Henry Silk’s Still Life
In 1930, basketmaker and artist Henry Silk sits alone in his sparsely furnished room in Rounton Rd in Bow surrounded by few personal possessions. He glances in the mirror and realises that he is no longer young. Yet the pair of medals from the Great War laid on the table remind him how lucky he is to be alive.
He wakes in the camp bed in the early morning and the empty green room is flooded with light as dawn rises over the rooftops of the East End and washing flaps on the line. Weaving baskets suits a contemplative nature and, when Henry returns from the kitchen with a cup of tea, he sits at the table with the pink cloth and studies the objects upon the surface in the morning sunlight.
The forms and colours of these familiar things fascinate him. His pipe, his purse and his pocket knife that he carried for years are as commonplace to him as his own hands. Each day, Henry paints a picture to catalogue his personal possessions, comprising the modest landscape of his existence. It is a whole life in a handful of paintings.
Henry Silk and his sister
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Henry Silk, Basketmaker & Artist
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Mickey Davis At The Fruit & Wool Exchange
Photographer David Hoffman will be in conversation with Gaynor Tutani at the Museum of the Home on Wednesday 20th November at 6:30pm, discussing his new book and exhibition ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END. This is the only event David is doing in person, so if you want to hear him speak please book now.
Mike Brooke recalls his uncle Mickey Davis – affectionately known as “Mickey the Midget” – who became a popular hero when he took the initiative to organise the shelter in the basement of the Exchange where as many ten thousand people took refuge nightly, escaping the London Blitz. Mickey’s story is featured in Steve McQueen’s new film Blitz which we wholeheartedly recommend to our readers.
Mickey Davis & his wife Doris in the shelter beneath the Fruit & Wool Exchange, 1941
The last time I saw Mickey Davis I was as tall as him – and I was only seven or eight, back then in the Spitalfields of the early nineteen fifties. He came to my school, Robert Montefiore Primary in Deal St, as guest of honour for our annual prize giving. I recognised him in the corridor as we left the assembly hall afterwards, standing against the wall watching us return to our classrooms. I was the proudest kid on the block – because the guest of honour was my Uncle Mickey.
He was, I recall, Deputy Mayor of Stepney (the old Metropolitan borough that later became absorbed into what we now call Tower Hamlets), a very short man, a midget through an accident at birth or defect, I’m not sure exactly. But Mickey was a giant of a man to the community he served in those post-war years and a “people’s hero” of the London Blitz of 1940, several years before I was even born, as I discovered as a journalist working in the East End more than half-a-century later.
I must have been about eight when I roller-skated through the streets of Spitalfields one afternoon and found myself in Fournier St and decided to pop in to see aunt Doris and husband Mickey who lived in a large flat on the first floor of 103 Commercial St, part of the London Fruit & Wool Exchange opposite Spitalfields Church (now known as Christ Church). The kitchen overlooked the indoor wholesale trading area and there was always a faint smell of fruit and veg in the background, while the front room overlooked Commercial St, roughly level with the overhead wires of the 647 and 665 trolleybuses. It seemed quite a posh apartment to an eight-year-old.
But I didn’t go inside that afternoon. My grandmother, aunt Doris and my late father Henry’s mother, answered the door and told me immediately that uncle Mickey was dead. It was an abrupt manner to an eight-year-old, but I knew she was upset. I left and skated straight home to Granby St, along Brick Lane, rushing to tell my mother. She had not heard about Mickey yet, but knew he had been in hospital. We did not have a phone in the house in those days.
Doris and my mother Connie had been great friends during the War and worked together. It was through Doris that my mother and father met when he came home on leave from the Royal Navy in 1943. He visited his sister at work and took a fancy to Connie. They married while he was on leave and he was recalled back to Plymouth to rejoin his ship on their wedding night, so my mother once told me.
My mother immediately put a coat on and went over to see Doris that day in 1954 when I told her about the death of Uncle Mickey. It was not until decades later that I learned the full story of Mickey Davis – and how he organised a shelter committee during the early days of the Blitz at the Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange – when the BBC contacted my family in the nineteen eighties, researching a possible documentary, though I do not think the programme was ever made. It was another two decades before I did my own research for an article about Mickey Davis for a commemorative supplement in the East London Advertiser, where I was Features Editor, marking the seventieth anniversary of the start of the Blitz in September 2010,.
