Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
The work of Geoffrey Fletcher (1923–2004) is an inspiration to me, and today I am publishing his drawings of London’s street people in the nineteen sixties from Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders of 1967.
Charlie Sylvester -“I’m Charlie Sylvester, Charlie of Whitechapel. I’ve been on the markets over forty years. I can’t keep still too long, as I have to serve the customers. Then I must take me pram and go fer some more stock. Stock’s been getting low. I go all over with me pram, getting stock, I sell anythin’ – like them gardening tools, them baking tins and plastic mugs. All kinds of junk. Them gramophone records is classic, Ma, real classic stuff. Course they ain’t long playing? Wot do you expect? Pick where you like out of them baking tins. Well, I’ll be seeing you next you’re in Whitechapel. Don’t forget. Sylvester’s the name.”
Peanuts, Tower Hill – “We’ve only been doin’ this for a few months, me peanut pram and I. I only comes twice a week, Saturdays and Sundays. Sundays is best. It’s a hot day. Hope it will stay. I’m counting on it. How many bags do I sell in a day? I’ve never counted ’em. All I want is for to sell ’em out.”
Doing the Spoons, Leicester Sq -“I’ve been in London since 1932, doin’ the spoons, mostly. I does it when I’m not with the group – if they’re away or don’t show up. I’m about the only spoon man left. No, the police don’t bother us much – they know we’re old timers. We’re playing the Square tonight, later when the crowds will come.”
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes – “It’s the facial characteristics. I can usually guess within a year. It’s the emanations – that’s why they call me the man with the X-ray eyes. I’ve been doing it thirty-two years. Thirty -two years is a long time. I’m off-form today. Sometimes I am off-form and then I won’t take their money. I’m in show business. You see me on TV before the cameras. My show took London, Paris and New York by storm.”
Selections from ‘The Merry Widow,’ Oxford St – “You need a good breath for one o’ these. It’s called a euphonium. Write it down, same as when a man makes a euphemism at dinner. If I smoked or got dissipated, I couldn’t play. I can’t play the cornet, as it is, but that’s because I only have one tooth, as I’ll show you – central eating, as you say, Guv. I come from Oldham. When I was a boy of ten, I worked in Yates’ Wine Lodge, but I broke the glasses. I’m seventy-three now, too old for a job. But I don’t want a job, I have this – the euphonium. Life is an adventure, but things is bad today. People will do you down and not be ashamed of it. They’ll glory in it. Well, that’s it. My mother-in-law is staying with us so we have plenty to eat. She gives me the cold shoulder. I’m going for a cuppa tea. Have a nice summer and lots of luck.”
Lucky White Heather – “I’ve been selling on the London streets all my life, dearie. Selling various things – gypsy things – clothes pegs – it used to be clothes pegs. The men used to make them, but they won’t now – they’re onto other things. There wasn’t much profit in them, either. You sold them at three ha’pence a dozen. That was in the old days, dearie. Now I could be earning a pound while you’re drawing me. We comes every day from Kent. People like the lucky heather. But I’ll give you the white elephant – they’re very lucky. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be selling them on the streets of London now, would we, dearie?”
Pavement Artist at Work, Trafalgar Sq – “I’ve been away two years, I haven’t been well, but I’m back again now. I’ve worked in other parts, but nearly always in London. Used to be outside the National Gallery, where I did Constable. I used to do copies of Constable. I do horses, dogs and other animals. The children like animals best, and give me money. I’m only playing about today, you might say. I haven’t prepared the stone. It gives it a smooth surface, makes the chalks sparkle. Makes them bright and clear, y’know. These pastels are too hard. I like soft ones, but everything’s gone up and I can’t afford them. Oh yes, I always clean off the stones. I won the prize for the best pavement artist in London.”
L.S.D. the Only Criterion, Tavistock Sq – “I’ve been here thirty years. I became a combined tipster and pavement artist because I had the talent, and because I believe in independence. Some people buy my drawings. I don’t go to the races now. I used to – Epsom, Ascot and all that. I have my regulars who come to see me and leave me money in my cap. That’s what it’s for. The rank and file are no good. It’s quiet Saturdays except when there’s a football match – Scoltand, say – and they stay round here. Weather’s been terrible – no-one about. Trafalgar Sq is where the money is, but they fights. I’ve sen the po-leece intervene when they’ve been fighting among themselves, and they say, ‘ere, move on, you?’ It’s money what’s at the bottom of it. Money an’ greed. Like I’ve got written here.”
The Best Friend You Have is Jesus – “Forty years I’ve been selling plants in London, and for over thirty years the Lord’s work has been done. In 1935, I was backing a dog – funnily enough it was called ‘Real Work’ – at New Cross. All at once, a small voice, the voice of the Lord, spoke to me and said ‘Abel (My name is Abel), I’ve got some real work for you to do.’ I gave up drink and dogs and got the posters on the barrow – the messages. I’ve been thousands of miles all over London doing the work of the Lord. London is wicked, and it’s getting worse. But God is merciful, and always gives a warning. It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah. The Lord says ‘Repent’ before His wrath comes. He could destroy London with an earthquake. Remember Noah? – how God wanted them to go in the Ark? But they wouldn’t. They said, ‘We’re going to have a good time…’ The Lord could destroy London with His elements. It dosen’t worry me as I’m doing the Lord’s work. Let these iris stand in water when you get ’em home.”
