Travellers Children In London Fields
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Copies of Colin O’Brien’s TRAVELLERS CHILDREN IN LONDON FIELDS are included in the sale
“I came across the travellers whilst I was photographing a deserted warehouse in the London Fields area in 1987. They had parked their caravans in and around Martello St, near the railway arches by the station. This part of Hackney was very run down in the eighties. The streets were littered with rubbish and many of the decaying Victorian terraces were being demolished. The area was neglected and dangerous, with graffiti everywhere.
The travellers were Irish, mostly families with three or four children, living in modern caravans which looked extremely cramped but comfortable. On the first week I started to take one or two Polaroid shots of the children which I gave to them to show their parents. Some of the parents then dressed the children up and sent them out for me to take more pictures.
I continued to take many more images over a period of three weeks and got to know some of the travellers well. They took me into their confidence and trusted me with their children. It was only when I started to print the images that I realised what an amazing set of photographs they were.
When I returned to the site on the fourth week the families had gone. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was – after all, this is what travellers do, they move on. I had no way of contacting them but I was left with an amazing set of pictures.”
Colin O’Brien
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
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Remembering A Hoxton Childhood
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Today I present these extracts to give you a flavour of AS Jasper’s memoir of growing up in the East End at the beginning of the twentieth century, A HOXTON CHILDHOOD, which was acclaimed as a classic when it was described by the Observer as ‘Zola without the trimmings.’
My father had a distinct Roman nose, a full moustache, slightly bandy legs and drooping shoulders. His main object in life was to be continually drunk and he had every opportunity to keep that way. His job was delivering overmantels and small furniture to various places in East London. He used to go out at five in the morning. First call was the local pub for rum and milk, this he could keep up all day. He always had money. Of every three articles he delivered, one was nicked, and the proceeds shared among the men who loaded him up. But at home he was tight with his money. I don’t ever remember my mother having a week’s wages off him – six or seven shillings was the most she ever received.
The reason he never gave her regular wages was he knew my mother could always earn a few shillings with her machine. To me, my mother was the most wonderful woman on earth. I find it hard to describe the love that she gave us. She had come to this country at the age of eighteen. Her family were musicians and had played at the royal Dutch Court. I never discovered why they emigrated – probably thought they could do better here.
When I was old enough to understand, I asked her what made her marry a man like my father. She told me that he had taken her out many times, but she always had to be home early for my grandmother was very strict. Eventually one night he brought her home past midnight and Grandmother refused to open the door. Consequently, he took her to his own place, made her pregnant and they had to get married. He deceived her from the start, she never got over the fact that he gave her a brass wedding ring.
In 1915, several commodities were in short supply. Among them were screws and glue. If any could be obtained, a good price could be had from the small cabinet-makers in the district.
Evidently, during their drinking bouts, the old man told Gerry what a wonderful market there was for screws and glue and how he wished he could get hold of some. Gerry was working in Bethnal Green Road, making munition boxes. Plenty of screws and glue were used in their construction. Gerry reckoned he could get plenty but some arrangement would have to be made to collect them. He could get them out during his afternoon tea break, but not dinner-time or night-time. I was approached and asked to go each day to meet Gerry during his afternoon tea break.
Mum went mad when she knew what they were up to, but between the two of them they managed to convince her there was no risk. I had to take a shopping bag to school with me and then proceed to Bethnal Green Road at four o’clock. I can’t remember the name of the pub where I had to meet Gerry. At the side of the pub there was a gents’ toilet that was always open.
When Gerry came along I would dive in and he would follow. He would quickly undo his apron and take out packets of screws and packets of dried glue from inside his trousers. He also had his pockets stuffed. They were quickly dropped in the bag and I would walk home. This I had to do every day of the week and Saturday mornings also. The old man would take them on his round and flog them to various small cabinet-makers. On Saturday afternoons they would share out the proceeds. I don’t remember ever getting anything out of this, but I suppose I must have done. Mum wouldn’t have let me do it for nothing. It’s a marvel I didn’t grow up a criminal the things I had to do for them.
Mum decided to start selling clothes again. One Friday she said to me, ‘Stan, I want you to go down Hoxton in the morning and see if you can find a site where we can pitch a stall.’ The market was usually chock-a-block with stalls but this didn’t deter her from sending me to have a look round. I started from the ‘narrow way’ of Hoxton and walked along towards Old Street, but couldn’t see many vacant places. Coming back, I saw somewhere that took my eye. In the centre of the road between Nuttall Street and Wilmer Gardens were two public lavatories, flanked all round by a wide pavement. There were two or three stalls there but plenty of room for more. Home I went and told Mum. This pleased her and she thought she could do all right there, but I had lost my cart.
