.”
Stan started his own business manufacturing wooden cases for radios in the forties, employing more than seventy people at one point until it ran into difficulties during the credit squeeze of the fifties. Offered a lucrative buy-out, Stan turned it down out of a concern that his employees might lose their jobs but, shortly after, the business went into liquidation.”He should have thought of his family rather his workers,” commented Terry regretfully, “He lost his factory and his home and had to live in a council flat for the rest of his life.”
“My dad used to talk about his childhood quite a lot, he never forgot it – so my uncle Bob said, ‘Why don’t you write it all down?’ And he did, but he tried to get it published without success. Then a friend where I worked in the City Rd took it to someone he knew in publishing, and they really liked it and that’s how it got published. When the book came out in 1969, he wanted to go back to Hoxton to see what was still left, but his health wasn’t good enough.”
Terry ‘s memories of his father’s struggles are counterbalanced by warm recollections of family celebrations.”He always enjoyed throwing a party, especially if he was in the company of my mother’s family. It wasn’t easy obtaining beer and spirits during the warm but somehow he managed to find a supply. He was always generous where money was concerned, sometimes to a fault, and he had a nice voice and didn’t need much persuading to get up and sing a song or two.”
Stan Jasper only became an author in the final years of his life when he could no longer work, and the success of A Hoxton Childhood encouraged him to write The Years After, which was found among his papers after his death and is published now more than forty years later. The two works exist as companion pieces, tracing the dramatic journey of the author from the insecurity of his early years in Hoxton to the comfortable suburban existence he created for his family as an adult. The moral lessons he learnt in childhood became the guidelines by which he lived his life.
Together, A.S. Jasper’s A Hoxton Childhood & The Years After comprise an authentic testimony of the survival and eventual triumph of a protagonist who retains his sense of decency against all the odds. ” He said he would always settle for the way life turned out,” Terry concluded fondly.
Stan (on the right) with his brother Fred
Stan and his wife Lydia
Terry as a boy
Terry with his dad Stan
Stan and his sister Flo
Stan Jasper
Terry with his mum and dad at Christmas
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A Hoxton Childhood & The Years After
James Boswell, Artist & Illustrator
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The Tale Of James Hadfield’s Pistol
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Today Julian Woodford outlines the story of James Hadfield, mysterious would-be assassin of George III, revealing how his pistol found its way into the hands of Joseph Merceron, East End gangster & corrupt magistrate – and where it is today.
The Boss of Bethnal Green is included in the sale and we only have a very few copies left, so this is your last chance to buy one.
Click to enlarge this print, reproduced courtesy of V&A Museum
When I talk about how Joseph Merceron ruled the East End for half a century, I am often asked ‘How did he get away with it?’ It is a question I could not answer until I discovered that he owned a gun which almost changed English history.
In 1795, Merceron used his position of influence in Bethnal Green to become a magistrate. Just weeks afterwards, King George III’s carriage windows were shattered by an angry mob as he travelled to open Parliament and Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger launched a ‘reign of terror’ with laws forbidding public assembly or publication of ‘seditious writings.’ Secretly, the Home Office also set up an extensive spy network in the East End administered by the local magistrates and their clerks.
During the early seventeen-nineties, in the wake of the French Revolution, radical societies sprang up across London – especially in the East End. Their members agitated for universal suffrage or, in more extreme, cases a revolution of their own. Over the next few years, Pitt’s ‘Gagging Acts’ were applied with increasing severity and the Home Office spies busied themselves in infiltrating radical societies. Democratic activists and mutineering sailors were rounded up and incarcerated without trial at Coldbath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell.
The ritual abuse they suffered at the hands of the Prison Governor, Thomas Aris, was ignored or even encouraged by Merceron and his fellow magistrates. But when the prisoners’ plight was raised in Parliament by the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett, it became the subject of a national scandal that rocked the Pitt government and damaged the credibility of the Middlesex magistrates.
Then, in the spring of 1800, came an act of terror that appeared to justify Pitt’s harsh conservatism. James Hadfield was a British soldier who had suffered horrendous head wounds in the Napoleonic Wars, and been captured and tortured by the French. Released in a prisoner exchange but traumatised to the point of insanity and unfit for further service, Hadfield was simply turned onto the London streets. Here he encountered an itinerant preacher named Bannister Truelock, who persuaded Hadfield he could trigger the Second Coming of Christ – he just needed to shoot the King and die in the attempt.