One Minute Photos, Westminster Bridge – “‘Happy Len,’ they call me, but my real name’s Anthony. Fifty years on the bridge. 1920 I came, and my camera was made in 1903. It’s the only one left. I have to keep patching it up. The man who made it was called ‘Moore,’ and he came from Dr Barnardo’s. They sent him to Canada, and he and a Canadian got together, a bit sharp like, and they brought out this camera. Died a millionaire. I’m seventy-three, and I’ve seen some rum ‘uns on the bridge. There was a woman who came up and took all her clothes off, and the bobby arrested her for indecent behaviour. Disgraceful. The nude, I mean. She was spoiling my pitch.”
Music in the Strand – “I had to make some money to live, and so I came to play in the streets. I’ve never played professionally, I play the piano as well but I never had much training. I’m usually here in the Strand but sometimes I play in Knightsbridge, sometimes in Victoria St. There’s not so many lady musicians about now. I only play classical pieces.”
Horrible Spiders – “Christmas time is the best for us, Guv, if the weather ain’t wet or cold. Then the crowds are good humoured. I like my picture and I’m going to pick out an extra horrible spider for you in return. I’ll tell you a secret – some of the spiders ain’t made of real fur. They’re nylon. But yours is real fur, and it’s very squeaky.”
Salty Bob – “Come round behind the stall and have a bottle of ale. It’s a sort of club, a private club. It’s a grand life sitting here drinking, watching the world go by. I’ve been selling salt and vinegar for fifty years and I’m seventy now. I’ve seen some changes. Take Camden Passage, it’s all antiques, like Chelsea, none of the originals left hardly. Let me pour you another drink. Here we are snug and happy in the sun. I’ve just picked up nine pounds on a horse, and I’ve got another good one for the four-thirty. Next time you’re passing, join me for another drop of ale. No, you can’t pay for it. You’ll be my guest, same as now, at our private club behind the bottles of non-brewed, an’ the bleach.”
Don’t Squeeze Me Till I’m Yours – “That’s a German accordion – they’re the best. Bought it cheap up in the Charing Cross Rd. I do the mouth organ too, this is an English one – fourteen shillings from Harrods. I began with a tin whistle and worked me way up. I’ve a room in Mornington Crescent. My wife died, luvly woman, thrombosis. I could see here everywhere, lying in bed and what not, so I cleared out. I got to livin’ in hostels. But I couldn’t stand the class of men. I work here Mondays, Fridays sometimes. I also work Knightsbridge and ‘ere. I work Aldgate Sundays. I do well there. I gets a fair livin.’ So long as I’ve got me rent, two pounds ten, and baccy money, I don’t want nothing else.”
A Barrel Organ Carolling Across a Golden Street – They received their maximum appreciation in the East End, in the days when the area was a world apart from the rest of London, and the appearance of a barrel organ in Casey Court, among patrons almost as hard pressed as the organist, meant an interval for music and dancing, while the poor little monkey, often a prey to influenza, performed his sad little capers on the organ lid.
Sandwich Man – Consult Madame Sandra – “It’s a poor life, you only get twelve shillings and sixpence a day and you can’t do much on that now, can you, sir? It was drink that got me, the drink. When I come off the farms, I became a porter at Clapham Junction, sir. I worked on the railways, but I couldn’t hold my job. So I dropped down, and this is what I do now. All you can say is you’re in the open air. Sometimes I sleep in a hostel, sometimes I stay out. Just now I’m sleeping out. It was the drink that done it, sir.”
Matchseller – “I was a labourer – a builder’s labourer – an’ I come frae Glasgow. I’ve not been down here in London verra long – eight years. Do i like it here? Weel, the peepull, the peepull are sociable, but they not gie you much, so you only exist. Just exist. I don’t sleep in no hostel, I sleep rough. I haven’t slept in a bed in four weeks. I sleep anywhere. I like a bench in the park or on the embankment. I like the freedom. Anywhere I hang my hat, it’s home sweet home to me.”
A Romany – Apart from the Romany women who sell heather and lucky charms in such places as Villiers St and Oxford St, the gypsies are rapidly disaapearing from Central London. Only occasionally do you see them at their traditional trade of selling. lace paper flowers of cowslips. Modern living vans are invariably smart turn-outs that have little in common with the carved and painted caravans of fifty years ago. They are with-it-gypises-O! Small colonies can still be found on East End bombsites, which the Romanies favour for winter quarters.