Some time ago, I had to go to Whiston Street Gasworks for three penn’orth of coke. To get the coke I went in the gate, paid my threepence in the office and got a ticket. I then went to where the men were filling the sacks, got loaded and went back to where I had left my cart. When I got there someone had pinched it. I should have known better. The lads round there could take your laces out of your boots and you wouldn’t know they were gone. I had to carry the coke home and swore I would somehow get my cart back. Mum worked hard all that week and bought and mended any old clothes she could find and got them ready for the stall on the coming Saturday.
Opposite the house where we lived was a coal shop and they had a couple of barrows which they let out on hire. I booked one for Saturday, when at eight sharp I got it loaded up with two sacks of clothes, old boots and anything Mum thought she could sell. I pushed the barrow and Mum walked alongside of me. I was just hoping the pitch was vacant. It was and I was overjoyed.
I propped up the barrow with the front legs I had brought along with me so that Mum could sit on it. We had some boards and these we laid out on the barrow. Mum unpacked the clothes and we were away. By nine-thirty people were beginning to flock into the market and we soon had some customers. The frocks and pinafores went like wildfire. ‘Fifteen pence the frocks,’ Mum would say, and ‘ninepence the pinafores.’
About midday we were half sold out. I asked Mum if she would like some tea. ‘Ere y’are, son,’ she said, and took the money out of the takings. I got a jug of tea and some sandwiches and we ate them ravenously. We’d had no breakfast owing to our having to start out early. Three o’clock came and we had sold out. Mum told me to stay with the barrow while she went shopping, and came back loaded. She treated me to the pictures and gave me money to buy sweets. I had never known such times.
POSTSCRIPT BY A.S. JASPER
I find that few realise how bad conditions were such a comparatively short time ago. (‘Your story reads more like something out of Dickens,’ is a typical comment.) It was easy, it seems, for the better-off to be unaware of the appalling poverty and near starvation that existed. But those of us (and there are plenty) who remember lining-up in the snow at the local Mission for a jug of soup or second-hand boots, begging for relief at the Poor Law Institution, being told to take our caps off and address officials as ‘sir’, realise it all too well. Yet amid those terrible times, we found time to laugh. We did not expect many pleasures out of life, but those we could get we took to the full. Perhaps it was this that enabled us to survive and perhaps this is why some of my older readers said they looked back with nostalgia and even affection to some aspects of those old days.
To my younger readers, may I say, ‘Be thankful that you were born now and not then. Go forward, but try to be tolerant of your parents on the way.’
Illustrations copyright © Estate of James Boswell
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AS Jasper, Author & Cabinet-Maker
A Hoxton Childhood & The Years After
James Boswell, Artist & Illustrator
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More Ghastly Facades
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Despite everything, the relentless advance of facadism continues across London as illustrated by these most recent examples. THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM is included in the sale.
In Newell St next to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St Anne, Limehouse
Nineteenth century warehouse in Norton Folgate facaded by British Land
Former Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel
Corner of Half Moon St and Piccadilly
Former American Embassy, Grosvenor Sq, designed by Eero Saarinen in 1960
All that remains of the Kings Rd Odeon. Originally named the Gaumont Palace, it was designed by cinema architect William Edward Trent and opened in 1934.
Eighteenth Century Weaver’s House in Norton Folgate facaded by British Land
All that remains of Kensington Odeon. Originally built in as 1926 as The Kensington in 1926, designed by Julian Randolph Leathart & W.F Grainger.
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“As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio.”
The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.
As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.
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My Love For The Cries Of London
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THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S CRIES OF LONDON is included in the sale
Cries of London 1600, reproduced from Samuel Pepys’ Album © Magdalene College, Cambridge
Costermonger by Marcellus Laroon, 1687 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Pedlar by Marcellus Laroon, 1687 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
‘Two Bunches a Penny, Primroses, Two Bunches a Penny!’ The Primrose Seller by Francis Wheatley, 1793 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
‘Strawberries, Scarlet Strawberries’ by Francis Wheatley, 1793 (image courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Hair Brooms outside Shoreditch Church by William Marshall Craig, 1804 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Showman with a raree show at Hyde Park Corner by William Marshall Craig, 1804 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
‘Rabbit, Rabbit – Nice fat Rabbit!’ by Luke Clennell 1812 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
‘Lilies of the Valley, Sweet Lilies of the Valley’ by Luke Clennell 1812 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
Pickled Cucumbers by John Thomas Smith, 1816 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
The Flying Pie Man by John Thomas Smith, 1816 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
London boardmen & women by George Scharf 1825-33 © British Museum
Long Song Seller, engraved from a photograph by Richard Beard, 1851 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
The dispossessed and those with no other income were always able to cry their wares for sale in London. By turning their presence into performance with their Cries, they claimed the streets as their theatre – winning the lasting affections of generations of Londoners and embodying the soul of the city in the popular imagination. Thus, through time, the culture of the capital’s street Cries became integral to the distinctive identity of London.