On 15th May 1800, Hadfield bought an old flintlock pistol from a pawnbroker and made his way to Drury Lane Theatre, where George III was due to attend a Royal Command Performance. As the King took a bow from the Royal Box, Hadfield pulled out his pistol and fired, narrowly missing his Majesty. Despite a lengthy investigation and an apparemt attempt by the government to rig the jury, Hadfield was acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity, setting an important legal precedent. Instead of being executed, he was committed to the Bethlehem hospital in Moorfields where he spent the next forty-one years writing poems to his pet squirrels.
You might wonder what the connection is to The Boss of Bethnal Green? In 2006, when I started researching my book, I traced Joseph Merceron’s descendants and met his great-great-great grandson Daniel, who showed me an ancient tin box full of Merceron’s papers. This was enough to make my journey worthwhile, but I was dumbstruck when Daniel walked back into the room brandishing an old flintlock pistol and casually announced that – according to family lore – it had once belonged to The Boss and was used in an assassination attempt on George III at Drury Lane in 1800.
That was all Daniel knew and, although I remembered James Hadfield’s story, I could not think how Joseph Merceron could possibly have been involved. Just an hour’s research on the internet uncovered the answer. The transcript of Hadfield’s trial revealed the key prosecution witness was Major Wright, a solicitor of Wellclose Sq and clerk to the Tower Hamlets magistrates. He was a significant figure in Merceron’s circle and closely linked to the Home Office spy network. At Drury Lane, the Major had been sitting within arm’s reach of Hadfield and collared him with his weapon after the event. Among the trial papers are letters from Home Office spies claiming that Hadfield and Truelock were members of the London Corresponding Society which had infiltrated army regiments, including Hadfield’s 15th Light Dragoons.
Remarkably, Major Wright was allowed to keep the pistol as a souvenir. Yet his will lists a print of the assassination attempt among his effects not the gun, which had given to his master – Joseph Merceron. Based on the evidence, I believe Major Wright was secretly tailing James Hadfield on behalf of the Home Office, but it did not suit the government to blow his cover at Hadfield’s trial.
This anecdote offers the explanation for the astonishing longevity of Joseph Merceron’s career as the Godfather of Regency London. Despite being responsible for appalling corruption on a vast scale, he was the devil-the-government-knew, manning the front line in the East End for William Pitt’s ‘war on sedition.’ Merceron owned and licensed many of the pubs where the radical societies met. Merceron’s clerks were actively involved in running spies and, despite repeated attempts to prosecute him during his first three decades in power, the government repeatedly refused to do so and it was only in 1818 – well after the end of the Napoleonic Wars – that he was finally brought to trial and jailed briefly.
James Hadfield’s pistol – the gun that nearly changed history
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Chinnee Kaur, My Mum
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Today Suresh Singh recalls the life of his mother in this extract from A MODEST LIVING, MEMOIRS OF A COCKNEY SIKH which is included in the sale.
Mum with me in the yard at 38 Princelet St shortly after we left hospital
Mum came to join Dad in London in 1955, bringing my elder sister. I think she quickly became absorbed by motherhood and childbearing. She did not stay healthy because the house was so overcrowded. First she got asthma from the dust mites in the mattresses and then she got tuberculosis. Yet she remained a very generous woman and welcomed everybody. She tolerated our mad house and never said she wanted to live like other Sikh families. She never sought domestic comforts. She understood Dad’s beliefs and adapted to life in England in her own way. To look at Mum, you would think that she never left India. She just stayed in her Punjabi clothes, as if she had arrived yesterday.
She was always cooking in big pans for lots of people, brewing masala tea with milk on the gas ring. It seemed nothing ever boiled over. She had mastered it to an art, the size of the gas flame and the circumference of the pan. She made dals, cooked spinach, and roasted chicken at weekends. We kept a big sack of brown flour in a dustbin, twenty-five kilos, and she loved making chapatis in abundance. They were buttered with Anchor butter, wrapped in cloth to keep them soft and stacked one on top ofthe other in an aluminium pot with a lid. We always thought there was an endless bundle because they never ran out. On Friday someone would bring a freshly-killed chicken from the kosher chicken shop in Petticoat Lane or, as a treat, Dad would buy fish and chips from Alfies on Brick Lane. On Sunday and special occasions Mum would make prashad.
