Spitalfields Life

Pamela Freedman died on Monday at the fine age of ninety-seven

Pamela Freedman at Sandys Row Synagogue by Jeremy Freedman

Pamela Freedman was a West End girl, born in 1923 in The Bricklayers Arms in Berwick St, Soho – the pub managed by her parents, Hetty & Albert Harris, just around the corner from The Blue Posts run by her grandfather. This was the only world Pamela knew, until one fateful day the treasurer of the pub’s Christmas Club absconded with all the savings and her father did the honourable thing, paying back the money to his customers out of his own pocket. It was a noble action that changed his family’s lives forever.

As a consequence, Hetty & Albert lost The Bricklayers Arms and in 1935, when Pamela was thirteen, they started a whole new life in the East End, managing The Princess Alice (now The Culpeper) in Commercial St. “When my mother saw it, she said, ‘Never in a million years! I can’t live in a place like that.’ The state of it was disgusting,” revealed Pamela, when I met her at The Princess Alice on her first return visit since the nineteen sixties, gazing wistfully around at the location that was once central to her life, rendered barely recognisable by alterations now. “The brewery sent the builders in and when they opened up the old counter, the rats ran everywhere. When my mother saw the seamen’s lodging house on the top that was rotten and neglected, she was frightened she might fall through the ceiling – the first thing the brewery was demolish the top floors,” she told me with gleeful satisfaction, explaining the curiously stunted architecture of the building today.

Although it was inauspicious circumstances that brought them to the East End, Hetty & Albert created a vibrant life at The Princess Alice with a large crowd of friendly regulars – as the exuberant pictures testify. But a far greater challenge was to come when World War II brought bombing, setting the East End ablaze, as Pamela recounted to me. “We had one night when the buzz bombs started, Daddy & I saw a buzz bomb catch three hundred people coming out of work from Old St. They all died. A lot of our customers were killed. We made dugouts in the cellar and we slept down there. We lay there listening to the clicking of the tram lines as the bombs hit. We kept coming up to see if anything was left standing. One night I came up from the cellar and everything was on fire. We told the firemen to take the beer and use it to put out the flames.We had no glass in the windows of the pub and the brewers said, ‘Stay open.’ We had no power and the brewers said, ‘Get candles and stay open.’ On the night the war ended, we sold out and we went up to the West End to celebrate.”

In the midst of this chaos, Pamela got married to Alf Freedman who lived across the street, “We grew up together and we were the same age. He was in the RAF for five years as a meteorological officer in North Africa, while I was a firewarden for three years. He came back from abroad and we decided to get married. Both families knew a lot of people and God forbid anyone should be ignored. It was the first big wedding after the war, Sandys Row Synagogue was too small, so we had it at the New West End Synagogue, St Petersburg Place, Bayswater and four hundred people came to the dinner. I was twenty-four when I got married and left the Princess Alice for good. All the draymen turned up early in the morning outside in the street to see me off. After I got married, I lived in a nice flat in Kensington but my husband was still away in the service. We were married nearly sixty years. We had a very good life. We worked hard and we went all over the world.”

Destiny took her back to the West End, her place of origin, and the foray into the East End became a single episode in her long life, but Pamela’s experiences here endowed her with a fearless quality and an unsentimental appreciation of the value of existence that remained with her. On the day in 1964 that her father Albert died at seven in the morning, the brewery expected her mother to open The Princess Alice, and although Hetty technically had a year’s grace as a widow, Pamela and her brother gave notice to the brewery at once.

They departed the East End with their mother in a taxi and never looked back, until forty years later when Pamela returned to pub at the invitation of her grandson Jeremy Freedman. Although, wisely, Pamela did ensure they kept the contents of the cellar from The Princess Alice when they left, which she and her family were still drinking decades later, including bottles of whisky worth over five hundred pounds each. But it was farewell to the East End, as Pamela herself said to me plainly, “We had no cause to come this way.”

Pamela recalled her own time behind the bar for me, outlined her personal method of dealing with troublesome customers, “My secret weapon was a syphon of soda behind the counter. I could let go as well as anybody, because I didn’t care, even though I was the governor’s daughter.” she declared. Describing Hetty & Albert’s style as landlords, she said, “Everything had to be regimented, if you put a bottle the wrong way round, God help you…it was bloody hard work.”