Undertaking interviews with stallholders in Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Columbia Road and other East End markets in recent years led me to consider the cultural legacy of urban street trading. While this phenomenon might appear transitory and fleeting, I discovered a venerable tradition in the Cries of London. Yet even this genre of popular illustrated prints, which began in the seventeenth century, was itself preceded by verse such as London Lackpenny attributed to the fifteenth century poet John Lydgate that drew upon an earlier oral culture of hawkers’ Cries. From medieval times, the great number of Cries in London became recognised by travellers throughout Europe as indicative of the infinite variety of life in the British capital.
Given the former ubiquity of the Cries of London, the sophistication of many of the images, their significance as social history, and their existence as almost the only portraits of working people in London through four centuries, it astonishes me that there has been little attention paid to this subject and so I have set out to reclaim this devalued cultural tradition.
I take my cue from Samuel Pepys who pasted three sets of Cries into his albums of London & Westminster in a chronological sequence spanning a century, thereby permitting an assessment of the evolution of the style of the prints as well as social change in the capital in his era. In my book, I have supplemented these with another dozen series published over the following centuries which trace the development of the Cries right into our own time. My policy has been to collate a personal selection of those that delight me, those that speak most eloquently of the life of the street and those created by artists who demonstrated an affinity with the Criers.
Through the narrow urban thoroughfares and byways, hawkers announced their wares by calling out a repeated phrase that grew familiar to their customers, who learned to recognise the Cries of those from whom they bought regularly. By nature of repetition, these Cries acquired a musical quality as hawkers improvised upon the sounds of the words, evolving phrases into songs. Commonly, Cries also became unintelligible to those who did not already know what was being sold. Sometimes the outcome was melodic and lyrical, drawing the appreciation of bystanders, and at other times discordant and raucous as hawkers strained their voices to be heard across the longest distance.
Over time, certain Cries became widely adopted, and it is in written accounts and songbooks that we find the earliest records. Print collections of pictures of Criers also became known as ‘Cries’ and although the oldest set in London dates from around 1600, there are those from Paris which predate these by a century. Characteristically, the Cries represented peripatetic street traders or pedlars, yet other street characters were also included from the start. At first, the Cries were supplemented by the bellman and the town crier, but then preachers, beggars, musicians, performers were added as the notion of the Cries of London became expanded by artists and print sellers seeking greater novelty through elaborating upon the original premise.
Before the age of traffic, the streets of London offered a common public space for all manner of activity, trading, commerce, sport, entertainment and political rallies. Yet this arena of possibility, which is the primary source of the capital’s cultural vitality has also invited the consistent attention of those who seek policing and social control upon the premise of protecting citizens from each other, guarding against crime and preventing civil unrest. It suits the interest of those who would rule the city that, in London, street traders have always been perceived as equivocal characters with an identity barely distinguished from vagrants. Thus the suspicion that their itinerant nature facilitated thieving and illicit dealing, or that women might be selling their bodies as as well as their legitimate wares has never been dispelled.
Like the internet, the notion of the street as a space where people may communicate and do business freely can be profoundly threatening to some. It is a tension institutionalised in this country through the issuing of licences to traders, criminalising those denied such official endorsement, while on the continent of Europe the right to sell in the street is automatically granted to every citizen. Depending upon your point of view, the itinerants are those who bring life to the city through their occupation of its streets or they are outcasts who have no place in a developed modern urban environment.
When I interviewed Tony Purser on his last afternoon after fifty-two years selling flowers outside Fenchurch Street Station in the City of London, he admitted to me that as a boy he assisted his father Alfie, and, before licences were granted in 1962, they were both regularly arrested. Their stock was confiscated, they were charged three shillings and spent the night in the cells at Bishopsgate Police Station, before going back to trade again next day.
Street trading proposes an interpretation of the ancient myth of London as a city paved with gold that is not without truth. Many large British corporate retailers including Tesco, started by Jack Cohen in 1919, Marks & Spencer, started by Michael Marks in 1884, owe their origin to single stalls in markets – emphasising the value of street trading to wider economic development.
In the twentieth century, the Cries of London found their way onto cigarette cards, chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, tea towels, silk scarves, dinner services and, famously, tins of Yardley talcum powder from 1912 onwards, becoming divorced from the reality they once represented as time went by, copied and recopied by different artists.