‘A Tiny Seed of Love,’ Piccadilly – “Oh yes, Guvnor, they’re good to me if the weather’s fine. Depends on the weather. I can’t play well enough, as you might say. I used to travel all over, four or five of us, saxo, drums, like that. Sometimes there was as many as eight of us. Then it got dodgy. I’m an old hand now. I’ve settled down. I got two rooms at thirty-two bob a week, Islington way. Where could you get two rooms for sixteen shillings each in London? I can easily get along at the price I pay. What’s more, I’ve married the woman who owns the house, too. She’s eight years older than I am, but we get along amicable.”
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On Missing Mr Pussy In Summer
In these dreamy days of high summer, I often think of my old cat Mr Pussy
While Londoners luxuriate in the warmth of summer, I miss Mr Pussy who endured the hindrance of a fur coat, spending his languorous days stretched out upon the floor in a heat-induced stupor. As the sun reached its zenith, his activity declined and he sought the deep shadow, the cooling breeze and the bare wooden floor to stretch out and fall into a deep trance that could transport him far away to the loss of his physical being. Mr Pussy’s refined nature was such that even these testing conditions provided an opportunity for him to show grace, transcending dreamy resignation to explore an area of meditation of which he was the supreme proponent.
In the early morning and late afternoon, you would see him on the first floor window sill here in Spitalfields, taking advantage of the draught of air through the house. With his aristocratic attitude, Mr Pussy took amusement in watching the passersby from his high vantage point on the street frontage and enjoyed lapping water from his dish on the kitchen window sill at the back of the house, where in the evenings he also liked to look down upon the foxes gambolling in the yard.
Whereas in winter it was Mr Pussy’s custom to curl up in a ball to exclude drafts, in these balmy days he preferred to stretch out to maximize the air flow around his body. There was a familiar sequence to his actions, as particular as stages in yoga. Finding a sympathetic location with the advantage of cross currents and shade from direct light, at first Mr Pussy sat to consider the suitability of the circumstance before rolling onto his side and releasing the muscles in his limbs, revealing that he was irrevocably set upon the path of total relaxation.
Delighting in the sensuous moment, Mr Pussy stretched out to his maximum length of over three feet long, curling his spine and splaying his legs at angles, creating an impression of the frozen moment of a leap, just like those wooden horses on fairground rides. Extending every muscle and toe, his glinting claws unsheathed and his eyes widened gleaming gold, until the stretch reached it full extent and subsided in the manner of a wave upon the ocean, as Mr Pussy slackened his limbs to lie peacefully with heavy lids descending.
In this position that resembled a carcass on the floor, Mr Pussy could undertake his journey into dreams, apparent by his twitching eyelids and limbs as he ran through the dark forest of his feline unconscious where prey were to be found in abundance. Vulnerable as an infant, sometimes Mr Pussy cried to himself in his dream, an internal murmur of indeterminate emotion, evoking a mysterious fantasy that I could never be party to. It was somewhere beyond thought or language. I could only wonder if his arcadia was like that in Paolo Uccello’s “Hunt in the Forest” or whether Mr Pussy’s dreamscape resembled the watermeadows of the River Exe, the location of his youthful safaris.
There was another stage, beyond dreams, signalled when Mr Pussy rolled onto his back with his front paws distended like a child in the womb, almost in prayer. His back legs splayed to either side, his head tilted back, his jaw loosened and his mouth opened a little, just sufficient to release his shallow breath – and Mr Pussy was gone. Silent and inanimate, he looked like a baby and yet very old at the same time. The heat relaxed Mr Pussy’s connection to the world and he fell, he let himself go far away on a spiritual odyssey. It was somewhere deep and somewhere cool, he was out of his body, released from the fur coat at last.
Startled upon awakening from his trance, like a deep-sea diver ascending too quickly, Mr Pussy squinted at me as he recovered recognition, giving his brains a good shake, once the heat of the day had subsided. Lolloping down the stairs, still loose-limbed, he strolled out of the house into the garden and took a dust bath under a tree, spending the next hour washing it out and thereby cleansing the sticky perspiration from his fur.
Regrettably the climatic conditions that subdued Mr Pussy by day, also enlivened him by night. At first light, when the dawn chorus commenced, he stood on the floor at my bedside, scratched a little and called to me. I woke to discover two golden eyes filling my field of vision. I rolled over at my peril, because this provoked Mr Pussy to walk to the end of the bed and scratch my toes sticking out under the sheet, causing me to wake again with a cry of pain. I miss having no choice but to rise, accepting his forceful invitation to appreciate the manifold joys of early morning in summer in Spitalfields, because it was not an entirely unwelcome obligation.