Pamela Freedman was an individual of extraordinary vitality, a charismatic diminutive woman with bright confident eyes, a shrewd yet upbeat generous matter and shrill energetic way of talking, constantly punctuating her speech with phrases like, “You tell people things, they wouldn’t believe you!”, “So many stories, am I boring you?” and her favourite exclamation, “Unbelievable!” This last word served as her personal leitmotif when called upon to consider the events of her life.

Hetty & Albert Harris with the locals the Princess Alice

Hetty & Albert Harris behind the bar

Hetty, Albert & Hetty’s brother Walter

1. Albert taps a keg

2. Albert connects the tap

3. Albert tightens the tap

These are the photographs that Alf & his wife-to-be Pamela Freedman exchanged when they were both twenty-one, before he left for North Africa in 1942 -“with undying love.”

Pamela standing in Wentworth St in the week of her eighty-seventh birthday, looking across Commercial St to The Princess Alice, on the occasion of her return for the first time in forty years

Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman

Catherine Wheel Alley

Bishopsgate Institute has a magnificent collection of nineteenth century watercolours collected by the first archivist Charles Goss, which offer tantalising glimpses of the last surviving tumbledown pantiled tenements and terraces, crooked alleys and hidden yards that once comprised the urban landscape of Spitalfields.

When we think of old Spitalfields, we usually consider the eighteenth and nineteenth century fragments remaining today, yet there was another Spitalfields before this. Before the roads were made up, before Commercial St was cut through, before the Market was enclosed, before Liverpool St Station was built, Spitalfields was another place entirely. Lined with coaching inns, peppered by renaissance mansions and celebrated for its production of extravagant silks and satins, it was also notorious for violent riots and rebellion, where impoverished families might starve or freeze to death.

Sunday Morning in Petticoat Lane, 1838

Old Red House, Corner of Brushfield St by J.P.Emslie, 1879

Paul’s Head, Crispin St by J.T. Wilson, 1870

The Fort & Gun Tavern and Northumberland Arms, corner of Fashion St by J.T.Wilson

Dunning’s Alley showing Lucky Bob’s formerly Duke of Wellington, Bishopsgate by J.T.Wilson, 1868

Bell Tavern, Bell Yard, Gracechurch St by J.T.Wilson, 1869

Bishopsgate at the Corner of Alderman’s Walk beside St Botolph’s church by C.J.Richardson, 1871

House of Sir Francis Dashwood, Alderman’s Walk, by C.J.Richardson, 1820

Entrance from Bishopsgate to Great St Helen’s by C.J.Richardson, 1871

Devonshire House, Bishopsgate by C.J.Richardson, 1871

The Green Dragon, Bishopsgate, coloured by S.Lowell

The Green Dragon, Bishopsgate by T. Hosmer Shepherd, coloured by S.Lowell, 1856

The Bull Inn by T.Hosmer Shepherd, 1856

The Spread Eagle in Gracechurch St by R.B.Schnebblie, 1814

Sir Paul Pindar’s Lodge, Bishopsgate c. 1760

North East View of Bishopsgate Street, 1814

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Insititute

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Lost Spitalfields

I have to report the recent death of Brick Lane icon, Thomas Hewson Finch, aged seventy-nine

Let me admit, if I had to choose one person who incarnated the spirit of Brick Lane Market, it would have been Tom – Tom the Sailor, as he was widely known – who was to be found almost every day of the week with his faithful dog Matty, stalling out on the pavement with a few bits and pieces for sale.

A distinguished gentleman of soulful character, yet with indefatigable humour and spirit, Thomas Frederick Hewson Finch had been around as long as anyone could remember, although few were aware of his origins or the extraordinary story of how he came to be there.

“In 1941, when the Germans were at war with England, that’s when I came along. My father wasn’t married to my mother. As far as I know, I was born in Goole in Yorkshire, but I don’t know for sure – no-one knows because it was 1941. I don’t think anybody cared about me, I was just a problem. I say my mother died when I was born but I don’t know, and I don’t want to know because I’ve had my life now, and I was slung in a home then which was natural. All I can remember is me lying on a floor and watching a rocking horse.