Yet the sentimentally cheerful tones applied by hand to prints that were contrived to appeal to the casual purchaser, chime with the resilience required by traders selling in the street. And it is our respect for their spirit and resourcefulness which may account for the long lasting popularity of these poignant images of the self-respecting poor who turned their trades into performances. Even now, it is impossible to hear the cries of market traders and newspaper sellers without succumbing to their spell, as the last reverberations of a great cacophonous symphony echoing across time and through the streets of London.
Surely none can resist the romance of the Cries of London and the raffish appeal of the liberty of vagabondage, of those who had no indenture or task master, and who travelled wide throughout the city, witnessing the spectacle of its streets, speaking with a wide variety of customers, and seeing life. In the densely-populated neighbourhoods, it was the itinerants’ cries that marked the times of day and announced the changing seasons of the year. Before the motorcar, their calls were a constant of street life in London. Before advertising, their songs were the jingles that announced of the latest, freshest produce or appealing gimcrack. Before radio, television and internet, they were the harbingers of news, and gossip, and novelty ballads. These itinerants had nothing but they had possession of the city.
The Cries of London have taught me the essential truth of London street traders down through the centuries, and it is one that still holds today – they do not need your sympathy, they only want your respect, and your money.
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The Punjabi Punk
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A MODEST LIVING, Memoirs of a Cockney Sikh by Suresh Singh is included in the sale. In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh tells the story of his family who 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 Sikh recipes by Jagir Kaur, Suresh’s wife.
Suresh Singh & Jagir Kaur at 38 Princelet St (Photograph by Patricia Niven)
Suresh (in the hat) with punk friends in Spitalfields, 1977
Encouraged by my Trotskyite, Leninist, Marxist and Maoist teachers at the City & East London College – and even Eddy Stride, Rector of Christ Church whose thinking was out on a limb – I became rebellious. I questioned everything and could no longer accept things as they were. I preferred to wear clothes from jumble sales and I looked different from other people. Dad appreciated that too. We both had swag. He was more of a snappy dresser and I was more of a punk.
He never minded when I got my ears pierced, and Mum heated up the needle so I could pierce my nose, a very do-it-yourself job. Dad understood my actions as being like the yogis who wore dreadlocks and painted their bodies with mud.
He preferred that I discovered my own expressions of identity instead of asking him, ‘Dad, can I buy a flash car?’ or even, ‘Can you give me the money for a pair of Nike trainers?’ He would rather I find a pair of old football boots, take the studs off the soles, shave them and make them into a nice pair of shoes by painting a Union Jack or something on them. He liked the sense of surprise and was curious to see what I would come up with. It was so exciting to me at fifteen years old. It gave me the courage to put two fingers up to the skinheads and say, ‘You try it now!’
I was an outsider. I was not inside the white community, I was not inside the Bengali community and I was not inside the Sikh community either, because Dad did not want me to be a stereotypical Sikh. So instead I chose the freedom of an anarchic existence.
I remember seeing a skinhead band, Screwdriver, in the student union at the Polytechnic in Whitechapel. The audience were entirely skinheads and I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to die,’ because I was the only Asian there. But I am still here. At the Marquee in Soho, I went to see Generation X and Boomtown Rats. At the Acklam Hall in Portobello, I saw The Fall. All for fifty pence. Through word of mouth, I was able to catch Blues Dub sound systems nights in big basements in Notting Hill. These were exciting times.
In retrospect, I think it was less about rebellion and more about creativity. This explosion of musical culture in London came at the right time for me, just as I left school. The Rastafarians believed the world would end in 1977. Apparently Haile Selassie said that ‘When seven sevens clash, that is the year of reckoning.’
I started listening to the Sex Pistols, though I preferred the early days of Siouxsie & the Banshees before they were signed up. No-one would sign them at first because they did not know how to play their instruments and Siouxsie did not know how to sing, she just wailed like a banshee.
I was a good drummer, even though I had never learned how to play. I just picked up a pair of sticks because I used to play the flute at school and got bored with it. I used to play Dad’s Indian dholki (hand drum) quite a bit at home, so I knew I could do it. I got a drum kit that I bought out of the back of Melody Maker for twenty-five quid. It was a good kit made by Rogers. I practised at home in the back room in Princelet St. A lot of the time I rehearsed using just my drum sticks and telephone directories. I put the directories in place of the snare drum to practice without making noise, allowing me to strengthen my arm and wrist action.
I did not know Spizzenergi at all, although I heard through the grapevine that they were looking for a drummer. Spizz, the frontman, was a nice posh white kid from Solihull. He was living in Portobello Rd, where a lot of people were playing and rehearsing music in the squats. I used to cycle over. I found a bike in an abandoned Anderson shelter in Parfett St which meant I could travel all over London. I made new friends at City & East London College, including Mark Fineberg who lived in Belsize Park, so my social life expanded beyond the East End.