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John Bringhurst, Seditious Printer
Sally Jeffery, author of DISSENTING PRINTERS, the intractable men and women of a
17th century Quaker Press, introduces seditious printer John Bringhurst who was apprenticed in Holywell Lane in Shoreditch and set up his press in Gracechurch St in the City of London
The book printer by Jan Luyken, 1694
On 3rd October 1685, a spy named Edmund Everard sent this intelligence from Amsterdam to the British envoy at the Hague, revealing the treasonous duplicity of a London printer:
‘A quaker, who is a german & a bookseller whose shop was about Peters ally in Gracious Street London who was concerned in printing the said Monm. Declaration is expected evry day to make his Escape from London, as I am told by his own brother a journey man shoemaker & young printer likewise (who was in Atterbury the Messengers hand for some time) this young man tells me the found of that matter thus, that Thomas Weeks a silkman in Peters allee (Landlord to the said Quaking bookseller) together with Mr Disny procured Churchill (him that is here fled) to lend his Presse to the said quaker for to print the said treasonable Declaration.’
The individual expected in Amsterdam was John Bringhurst. He rented premises on Gracechurch St from Thomas Weeks, a lutestring merchant in Corbet’s Court. The trade had nothing to do with musical instruments, it was just a word-shift from French lustrine and Weeks dealt in lustrous silk fabrics for dresses. He was also politically engaged. In 1683 he had been involved in the Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother James. Although it never got beyond the planning stage, it led to multiple trials and executions.
Two years later when the openly Catholic James succeeded his brother as king, the cause took on a new urgency. The plan now was to overthrow James II and in his place install Charles’s natural son, James Duke of Monmouth. For some of the much-persecuted Quakers, a new revolt offered a better hope of religious freedom than a court in thrall to the absolutist French king. The rebellion failed disastrously and there was a hurried exodus of London conspirators to Amsterdam.
John Bringhurst was not German – as the intelligence believed – he was baptised in 1652 at St Michael Bassishaw in the City of London, son of a navy surgeon. When his father died, he was apprenticed to the Shoreditch printing house of Andrew Sowle, the first Quaker printer in London. The press was in Holywell Lane, once the location of a priory of Augustinian nuns and still there today.
Andrew Sowle’s press was frequently raided by Stationers’ Company men. Although Shoreditch was outside the City’s jurisdiction the Company operated as an arm of government, looking for evidence of sedition. In 1678 while Bringhurst was a journeyman there, they discovered ‘a private printing press and cases in two upper rooms, to which there was no passage but through trap doors. There they found parts of several scandalous and unlicensed books, printing and printed, which the said Souls acknowledged he had printed. He is the person that a considerable parcel of books was taken from formerly.’
That earlier raid referred to was on premises in Moorfields belonging to one John Casimere, which had produced ‘three cartloads of unlicensed and seditious bookes written by a sort of people called Quakers’. Bringhurst would have experienced many such raids, as would Andrew Sowle’s three daughters, all of whom grew up to be printers. The youngest, Tace, succeeded her father, moved the press to Lombard Street and ran it for fifty years.
Bringhurst set up on his own in 1680 with George Fox’s support and became a printer to the Friends with a shop was on Gracechurch Street at the sign of the Book. Nearby was the Gracechurch Meeting House, the centre of Quaker life, and many of the businesses in the surrounding streets were owned by Friends. It was a progressive enclave lodged within the mercantile city.
Bringhurst married Rosina Prache Matern, daughter and widow of Behmenist refugees from Silesia. When her family arrived in London the Friends rented a house in Holywell Court for them. Rosina’s first husband worked as a schoolmaster at the Friends’ school at Edmonton, her scholarly father Hilarius Prache corrected proofs for Andrew Sowle at £10 per annum while her mother and sister were engaged in silk-weaving in Spitalfields.
In 1683 the Bringhursts crossed Gracechurch St to Leadenhall’s eastern side, with a shop at ‘the sign of the Book and Three-Black-Birds in Leaden-Hall Mutton-Market, commonly called the Green-Yard’. It was reached by a passage from Gracechurch Street between the Black Bull and Colchester Arms. Bull’s Head Passage is still there, across the street from Corbet Court.
When Thomas Weeks recruited Bringhurst to print the Duke of Monmouth’s incendiary ‘Declaration for the defence and vindication of the protestant religion and of the laws, rights and privileges of England from the invasion made upon them, and for delivering the Kingdom from the usurpation and tyranny of us by the name of James, Duke of York,’ they took the precaution of doing it outside the City of London.
A sympathetic bookseller let them use his press in Lambeth and the printing was supervised by another conspirator, William Disney. Bringhurst brought along an assistant – his wife’s younger brother Ephraim who, as a bored shoemaker’s apprentice, may simply have been hoping for a bit of adventure. What happened next would change his life too.
Four days after Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset with his army, the Lambeth press was raided. Only Disney was caught, because work had paused for the night. At the trial, a messenger gave evidence that he broke into Disney’s apartment and found him in bed with his maid. He then got into the printing house where he discovered about 750 Declarations printed on one side and five completed.