That home was St John’s in Ipswich, it’s not there any more. You went from baby to cots and then you went to beds, in other words you went through the stages. It was a big place. Loads of people like me needed somewhere to go. Why this place was picked was because there was Yanks all around. Although it may not be true, what I say is that my father was American. My mother went out with other people. She was part gypsy and she had to take care of herself, and naturally she would go with the Yanks who gave her cigarettes and stockings. Why would a woman want to go with Englishmen that were poor and had nothing?

When you sit there as an orphan and see other people being given presents, how do you imagine I felt? One child had an electric train set and I nicked it and buried it, but I when I went back to get it a year later it was rusty and no good. Why take somebody’s train set? It was how I thought. It was wrong, I know this now. I hid above a toilet for three days when they were looking for me, after they thought I had run away. As I got older, they slung me out because I was too unruly, and they put me in a stronger home. It was in East Grinstead, and the one who run it he was – now he would be locked up in  prison – he was very hard.  He used to love hitting me. He used the birch, he kept it in vinegar. He put you over a bench for six of the best. It was always me.

They sent me to a training ship for orphans on the River Medway – the Arethusa – where I reached Chief Petty Officer Boy. We slept in hammocks and you had to climb the one hundred and seventy foot masts everyday and slide down the lanyards. It was sailing ship from Harwich. From there, when you passed out you went to the Ganges in Suffolk where everyone went to go into the Royal Navy. They were training me in Morse code and typing, and I went on HMS Paladin. But I went deaf, on account of the cold weather in Iceland when I was drilling ice off a boat. I was invalided out with a pension of six shillings and ninepence a week which I sold for two hundred and fifty pounds, and with the money I bought a motorbike – a superflash.

I started working with woodworkers, Hollar Bros in Hull where I met my wife. I went in a cafe in Dagger Lane and the chap was doing no good and he asked me if I wanted the cafe for fifteen pounds a month, so I thought, “I’ll have that.” It turned out to be one hell of a place. All the bikers came down and it was packed out with motorcyclists from Brighton and all over England. I was open twenty-four hours and it was so busy you couldn’t park in the street. From there I ended up with seven nightclubs, and ten other cafes with casinos above them. I had dogs on the door, and I had one dressed as a fisherman because they knew me and I went to sea with them.

After that, I was twenty years on the run. I gave up everything when I left, me and my family, we just walked out. All the others ended up in the nick but they couldn’t catch me and I came down here to East End to get away. In other words, I was a bit of a villain. I’ve had a few premises round here, on Great Eastern St, Boundary St and two shops on Brick Lane, and in Cheshire St. I never paid for any of them. I used to have a partner, me and Terry – they called us “Tom & Jerry,” cat and mouse. Our first shop on the Hackney Rd, we sold the shop window just to get going. We used to sell nicked fireplaces, Victorian ranges and marble, you could get that stuff easy when there was no cameras. We sold them at giveaway prices, even the police came to buy from us. The shop was given to me by a Jew that was going to America, I was sitting in the Princess one day and he came in and threw the keys on the counter and said, “Take it, it’s yours!”

A camera crew came round once and asked me to show them how to sell a fireplace. We had one marked at fifteen pounds, so they filmed me and I asked “Thirty pounds” and they gave me the cash. Each time I asked more until it was seventy-five pounds. And when they said, “Can we have our money back ?” I said, “It’s your fireplace!” You can do anything in a market. Me and Terry closed up and went to the stripper pub on the corner. That’s how you sell a fireplace.

All my family are well off, they all made it. My little boy Andrew, he’s my son, he was always with me. He’s grown up now too, but I just carry on in my own stupid way. Why does a man do it?  I can only do what I’ve always done, I know it better than anything. I’ve done it all my life. Old Tom’s still an orphan, it’s the way I was brought up.”

Larger than life yet of this life, Tom the Sailor was the most charismatic rogue you could meet, with his nautical tattoos, weatherbeaten features, white mutton chop whiskers and an endless supply of yarns to regale. He delighted in ruses and fables. With the wisdom and modesty of one who had lived many lives, Tom recognised that the truth of experience is rarely simple, always ambiguous. And if, like me, you are of a similar cast of mind, then there was almost no better way to pass time and learn about the East End than hanging on Old Tom’s ear.

For years, we exchanged discreet greetings every day when I passed him outside the beigel shop and, now he is gone, I shall think of him each time I reach that spot. Brick Lane will be a lesser place without Tom the Sailor.

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