Spizz knocked on my door in Princelet St one day. I looked out of the window at the top of the house. He shouted, ‘Look, I’ve got a van here. Get your drums in the back, we’re going on tour with Siouxsie & the Banshees.’ I said, ‘Who?’ and he yelled, ‘Do you want to go on tour with us?’ So I asked, ‘Can I go, Dad? I’ve got a drum kit,’ and he said, ‘You’ve got a drum kit, so you can go.’
In true do-it-yourself spirit we put our records in plastic sleeves and and delivered them ourselves to Rough Trade in Portobello. I loved doing our John Peel session in November 1979 and seeing in 1980 at Au Plan K in Brussels. When we put out ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’ it became a huge hit and the members of the band thought they were going to become pop stars. They wanted the sound to become more con- trolled and less spontaneous. I did not want us to end up sounding like a bunch of session players. I was Hero Shema, the drummer who never played in an orchestrated fashion. ‘Bollocks to this,’ I thought, ‘I’m shipping out.’ Dad always said, ‘If your ego overrides you, you’ve had it.’ I could see the egos expanding. I recognised the band were losing their edge. Dad said, ‘When that happens, just ship out.’ It was time to be in the world and not of it.
As an adolescent I loved the idea of not conforming – not being different just for the sake of it but to avoid becoming part of the status quo. By questioning, I learned different ways of doing things and different ways of thinking. It taught me to consider the value of things and resist becoming set in my ideas. At that time, black culture was becoming more accepted in this country and, through sharing music, people learned to respect other cultures. Most important for me was that I was not rebelling against my parents, which was quite different from my mates’ situations. They would tell me, ‘My dad hates me being a punk, I can’t even get out the house without my old man going “Who are the Boomtown Rats? And what are those trousers you’re wearing?”’
My parents’ acceptance of punk made me feel that it was of value and gave me more confidence in my own anarchic understanding of what was valuable in life. Dad was the same. He was holding two fingers up to the gurdwaras and the Sikhs, because he had his own way of living and being a Sikh. If your parents love and support you, you do not need to rebel against them because you know that they value you as an individual in your own right. Dad did not want to create another Joginder Singh, he wanted me to find my own identity as Suresh without losing my Sikhism.
Sometimes Sikhs would come round to our house and ask, ‘Why do you let your son pierce his nose?’ and Dad would say, ‘Well, he isn’t doing you any harm is he? Has he said anything to you? No? Well, let it be.’ Their sons would come round dressed up, wearing badly-fitted suits, they just looked terrible. Dad loved it and got off on winding people up – I actually think that was what gave him the edge.
Suresh plays drums for Spizzenergi at Lewisham Odeon 31st October 1979 (Photograph copyright © Philippe Carly)
The cover of Where’s Captain Kirk? reproduced courtesy of Spizz
Suresh’s cat Scratti named after Scritti Pollitti
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The Boss Of Bethnal Green
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THE BOSS OF BETHNAL GREEN is included in the sale.
Julian Woodford uncovers the breathtakingly appalling life of Joseph Merceron – the notorious Huguenot, gangster and corrupt East End magistrate. By revealing the story of the man who gave the East End the bad reputation which still lingers today and who created the templates of the mobster and of the political miscreant that we recognise in our own times – Julian Woodford’s shrewd biography makes an essential contribution to our understanding of the history of London.
Joseph Merceron by Joe McLaren
At 134 Brick Lane is the Cinnamon restaurant, the self-proclaimed ‘King of all Kings for curries on Brick Lane,’ but in 1764, this was a Huguenot pawnbroker’s shop and, on 29th January of that year, a baby boy was born there. His name was Joseph Merceron and he would grow up to be The Boss of Bethnal Green – the Godfather of Regency London.
My book has been a decade in its gestation. I first came across Joseph Merceron’s name late in 2005, when I happened upon a brief reference to him in Roy Porter’s London: A Social History. Porter described Merceron as an early corrupt political ‘Boss’ who had dominated the East End some one hundred and fifty years before it became the home of the Kray twins. By a strange coincidence, I had seen Merceron’s name just the day before, listed as a defendant in a series of legal cases at the National Archives. I was intrigued: Merceron is not a common name in England. Was this the same man? The internet confirmed that it was, and revealed that he had clearly been a larger-than-life character. His story seemed to anticipate the plot of the Marlon Brando movie On the Waterfront, where a corrupt gangster is taken on – and eventually toppled – by a brave and determined local priest.