Disney was tried for treason and hanged, the Declarations were burned by the public hangman, but Weeks disappeared. Bringhurst made no immediate move until he heard a rumour that Weeks was taken, then he fled across the channel. ‘Speedier means & wings were afforded to him to gett out of the way’, reported Edmund Everard in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam was already crowded with fugitives, the survivors of several seditious conspiracies. By the time William of Orange landed at Torbay in 1688, most of them had returned home but John Bringhurst remained in Amsterdam with his wife Rosina who had followed him there. When her father Hilarius Prache died, her remaining family in London emigrated once more, to Germantown in Philadelphia. They tried to persuade the Bringhursts to join them, but John ‘could not be prevaild with to cross the ocean to a new Country in his old age’.
Bringhurst was only in his forties, no great age even then. Perhaps he felt unwilling to return to life among the Quakers who had turned away from him in 1685, even though he had not taken up arms but simply printed a call for liberty of conscience. He chose to remain in the pluralistic Dutch Republic and died there in 1700, buried in the Westerkerkhof in Amsterdam.
This grimy copy of Monmouth’s Declaration was taken from a captured rebel
An initial with pinks printed by John Bringhurst in a George Fox epistle
Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, where John Bringhurst was apprenticed to Andrew Sowle, the first Quaker printer in London
Bull’s Head Passage, City of London, where John Bringhurst set up his printing shop in 1683
In London, the Bringhurts lived around the corner from Leadenhall Market. Depicted in the The Microcosm of London, 1809 ( Courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
In Amsterdam, the Bringhursts lived around the corner from this market. The Nieuwezijds Voorburgswal with the Flower Market, Amsterdam, Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde, 1686 (Courtesy Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)
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The Bookshops Of Old London
At Marks & Co, 84 Charing Cross Rd
How I wish I could go back to the bookshops of old London. When I saw these evocative photographs of London’s secondhand bookshops taken in 1971 by Richard Brown, it made me realise how much I miss them all now that they have mostly vanished from the streets.
After I left college and came to London, I rented a small windowless room in a basement off the Portobello Rd and I spent a lot of time trudging the streets. I believed the city was mine and I used to plan my walks of exploration around the capital by visiting all the old bookshops. They were such havens of peace from the clamour of the streets that I wished I could retreat from the world and move into one, setting up a hidden bedroom to sleep between the shelves and read all day in secret.
Frustrated by my pitiful lack of income, it was not long before I began carrying boxes of my textbooks to bookshops in the Charing Cross Rd and swapping them for a few banknotes that would give me a night at the theatre or some other treat. I recall the wrench of guilt when I first sold books off my shelves but I found I was more than compensated by the joy of the experiences that were granted to me in exchange.
Inevitably, I soon began acquiring more books that I discovered in these shops and, on occasion, making deals that gave me a little cash and a single volume from the shelves in return for a box of my own books. In this way, I obtained some early Hogarth Press titles and a first edition of To The Lighthouse with a sticker in the back revealing that it had been bought new at Shakespeare & Co in Paris. How I would like to have been there in 1927 to make that purchase myself.
Once, I opened a two volume copy of Tristram Shandy and realised it was an eighteenth century edition rebound in nineteenth century bindings, which accounted for the low price of eighteen pounds. Yet even this sum was beyond my means at the time. So I took the pair of volumes and concealed them at the back of the shelf hidden behind the other books and vowed to return.
More than six months later, I earned an advance for a piece of writing and – to my delight when I came back – I discovered the books were still there where I had hidden them. No question about the price was raised at the desk and I have those eighteenth century volumes of Tristram Shandy with me today. Copies of a favourite book, rendered more precious by the way I obtained them and now a souvenir of those dusty old secondhand bookshops that were once my landmarks to navigate around the city.
Frank Hollings of Cloth Fair, established 1892
E. Joseph of Charing Cross Rd, established 1885
Mr Maggs of Maggs Brothers of Berkeley Sq, established 1855
Marks & Co of Charing Cross Rd, established 1904
Harold T. Storey of Cecil Court, established 1928
Henry Sotheran of Sackville St, established 1760
Andrew Block of Barter St, established 1911
Louis W. Bondy of Little Russell St, established 1946
H.M. Fletcher, Cecil Court
Harold Mortlake, Cecil Court
Francis Edwards of Marylebone High St, founded 1855
Stanley Smith of Marchmont St, established 1935
Suckling & Co of Cecil Court, established 1889
Images from The London Bookshop, published by the Private Libraries Association, 1971
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The Spitalfields Bowl
One of these streets’ most-esteemed long-term residents summoned me to view an artefact that few have seen, the fabled Spitalfields Bowl. Engraved by Nicholas Anderson, a pupil of Laurence Whistler, it incarnates a certain moment of transition in the volatile history of this place.
I arrived at the old house and was escorted by the owner to an upper floor, and through several doors, to arrive in the room where the precious bowl is kept upon its own circular table that revolves with a smooth mechanism, thus avoiding any necessity to touch the glass. Of substantial design, it is a wide vessel upon a pedestal engraved with scenes that merge and combine in curious ways. You have the option of looking down upon the painstakingly-etched vignettes and keeping them separate them in your vision, or you can peer through, seeing one design behind the other, morphing and mutating in ambiguous space as the bowl rotates – like overlaid impressions of memory or the fleeting images of a dream.