At the end of each week, Dad gave his unopened pay-packet to Mum. She kept it so if the family needed money in India she could get it. They never had a bank account, but had a way of hiding valuables in the house. They sent money through Grewal, the grocer in Artillery Passage, who had a means of exchanging it for rupees.
Mum spent quite a bit of time in hospitals before I was born and then with me in the baby clinic, where she met other women – English, Irish, Scottish, Jewish, Maltese, Pakistani and West Indian. They were all very poor and became friends because they came from big families. They were devoted to their own faiths and shared a strong sense of duty to their families. Every Friday while Mum was in Mile End hospital in Bancroft Road they gave each woman a bottle of Guinness for strength because they believed the iron was good for the blood. As a Sikh, Mum did not drink alcohol so she put the bottles in her bedside cupboard. It was like a drinks cabinet. The Irish women came and she gave them one each, and they all became close.
I remember these women visiting our house. They called her Mrs Singh and she corrected them, saying, ‘No, I am Mrs Kaur.’ They would ask, ‘Are you separated from Mr Singh?’ She was shocked that anyone would ask such a question but explained, ‘No, no, it’s our Sikh faith that men are called Singh and women are called Kaur.’ Singh means lion and Kaur means princess. Mum would then take the opportunity to talk about her faith and how this naming was initiated by the tenth guru, Guru Gobind Singh.
Mum cultivated these warm relationships. She never judged anybody and had a gift for bringing women together regardless of their appearance, way of life or who they were. I think she inherited that quality from her dad who was a wise man. I was the luckiest in the family to spend so much time at home with my parents. They taught me how to hold a family together.
Mum wanted to stay at home and Dad never sent her out to work. She valued the responsibility of keeping the house, caring for her children and others in the family. He valued and trusted her judgement in keeping the household in order. She loved walking us to Christ Church School and enjoyed the social life at the school gate. We came home for dinner every day because the school meals were tasteless, without any spices.
Once my cousins’ wives started coming over from the Punjab and staying with us, Mum took them to the clinic and they would spend time together. She demonstrated how to put a terry nappy on a baby with a safety pin, and how to boil nappies in a pan with Daz on the gas ring to get them nice and white again. She was a mother to them, these newly-wed women who came and stayed for a while. She taught them a few tricks of the trade.
When I was born in 1962, I already had my eldest sister from India, my second sister and my brother. There were always other children in the house, so often I did not know who was family and who was not. Dad had adopted one of our cousins from India and I just thought all these people were family. I called everybody brother or sister. Food was cooked in a large pan and we all ate chapatis together on the floor. It was a simple but hard-working life.
Our family
Mum with a friend in Trafalgar Sq
Dad’s pay packet
Suresh Singh & Jagir Kaur at 38 Princelet St (Photograph by Patricia Niven)
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In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh tells the story of his family who have lived in their house in Princelet St for nearly seventy years, longer I believe than any other family in Spitalfields. In the book, chapters of biography are alternated with a series of Sikh recipes by Jagir Kaur, Suresh’s wife.
In Search Of Horace Warner
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Today I explore the life of Horace Warner, photographer of SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS which is included in the sale.
Horace Warner (1871-1939)
This is a self-portrait by Horace Warner taken when he was around thirty years old at the time he was photographing the Spitalfields Nippers, the pictures by which he is remembered and that establish his posthumous reputation as a photographer. If you look closely you can just see the bulb in his left hand to control the shutter, permitting him to capture this image of himself.
With his pale moon-like face, straggly moustache and shiny locks, Horace looks younger than his years and yet there is an intensity in his concentration matched by the poised energy of his right arm. This is how he chose to present himself – wielding a brush, indicative of his profession as a wallpaper designer in the family business of Jeffrey & Co, run by his father Metford Warner (1843-1930), where he and his brother Marcus worked. The company was established in 1836 and Metford was a junior partner who became proprietor by 1869 and, under his leadership, they became a leading manufacturer. He was committed to representing artists’ designs more accurately than had been done before and commissioned William Burges and Walter Crane, among other leading designers of the time – most famously, collaborating with William Morris.