Over the next few days, I found that Merceron was name-checked by virtually every book about the history of London’s darker side, from academic classics like Dorothy George’s London Life in the Eighteenth Century to true-crime exposés like Fergus Linnane’s London’s Underworld. The facts given were always suspiciously similar, and I soon learned that all these accounts had their origins in The Rule of the Boss, a chapter in Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s seminal 1906 work on English local government, The Parish and the County. The Webbs, a husband-and-wife team of early socialists, were embarking on a nine-volume treatise still regarded as a classic by historians. They intended that the centuries of inefficiency and corruption they painstakingly described would be swept away by the statistical analysis and central planning espoused by the early Labour movement.
The Webbs’ impeccable research had unearthed parts of Merceron’s story, seeing him as the perfect illustration of corruption within English parochial self-government. The Marxist academic Harold Laski wrote that ‘they have added new figures to our history, the school books of the next generation will make Merceron [and his like] illuminating examples of what a democracy must avoid.’ As it turned out, Professor Laski was wrong: the Second World War intervened, and the subsequent prominence given to 20th century history in school curricula meant that Merceron’s story has been largely forgotten.
The Rule of the Boss is an intriguing read, but the Webbs were not biographers, and had no interest in dissecting the personal life behind Merceron’s rule. Their account leaves fundamental questions unanswered. Who exactly was Joseph Merceron? Where did he come from? What drove him? How did he become so wealthy? How did he gain power while so young, and retain it for so long? Frustratingly, all subsequent accounts I could find regurgitated parts of the Webbs’ story but failed to provide the answers. Even a brief reference to Merceron in the Dictionary of National Biography could shed no further light. In his excellent book of tales about Brick Lane, An Acre of Barren Ground (2005), Jeremy Gavron had drawn some interesting conclusions about Merceron’s links to the brewer Sampson Hanbury, but when we met Jeremy explained that, apart from this, he too had struggled to make headway with Merceron’s wider story.
Convinced that Merceron’s story was worth telling, I delved deeper. Searching through the births, marriages and deaths columns of The Times, with the help of the electoral register I traced Merceron’s family tree forwards and learned there were just a handful of families with that name living in the United Kingdom. I wrote to the most promising candidates, and a couple of days later was rewarded with a call from an elderly lady who introduced herself as Susan Kendall, Merceron’s great-great-granddaughter. Mrs Kendall added that she would be delighted to invite me to her home in Wiltshire but, she added, ‘You had better come quick, because I’m ninety-three!’
I rushed off to the pretty village of Ramsbury to meet Mrs Kendall and over a cup of coffee explained my plans. But when I mentioned Beatrice Webb, Mrs Kendall almost exploded. ‘That beastly woman,’ she exclaimed, had published Merceron’s story just before her own birth. The Mercerons were a wealthy and respected county family in Edwardian times, and Susan and her sisters were presented at Court to Queen Mary as teenagers. The Webbs’ story had not been helpful, to say the least, and Mrs Kendall expressed satisfaction that finally I was going to disprove it. This was not promising.
When I nervously explained that, based on my research to date, if anything Merceron had been even more of a tyrant than the Webbs had described, I wondered if I was about to be asked to leave. But Mrs Kendall reflected. ‘If that is the true story,’ she said, ‘then of course you must tell it.’ From that moment on, she gave me every support and we corresponded regularly until her death a few years later. She generously lent me the few family papers she had, but said I would need to meet with her nephew Daniel to see the rest.
Daniel Merceron was serving overseas with the army. It was a frustrating several months before he returned and I was able to visit him, but it was worth the wait. Daniel left me with a cup of tea while he disappeared into his attic, returning with Merceron’s two-hundred-year-old tin chest: full of deeds, letters and other papers which shed new light on Merceron’s misdeeds, added colour to his personal life and provided crucial clues to the existence and location of other original records of the Court of Chancery at the National Archives – heavy parchment rolls, encrusted with dust and unopened for two centuries. They told a fascinating story – the depths of an obsession with money which led Merceron to lock away his half-sister in a lunatic asylum and steal the inheritances of his nephews, as well as that of a mentally ill orphaned girl, all before he was twenty-three years old.
But even this was outshone by the other surprise Daniel had in store for me. He disappeared again, returning brandishing an old flintlock pistol that he announced was the weapon with which the madman James Hadfield tried to assassinate King George III at the Drury Lane theatre in 1800. Daniel was unclear how the gun had fallen into Merceron’s hands, but within an hour on the internet we had found the transcript of Hadfield’s trial and discovered that the key prosecution witness, who had picked up the pistol after Hadfield fired it at the King, was none other than Merceron’s clerk.