Ever conscientious, the owner brought out the correspondence that lay behind the commission and execution of the design from Nicholas Anderson in 1988. Consolidating a day in which the glass engraver had been given a tour of Spitalfields, one letter lists images that might be included – “1. The church and steeple of Christ Church, Spitalfields, and its domination of the surrounding areas. 2. The stacks, chimneys and weaving lofts. 3. The narrowness of the streets and the list and lean of the buildings with their different doorways and casement windows.”
There is a mesmerising quality to Nicholas Anderson’s intricate design that plays upon your perception, offering insubstantial apparitions glimpsed in moonlight, simultaneously ephemeral and eternal, haunting the mind. You realise an object as perilously fragile as an engraved glass bowl makes an ideal device to commemorate a transitory moment.
“It took him months and months,” admitted the proud owner,“and it represents the moment everything changed in Spitalfields, in which the first skyscraper had gone up and there were cranes as evidence of others to come. The Jewish people have left and the Asians are arriving, while at the same time, you see the last of the three-hundred-year-old flower, fruit and vegetable market with its history and characters, surrounded by the derelict houses and filthy streets.”
Sequestered in a locked room, away from the human eye, the Spitalfields Bowl is a spell-binding receptacle of time and memory.
The Jewish soup kitchen
To the left is the Worrall House, situated in a hidden courtyard between Princelet St & Fournier St
A moonlit view of Christ Church over the rooftops of Fournier St
The bird cage with the canary from Dennis Severs House
“He was a tinker who overwintered in Allen Gardens and used to glean every morning in the market…”
To the left is Elder St and the plaque commemorating the birth of John Wesley’s mother is in Spital Sq.
An Asian couple walk up Brushfield St, with the market the left and the Fruit & Wool Exchange and Verdes to the right
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Tom Vowden, Stained Glass Conservator
One of my favourite places in the East End is Bow Church, so it was a delight to visit last week and meet Stained Glass Conservator, Tom Vowden, who is currently working on the east window. It made me feel less guilty about my own windows which get cleaned no more than once a year, when he told me that the east window is being cleaned for the first time since it was installed in the early fifties – more than sixty years ago.
Designed by H Lewis Curtis, this window dates from the early fifties, replacing one that was blown out when a bomb hit the church during the war. The window poses something of a mystery, since it has no religious iconography and is filled with a classical architectural structure within which images of small animals are discreetly placed.
Yet, in the lower part of the window, the blue coffered roof matches the Tudor ceiling in the chancel and, in the upper part of the window, the cupola reflects the design on the tower which was added when it was rebuilt at the same time the window was installed. H Lewis Curtis was the professional partner of architect Harry Goodhart Rendell who repaired Bow Church after the war.
A compelling suggestion to explain the presence of the animals in the window is that they honour Arthur Broome, former Rector of Bow and one of the founder members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals that later became the RSPCA. At a meeting in June 1824, he was one of twenty-two people who gathered – possibly at Bow Church – to found a society that would protect animals from harm. It is even said that the debts incurred by the organisation in the early years meant that Broome himself was imprisoned.
Today the window forms a popular and intriguing puzzle for visitors who are invited to spot the owl, the butterfly, the pigeon, the cat, the mice and other creatures concealed in the design. And now that Tom has cleaned painstakingly the glass, this innocent pastime is even more attractive.
It was my privilege, as Tom’s guest, to climb up and take a much closer look at the window from the inside and the outside. So I took this opportunity to ask him about the profession of Stained Glass Conservator.
“I work on all kinds of glass from the medieval period until the modern day. Originally I studied archaeology and through that I got interested in historic crafts and the way things have been made throughout history. So I tried a few different things, I tried blacksmithing, glassblowing and marquetry before settling on stained glass. I found an apprenticeship at York Minster.
In my apprenticeship at the Minster, I worked on medieval glass but then I was at the Palace of Westminster for a couple of years working on nineteenth century glass. I replaced some of the glass on the face of Big Ben and we had to wait until the clock hands went past in order to fit the new pieces.
Making stained glass is a craft skill, but it is also artistic and you are playing with light. I am starting to design my own stained glass alongside my conservation work. Nowadays there’s less commissions for churches but more for front doors. Lead in stained glass has a lifespan of around a hundred years, and many houses in London are around that age, and it needs replacing.
The work I am doing at Bow Church is cleaning the surface of the glass and doing a couple of in situ repairs – there is a crack through one of the panes that needs resin bonding to weatherproof it. Mostly I am cleaning off the residue of pollution and sometimes there is a waxed layer in the interior where candles have been used. Pollution and pigeon droppings corrode the surface of glass over time and form a layer that allows condensation to settle which can cause any paint on the surface of the glass to deteriorate and be lost.