I set out to visit three places that were familiar to Horace Warner in an attempt to better understand the connections between the different aspects of his life that found their expression in these locations. First, I took the train to Highbury and walked up the hill beside the long eighteenth century terrace bounding the fields, turning off into the quiet crescent of Aberdeen Park, a private estate laid out in the eighteen-fifties.
The turret of the former Warner family house stood out among the other comfortably-appointed villas, as testimony to the success of Jeffrey & Co, supplying wallpaper to the artistic classes in the growing capital at the end of the nineteenth century. A woman pushing a pram along the pavement in front of me turned out to be the nanny employed by the current residents and, when I explained the reason for my visit, she volunteered that there were a series of old photographs still hanging in an upper room, which also retains its turn of the century embossed wallpaper.
Leaving the ghosts of Aberdeen Park, I turned south, following Horace’s route to work by walking for half an hour down through Canonbury, past the Tower and along the route of the New River, to meet the Essex Rd where the Jeffrey & Co wallpaper factory stands. An elegant turn-of-the century utilitarian building with three well-lit floors above for manufacturing and a showroom on the ground floor, it is currently occupied by a wholefood chain. William Morris’ wallpaper designs were all printed here until the thirties when they were taken over by Sandersons and the factory closed in 1940 but, if you go round to the side street, the loading doors remain as if another delivery might arrive at any time.
From here, the East End is a couple of miles south. In her nineties, Horace Warner’s surviving daughter, Ruth Finken, still remembers accompanying her father on this journey as a small child to deliver Christmas presents in Quaker St, where he was Sunday School teacher. She recalls how dark, dirty and frightening everything looked, and being told to hold her father’s hand and keep close. Ruth reports that her father was always one for getting the family to pose for his photos and that he spent ages getting everyone in exactly the right position. She also has a memory of one of his photographs of a pair of child’s boots upon the drawing room wall, along with a couple of his portraits of the Spitalfields Nippers, as reminders of those who were less fortunate.
Horace Warner’s participation as Superintendent at the Bedford Institute continued an involvement for his family in Spitalfields that stretched back to the seventeenth century when the Warner Bell Foundry was established. The Warner family were part of the Quaker movement too, almost since its inception, and the naming of Quaker St derives from the Friends Meeting House that opened there in 1656.
Yet the Quaker Mission at the Bedford Institute, that Horace Warner knew, owed its origin to a revival of Quakerism that happened a century later in Spitalfields – encouraged by Peter Bedford (1780-1864), a philanthropist silk merchant who devoted himself to alleviating poor social conditions. Rebuilt in 1893, the handsome red brick Bedford House that stands today would have been familiar to Warner.
In The Condition of The Working Class in England, Frederick Engels referred to the tragedy of a family living in the courtyards south of Quaker St as an example of the degradation of the poor in London and it was these people, living almost upon the doorstep of the Bedford Institute, that Horace Warner befriended and photographed. It was a small area, a narrow rectangle of shabby dwellings circumscribed by roads upon four sides, and no more than a hundred yards wide and five hundreds yards long. Today there is nothing left of it but Horace Warner’s photographs, yet since he annotated them with the names of his subjects we hope we can now discover more about the lives of these people through research into the records. Ultimately, what we can discover about Horace Warner exists in his response to others and their response to him, as manifest in his photographs.
“There isn’t a great deal of information we know about Horace,” his grandson Ian McGilvray admitted to me, “and, in any case, I imagine he would probably have been quite content to have it that way.”
The Warner family home in Aberdeen Park, Highbury
Jeffrey & Co, Wallpaper Factory & Showroom, 64 Essex Rd – the family business run by Metford Warner, where Horace worked with his brother Marcus
Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitafields, where Horace Warner was Sunday School Superintendent
Horace Warner’s photograph of one of the yards off Quaker St
Horace Warner’s photograph of Union Place off Quaker St
Horace Warner’s photograph of the children who lived in the yards beside Quaker St in 1900
Washing Day, Horace Warner’s photograph of children boiling up hot water for laundry
Little Adelaide’s Best & Only Boots – a photograph by Horace Warner that Ruth Finken, his daughter, remembers upon the drawing room wall as a child – the Bedford Institute distributed boots to children
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You can see more of Horace Warner’s photographs here
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana
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Today I present the etchings of John Thomas Smith who is featured in THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S CRIES OF LONDON which is included in the sale.