Pulling this thread further, I uncovered Merceron’s links to a network of government spies, set up to monitor the activities of underground revolutionary societies during the Napoleonic wars. This was the story the Webbs had missed. By keeping Merceron and his associates in power, successive British governments, desperate to stamp out radical republicanism after the French Revolution, repeatedly turned a blind eye to his criminal operations. In doing so, they abetted a social catastrophe. Joseph Merceron’s story turns out to be more than a tale about a man and his money. It is also about the origins of London’s East End, a world of riots, lynching, public executions and extreme poverty where whole families could easily starve or freeze to death.
As Merceron became extraordinarily wealthy, Bethnal Green became the epitome of the East End Victorian slum. By 1838, when young Charles Dickens chose it as the home of the murderer Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, Bethnal Green was beset by wretched poverty, the bankrupt home of cholera and typhus, its rotting workhouse crammed with more than a thousand starving paupers.
Joseph Merceron’s name is commemorated today in Merceron St, Bethnal Green, and in Merceron Houses which were erected as ‘model dwellings’ for the poor on the site of Merceron’s garden off Victoria Park Sq, in 1901 just before the Webbs reminded the world of his darker deeds.
Merceron Houses in Bethnal Green built on the site of Joseph Merceron’s garden
Joseph Merceron’s signature
The pistol used in the assassination attempt upon George III at Drury Lane in 1800
Julian Woodford researched the life of Joseph Merceron for ten years (Photo by George Woodford)
The Hanbury Hall where Joseph Merceron was baptised in 1764
The Lives Of The Nippers
To give you a chance to stock up for the cold months ahead, we are having a January sale. All titles in the online shop are half price with the discount code JANUARY until midnight on Twelfth Night.
Click here to visit the Spitalfields Life Bookshop
SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS by Horace Warner is included in the sale.
This boy is wearing Horace Warner’s hat
I often think of the lives of the Spitalfields Nippers. Around 1900, Photographer, Wallpaper Designer and Sunday School Teacher Horace Warner took portraits of children in Quaker St, who were some of the poorest in London at that time. When his personal album of these astonishing photographs came to light six years ago, we researched the lives of his subjects and published a book of all his portraits accompanied by biographies of the children.
Although we were shocked to discover that as many as a third did not reach adulthood, we were also surprised and heartened by the wide range of outcomes among the others. In spite of the deprivation they endured in their early years, many of these children survived to have long and fulfilled lives.
Walter Seabrook was born on 23rd May 1890 to William and Elizabeth Seabrook of Custance St, Hoxton. In 1901, when Walter’s portrait was taken by Horace Warner, the family were living at 24 & 1/2 Great Pearl St, Spitalfields, and Walter’s father worked as a printer’s labourer. At twenty-four years old, Walter was conscripted and fought in World War One but survived to marry Alice Noon on Christmas Day 1918 at St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green. By occupation, Walter was an electrician and lived at 2 Princes Court, Gibraltar Walk. He and Alice had three children – Walter born in 1919, Alice born in 1922 and Gladys born in 1924. Walter senior died in Ware, Hertfordshire, in 1971, aged eighty-one.
Sisters Wakefield
Jessica & Rosalie Wakefield. Jessica was born in Camden on January 16th 1891 and Rosalie at 47 Hamilton Buildings, Great Eastern St, Shoreditch on July 4th 1895. They were the second and last of four children born to William, a printer’s assistant, and Alice, a housewife. It seems likely they were living in Great Eastern St at the time Horace Warner photographed them, when Jessica was ten or eleven and Rosalie was five or six.
Jessica married Stanley Taylor in 1915 and they lived in Wandsworth, where she died in 1985, aged ninety-four. On July 31st 1918 at the age of twenty-three, Rosalie married Ewart Osborne, a typewriter dealer, who was also twenty-three years old, at St Mary, Balham. After five years of marriage, they had a son named Robert, in 1923, but Ewart left her and she was reported as being deaf. Eventually the couple divorced in 1927 and both married again. Rosalie died aged eighty-four in 1979, six years before her elder sister Jessica, in Waltham Forest.
Jerry Donovan, or ‘Dick Whittington & His Cat’
Jeremiah Donovan was born in 1895 in the City of London. His parents Daniel, news vendor, and Katherine Donovan originated in Ireland. They came to England and settled in Spitalfields at 14 Little Pearl St, Spitalfields. By 1901, the family were resident at Elizabeth Buildings, Boleyn Rd. Jeremiah volunteered for World War I in 1914 when he was nineteen and was stationed at first at City of London Barracks in Moorgate. He joined the Royal Artillery, looked after the horses for the gun carriages, but was gassed in France. In 1919, Jeremiah married Susan Nichols and they had one son, Bertram John Donovan, born in 1920. He died in Dalston in 1956 and is remembered by nine great grandchildren.