The east window that I am working on is not particularly old but it has an extreme amount of pollution for its age because of the location of this church with busy roads on either side. I find this window quite unusual because I cannot find a maker’s mark. It is one of the most interesting windows I have worked on. The design is unusual and it makes use of flashed glass, where glass is manufactured in two layers and the coloured layer is acid-etched through to the clear glass. Because it was manufactured in the fifties, this window is structurally sound but often with older windows are bowing which causes breaks.
Cleaning needs to be done fairly regularly to maintain the preserve the glass as well as possible. This is the first time this window has been cleaned since it was installed in the fifties. There’s not a huge amount of damage at this stage but if it was left for another hundred years or so it could get quite bad. Even something as simple as giving it a clean can really bring a window back to life. You see the texture in the glass that wouldn’t otherwise see.
In fifty years, I would be happy to come back and clean it again.”
Tom Vowden
Tom is cleaning the east window
Tudor roof in the chancel
Spot the owl
Spot the squirrel
Tom at work cleaning the exterior of the glass
The exterior of the east window
Repairs to the lead work on the roof is currently underway
The tower
The rear churchyard
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Martin White, Textile Consultant
Today it is my pleasure to publish the story of Martin White, who has heroically reopened Crescent Trading, Spitalfields’ last cloth warehouse, after the death of his business partner Philip Pittack
Martin White, aged two in 1933
“That was the difference between Philip & me,” explained Martin White, articulating the precise distinction between himself and his business partner Philip Pittack, “He was a Rag Merchant, whereas I am a Textile Consultant. I understand textiles, I know about suitings and have been dealing in them since 1946. Our different specialities complemented each other.”
Famous for his monocle and pearl tiepin, as well as his unrivalled knowledge, Martin White was one half of the duo at Crescent Trading, possessing more than one hundred and twenty years of experience in the business between them. Their continuous comedy repartee won them a reputation as the Mike & Bernie Winters of the textile trade.
In particular, Martin is known for his ability to make an offer on a parcel of textiles on sight. “Very few people know how to do it,” he admitted to me. “Recently, Philip & I went on a buying trip twice a year, but in the past I used to go buying every day.” Martin’s story reveals how he acquired his remarkable knowledge of textiles, developing an expertise that permits him obtain the quality fabrics for which Crescent Trading is renowned.
“My father, William White, was a leather merchant but he also had some boot repair shops and, because he was a bit of mechanic, he rebuilt boot repairing machines. And that’s what he wanted me to go into. We lived in a very nice house in Shepherd’s Hill, Highgate, but unfortunately my father was diabetic who didn’t believe in conventional medicine. He was a herbalist and he became very ill in his forties and died at forty-six.
I started work at fourteen for my two uncles, Joe Barnet & Mark Bass (known as Johnny,) at their shop in Noel St off Berwick St in 1946. I was a little boy who didn’t know anything and in those days fabric was rationed and very hard to come by. Joe used to go up north and he had contacts in Manchester who used to get him stuff from the mills. It was a tiny shop and everything we got we sold immediately. They were making thousands every week and I was getting two pounds a week for carrying the fabric in and out. I used to like touching the fabric and that’s how I learnt about it.
While I was there, my father died and another of my uncles, David Bass, came to see my mother and he said he would take me to work for him and give me a wage, so she wouldn’t have to worry about me. But when the two uncles I was already working for heard this, Joe Barnet sent his wife Zelda to my mother to say that, if I worked for David, I would take all their customers from Noel St and it would ruin their business. So Joe Barnet told my mother he would look after me. He had just formed an association with a government supply business in Bethnal Green and he asked me to go down there and watch because he didn’t trust them, and that was my job.
So the first Friday came and he gave me five pounds, that was my wages. The following week, I found a parcel of cloth for sale in Brick Lane and I bought three thousand yards at a shilling a yard and I sold it for three shillings and sixpence a yard. The next Friday, Joe gave me fifteen pounds but I realised I had no chance of furthering myself with him, so I left and started working with another boy of my own age, Daniel Secunda. We were fifteen years old. We had no premises. We used to stand by the post at the corner of Berwick St, and people came to us with samples and goods to sell. We took the samples and sold them, and we made a good living between the two of us. We were young and we were carefree.All the money we earned, we spent it. We were happy. We went out every night. And that lasted for about three years, before the business got hard when rationing ended.
Then I met a guy who wanted to go into business properly with us, Pip Kingsley. He took premises in Berwick St and formed P. Kingsley & Co. After a while, it became apparent that while Danny was a very good-looking and likeable fellow, I was the worker out of the two of us. So Kingsley got rid of Danny and rehired an old job buyer who had retired, Myer King, and we started working together. He was an Eastern European, a very big man who couldn’t read or write. He had the knack of job buying ‘by the look.’ He’d go into a factory and make an offer for everything on the spot. This method of buying was different to anything I had ever seen but it worked. By working with him, I learnt what to do and what not do. And that knowledge was the basis of how I did business from then on.
I was happy working with Kingsley & Myer, but then I met my wife to be, Sheila, and I decided that I wanted my share of the money that my father had left in trust for my younger brother Adrian and me when we were twenty-one. I wanted to get married, and Sheila had been married before and she had a little boy. She was very beautiful. She’s eighty-five and she’s still beautiful.