This is William Conway of Crab Tree Row, Bethnal Green, who walked twenty-five miles every day, calling, “Hard metal spoons to sell or change.” Born in 1752 in Worship St, Spitalfields, he is pictured here forty-seven years into his profession, following in the footsteps of his father, also an itinerant trader. Conway had eleven walks around London which he took in turn, wore out a pair of boots every six weeks and claimed that he never knew a day’s illness.
This is just one of the remarkable portraits by John Thomas Smith collected together in a large handsome volume entitled “Vagabondiana,” published in 1817, that I discovered in the collection of the Bishopsgate Institute. John Thomas Smith is an intriguing and unjustly neglected artist of the early nineteenth century who is chiefly remembered today for being born in the back of a Hackney carriage in Great Portland St and for his murky portrait of Joseph Mallord William Turner.
On the opening page of “Vagabondiana”, Smith’s project is introduced to the reader with delicately ambiguous irony. “Beggary, of late, has become so dreadful in London, that the more active interference of the legislature was deemed absolutely necessary, indeed the deceptions of the idle and sturdy were so various, cunning and extensive, that it was in most instances extremely difficult to discover the real object of charity. Concluding, therefore, that from the reduction of metropolitan beggars, several curious characters would disappear by being either compelled to industry, or to partake of the liberal parochial rates, provided for them in their respective work-houses, it occurred to the author of the present publication, that likenesses of the most remarkable of them, with a few particulars of their habits, would not be unamusing to those to whom they have been a pest for several years.”
Yet in spite of these apparently self-righteous, Scrooge-like, sentiments – that today might be still be voiced by any number of venerable bigots – John Thomas Smith’s pictures tell another story. From the moment I cast my eyes upon these breathtakingly beautiful engravings, I was captivated by their human presence. There are few smiling faces here, because Smith allows his subjects to retain their self possession, and his fine calligraphic line celebrates their idiosyncrasy borne of ingenious strategies to survive on the street.
You can tell from these works that John Thomas Smith loved Rembrandt, Hogarth and Goya’s prints because the stylistic influences are clear, in fact Smith became keeper of drawings and prints at the British Museum. More surprising is how modern these drawings feel – there are several that could pass as the work of Mervyn Peake. Heath Robinson’s drawings also spring to mind, especially his illustrations to Shakespeare and there are a couple of craggy stooping figures woven of jagged lines that are worthy of Ronald Searle or Quentin Blake.
If you are looking for the poetry of life, you will find it in abundance in these unsentimental yet compassionate studies that cut across two centuries to bring us a vivid sense of London street life in 1817. It is a dazzling vision of London that Smith proposes, populated by his vibrant characters.
The quality of Smith’s portraits transcend any condescension because through his sympathetic curiosity Smith came to portray his vagabonds with dignity, befitting an artist who was literally born in the street, who walked the city, who knew these people and who drew them in the street. He narrowly escaped a lynch mob once when his motives were misconstrued and he was mistaken for a police sketch artist. No wonder his biography states that, “Mr Smith happily escaped the necessity of continuing his labours as an artist, being appointed keeper of prints & drawings at the British Museum.”
Smith described his subjects as “curious characters” and while some may be exotic, it is obvious that these people cannot all fairly be classed as vagabonds, unless we chose instead to celebrate “Vagabondiana” as the self-respecting state of those who eek existence at the margins through their own wits. One cannot deny the romance of vagabond life, with its own culture and custom. Through pathos, John Thomas Smith sought to expose common human qualities and show vagabonds as people, rather than merely as pests or vermin to be driven out.
A Jewish mendicant, unable to walk, who sat in a box on wheels in Petticoat Lane
Israel Potter, one of the oldest menders of chairs still living
Strolling clowns
Bernado Millano, the bladder man
Itinerant third generation vendor of elegies, Christmas carols and love songs
A crippled sailor advertises his maritime past
George Smith, a brush maker afflicted with rheumatism who sold chickweed as bird food
A native of Lucca accompanying his dancing dolls upon the bagpipes
Blinded in one eye, this beggar seeks reward for sweeping the street
Priscilla who sat in the street in Clerkenwell making quilts
Anatony Antonini, selling artificial silk flowers adorned with birds cast in wax
This boot lace seller was a Scotman who lost his hands in the wars
Charles Wood and his dancing dog
Staffordshire ware vendors bought their stock from the Paddington basin and sold it door to door
Rattle-puzzle vendors
A blind beggar with a note hung round his neck appealing for charity
Pickled cucumbers!