Adelaide Springett in all her best clothes
Adelaide Springett was born in February 1893 in the parish of St George-in-the-East, Wapping. Her father, William Springett came from Marylebone and her mother Margaret from St Lukes, Old St. Both parents were costermongers, although William was a dock labourer when he first married. Adelaide’s twin sisters, Ellen and Margaret, died at birth and another sister, Susannah, died aged four. Adelaide attended St Mary’s School and then St Joseph’s School. The addresses on her school admissions were 12 Miller’s Court, Dorset St, and then 26 Dorset St. In 1901, at eight years old, she was recorded as lodging with her mother at the Salvation Army Shelter in Hanbury St.
Adelaide Springett died in 1986 in Fulham aged ninety-three, without any traceable relatives, and the London Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Social Services Department was her executor.
Charlie Potter was born in Haggerston to John – a leather cutter in the boot trade – and Esther Potter. He was baptised on 13th June 1890 at St Peter’s, Hoxton Sq. In 1911, they were living at 13 Socrates Place, New Inn Yard, Shoreditch and he was working as a mould maker. Charlie married Martha Elms at St John’s, Hoxton, on 3rd August 1913. They had two children, Martha, born in 1914 and, Charles, born in 1916. In World War One, Charlie served in the Royal Field Artillery Regiment, number 132308. He died on 19th October 1954 at the Royal Free Hospital. By then, he and Martha were living 46 De Beauvoir Rd, Haggerston, and he left four hundred and seventy pounds to his widow.
Celia Compton was born in 11 Johnson St, Mile End, on April 28th 1886, to Charles – a wood chopper – and Mary Compton. Celia was one of nine children but only six survived into adulthood. Two elder brothers Charles, born in 1883, and William, born in 1884, both died without reaching their first birthdays, leaving Celia as the eldest. On January 25th 1904, she married George Hayday, a chairmaker who was ten years older than her. They lived at 5 George St, Hoxton, and had no children. After he died in 1933, she married Henry Wood the next year and they lived in George Sq until it was demolished in 1949. In later years, Celia became a moneylender and she died in Poplar in 1966 aged eighty years old.
Lizzie Flynn & Dolly Green
Lizzie Flynn was living at 19 Branch Place, Haggerston, when she was nine years old in 1901. Daughter of John and Isabella Flynn, she had two brothers and a sister. By 1911, the children were living with their widowed father at 89 Wilmer Gardens, Shoreditch. Their place of birth was listed as “Oxton” in the census. On 9th May 1915, Lizzie married Robert May at St. Andrew, Hoxton. He died at the age of just thirty-four in 1926 and they had no children. Lizzie died in Stepney in 1969, aged seventy-seven.
Dolly Green (Lydia Green) was living at 31 Hyde Rd, Hoxton, with her parents Edward and Selina in 1901 when she was twelve years old. Dolly had a brother and sister who had been born before her parents’ marriage in 1881. Dolly married Edward Moseley in 1909 at St Jude in Mildmay Grove and they had two children – Arthur born in 1912, who died in 1915, and Lydia born in 1914, who lived less than a year. In 1959, Edward Mosley remarried after his wife’s death.
Annie & Nellie Lyons – is it their mother at the window?
Annie & Nellie Lyons, born 1895 and 1901 respectively, were the sixth and ninth of ten children of Annie Daniels. Only half of Annie’s children survived to adulthood. Their mother’s words are recorded in the Bethnal Green Poor Law document of 1901.
“My name is Annie Daniels, I am thirty-five years old. My occupation is a street seller. I was born in Thrawl St to Samuel Daniels and Bridget Corfield. Around fifteen or sixteen years ago, I met William Lyons who is thirty-eight years old, at this time he was living at 4 Winfield St. He is a street hawker. The last known address for William is Margaret’s Place. I have had eight children: Margaret born 1888 in Beauvoir Sq. William born 1889 in Tyssen Place. Joseph born 1891 in Whiston St. William born in Tyssen Place died. James died in Haggerston Infirmary. Annie born in 1895 at Hoxton Infirmary. Lily born April, one year and four months ago at Baker’s Row. Ellen born April, one month ago at Baker’s Row. About ten or eleven years ago, I had a son called John. He was sent away around seven years ago to the Hackney Union House. My eldest daughter Margaret is living with my sister Sarah and her husband Cornelius Haggerty. My son Joseph is living with my other sister Caroline and her husband Charles Johnson. I have moved from various addresses over the last ten years and have been lodging with my sister Mary for three years in Dorset St previous to Lily’s birth.”
You may also like to read about
Upon the Subject of the Spitalfields Nippers
An Astonishing Photographic Discovery