My brother Adrian was known as Eddie and, at the age of eleven while my father was dying, he contracted sugar diabetes, so they were both in hospital. In the next bed to him was George Hackenschmidt, a boxer who had done body-building and my brother became interested in this. It was a very sad thing, my dad died when they were both in hospital and an uncle said to Eddie, ‘When you get out, I’ll buy you anything you want,’ to make him feel better. So Eddie said, ‘I want a set of weights.’
It was back in 1945, Eddie was twelve and he got one hundred pounds worth of weights and equipped a gym in our garage, and he started doing these workouts in the American magazines that George Hackenschmidt had given him. Eventually, he became Charles Atlas’ body. They would take the head of Charles Atlas and put it on a photo of my brother in the adverts for body-building.
When we broke my father’s trust fund, Eddie was twenty-one and we each received eight hundred pounds. My brother only lifted weights and sat in the sun, so I said to him, ‘What are you going to do with this? Give it to me and we’ll be partners, and I’ll do all the work and you can sit in the sun.’
Now, I wanted to get married to Sheila and her father was a textile merchant but her family didn’t like who I was. One of them was A. Kramer who happened to be Dave Bass’ solicitor and he phoned me up to warn me off her. So I told him what he could do, and Sheila and I got married in a registry office in 1955. Sheila’s little boy was four and her father, Lou Mason, didn’t want him to suffer, so he came to see me at my business and I showed him what I was buying.
Then he approached me one day and asked if I was interested in looking at a parcel of goods he had found in Wardour St at a lingerie company called Row G. So I went to see the parcel and made an offer of seven hundred pounds on sight. Lou said, ‘We don’t do business that way,’ and I said, ‘I’ll do it how I want to do it.’
The owner said, ‘No,’ but two weeks later I went back. He took the seven hundred pounds and it was all sold within two weeks for eighteen hundred pounds. My father-in-law said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s wonderful, why don’t you come and work with me?’ I couldn’t say, ‘No,’ to my father-in-law. There was no option. I said to my brother, ‘We’ll have to part company and I’ll give you your money back.’ He never forgave me.
The very first deal that came along was Cooper & Keyward, they had a lot of rolls of suiting and it came to two thousand pounds. But when I asked my father-in-law for the money to buy it, he said, ‘I’m a bit short this week.’ I just about had the two thousand pounds so I laid out the money myself and took the goods, and my father-in-law was able to sell it to his customers. On Friday, I said to him, ‘I need forty pounds to take my wife out,’ and he said, ‘We don’t spend money that way!’ So I fell out with my father-in-law. It turned out, he didn’t have the money to pay me because his business was going bankrupt.
I went round to get my goods which were in the basement of a shop in Berwick St and my mother-in-law was in the shop. A cousin came out and said, ‘You’re going to kill her, can’t we meet at the weekend and sort this out?’ At the meeting, my father-in-law accused me of being a liar but my wife’s aunt, Joyce, knew him and said to me, ‘I believe you.’ I never was a liar. She said to me, ‘If I lend you a thousand pounds, can you make a living?’
In Berwick St, Johnny Bass was trying to sell his stock at the shop where I had started work. The Noel St shop was full of fabric and he’d offered it to several people but no-one could assess what was there. He wanted four thousand pounds yet, because of my knowledge, I was able to cut a deal for two thousand four hundred pounds. It was Friday night and he said, ‘Give me some money.’ He’d just come of out of the bookmakers and he was penniless. I had a hundred pounds on me, so I gave him that and I had to find the rest of the money.
I went to get it from Joyce but she was in hospital. So I visited her and she said, ‘My husband Bert will get the money for you,’ and on the Monday he came with me to pay Johnny. Joyce had a property in Mansell St and I filled it up with the fabric and started selling it every day from there. Joyce was coming over to collect money from me in her handbag. She was charging me one hundred pounds a week rent plus interest, so I realised she thought I was working for her now but it wasn’t a partnership in my eyes and I wouldn’t go along with it.
I told her I wanted premises in Great Portland St and I needed money for that. It was agreed and that’s what we did. It was called the Robert Martin Company – Sheila’s son was called Robert. I got Daniel Secunda back to work with me. It was 1956, I had my own shop at last. And that’s how I became a textile merchant.”
Aged two, 1933
Aged three, 1934
Aged five in 1936
At school in Highgate, 1936
At a family wedding in September 1939. On the left are William & Muriel White, Martin’s parents. Beside them is Joe Barnet, Martin’s first employer, and his wife Zelda.
Martin’s brother Adrian (known as Eddie) who became the body of Charles Atlas
Martin White & Danny Secunda, his first working partner in 1956
Martin White & Philip Pittack, Crescent Trading Winter 2010
Crescent Trading, Quaker Court, Quaker St, E1 6SN. Open Sunday-Friday.
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The Return of Crescent Trading