Very fine, Very cheap
Tinker
Fly poster
Door mats
Windmills
Live haddock
Henry Dinsdale
Plaster casts
Roasting Jack
Young lambs
The flying pie man
A poor painter removing
Umbrellas to mend
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Gentle Author assembles a choice selection of CRIES OF LONDON, telling the stories of the artists and celebrated traders, and revealing the unexpected social realities contained within these cheap colourful prints produced for the mass market.
For centuries, these lively images of familiar hawkers and pedlars have been treasured by Londoners. In the capital, those who had no other means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.
John Allin, Painter
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Today I present the paintings of John Allin who is featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, ARTISTS WHO PAINTED LONDON’S EAST END STREETS IN THE 20TH CENTURY which is included in the sale
Gun St, Spitalfields
John Allin (1934-1991) took to painting while serving a six month prison sentence for receiving some stolen shirts and achieved considerable success in the sixties and seventies with his vivid intricate pictures recalling the East End of his childhood. There is a dreamlike quality to these visions in sharp focus of an emotionalised cityscape, created at a time when the Jewish people were leaving to seek better housing in the suburbs and their culture was fading from those streets which had once been its home.
Returning from National Service in the Merchant Navy, Allin worked in the parks department planting trees, later as a swimming pool attendant and then as a long distance lorry driver – all before his conviction and imprisonment. After discovering his artistic talent, he devoted himself to painting and won attention with his first exhibition in 1969 at the Portal Gallery, specialising in primitive and outsider art. In 1974, he collaborated with Arnold Wesker on a book of reminiscence, “Say Goodbye: You may never see them again” in which he reveals an equivocation about the East End. “I saw it as a place where people lived, earned their living, grew up, moved on … they had dignity … I like painting the past with dignity…” he said in an interview with Wesker, “but what they’ve done to the East End is diabolical! They’ve scuppered it, built and built and torn down and torn out and took lots of identity away and made it into just a concrete nothing… But people go on, don’t they? Eating their eels and giving their custom where they’ve always given their custom … Funny how people can go on and take anything and everything.”
Like Joe Orton in the theatre, Allin’s reputation as an ex-con fuelled his reputation in newspapers and on television but he found there was a price to pay, as he revealed to Wesker, “You know how I started painting don’t you? In prison! Well, when I come out the kids at school give my kid a rough time … the silly bloody journalists didn’t help. ‘Jail-bird becomes painter!’ You’d’ve thought I’d done God knows what … I mean the neighbours used to say things like ‘Look at ‘im! Jail-bird and he’s on telly! Ought to be sent back inside the nick!’ I was the oddity in the district, the lazy fat bastard that paints. Give me a half a chance and I’d move mate.” In fact, Allin joined Gerry Cottle’s Circus, touring as a handyman to create another book, “John Allin’s Circus Life” in 1982.
Although he was the first British recipient of the international Prix Suisse de Peinture Naive award in 1979, the categorisation of Outsider or Primitive artist is no longer adequate to apply to John Allin. More than twenty years after his death, his charismatic paintings deserve to be recognised as sophisticated works which communicate an entire social world through an unapologetically personal and emotionally charged visual vocabulary.
Spitalfields Market, Brushfield St.
Great Synagogue, Brick Lane.
Jewish Soup Kitchen, Brune St.
Christ Church School, Brick Lane.
Heneage St and Brick Lane.
Rothschild Dwellings, Spitalfields.
Whitechapel Rd.
Christ Church Park, Commmercial St.
Wentworth St.
Fashion St with gramophone man in the foreground..
Churchill Walk.
Young Communist League rally, corner of Brick Lane and Old Montague St.
Hessel St.
Snow Scene.
Anti-Fascist Rally at Gardiners’ Corner, 1936.
Cole’s Chicken Shop, Cobb St.
Factory Workers
Paintings copyright © Estate of John Allin
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