Mickey, who at three feet three inches tall was known as ‘”the Midget,” was an East End optician who threw his energies into organising and improving shelter life, I wrote. He had emerged as the unofficial leader who pushed for improvements to health and safety in one of the East End’s biggest air raid shelters at the Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange in Brushfield St. While the local authority, Stepney Borough Council, was concerned by the 2,500 people crammed into the shelter each night, with its lack of sanitation, risking disease and infection, and lack of facilities for food, lighting and heating, it was left to Mickey set up first aid and medical units, and raise money to equip a dispensary. He even persuaded stretcher bearers and others to come in on their off duty times to minister to the sick and injured. As a popular activist and orator, he became indispensable to the people, pushing the authorities into action.
Long before medical posts became the official practice, well-to-do friends of Mickey provided his Spitalfields public shelter with drugs and equipment. A GP friend made two-hour journeys each day to the East End to spend his nights among the poor. Eight years before the NHS was set up, Mickey’s shelter in 1940 had a free medical service already up-and-running. He even devised a card index system of everyone who used the shelter, and introduced hygiene practices and protection against disease. He persuaded Marks & Spencer to donate money for a canteen and used the profits to provide free milk for children. When the wartime Government eventually appointed official shelter marshals, Mickey was replaced – but the first action of the Spitalfields Shelter Committee undertook was to vote him to be Shelter Marshal, responsible for 2,500 people.
His thinking in 1940 was a fore-runner of the post-war Welfare State that emerged in 1948. He was a man known affectionately among East Enders as “the midget with the heart of a giant.”That was the Mickey Davis, who I am proud to have called “uncle.”
Mickey Davis, popularly known as “Mickey the Midget,” who became a hero of the London Blitz – photo by Bert Hardy
Mickey (in the foreground) convenes a planning meeting in the basement of the Fruit & Wool Exchange in 1941 – photo by Bert Hardy
Musical entertainment for people sleeping in “Mickey’s Shelter” in the Fruit & Wool Exchange.
The space of “Mickey’s Shelter” prior to demolition.
Graffiti remaining from the days of the shelter in the basement of the Fruit & Wool Exchange.
The Fruit & Wool Exchange prior to redevelopment
The Auction room at the Fruit & Wool Exchange in the nineteen thirties.
Bert Hardy photographs © Getty Images
Photo of Auction Room courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Samuel Pepys At St Olave’s
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Do you see Elizabeth Pepys, leaning out from her monument and directing her gaze across the church to where Samuel sat in the gallery opposite? These days the gallery has long gone but, since her late husband became celebrated for his journal, a memorial to him was installed in 1883 where the gallery once was, which contains a portrait bust that peers back eternally at Elizabeth. They will always see eye-to-eye even if they are forever separated by the nave.
St Olave’s on the corner of Seething Lane has long been one of my favourite City churches. Dating from the eleventh century, it is a rare survivor of the Great Fire and the London Blitz. When you walk in from Hart St, three steps down into the nave immediately reveal you are entering an ancient building, where gothic vaults and medieval monuments conjure an atmosphere more reminiscent of a country church than one in the City of London.
Samuel Pepys moved into this parish when he was appointed Commissioner of the Navy Board and came to live next to the Navy Office at the rear of the church, noting his arrival at “my house in Seething Lane” in his journal on July 18th 1660. It was here that Pepys recorded the volatile events of the subsequent decade, the Plague and the Fire.
In Seething Lane, a gateway adorned with skulls as memento mori survives from that time. Pepys saw the gate from his house across the road and could walk out of the Navy Office and through it into the churchyard, where an external staircase led him straight into the private Navy Office pew in the gallery.
The churchyard itself is swollen above surrounding ground level by the vast number of bodies interred within and, even today, the gardeners constantly unearth human bones. When Elizabeth and the staff of the Navy Office took refuge from the Plague south of the river, Pepys stayed behind in the City. Countless times, he walked back and forth between his house and the Navy Office and St Olave’s as the body count escalated through the summer of 1665. “The sickness in general thickens round us, and particularly upon our neighbourhood,” he wrote to Sir William Coventry in grim resignation.
The following year, Pepys employed workers from the dockyard to pull down empty houses surrounding the Navy Office and his own home to create fire breaks. “About 2 in the morning my wife calls me up and tells me of new cries of fire, it being come to … the bottom of our lane,” he recorded on 6th September 1666.
In the seventeenth century vestry room where a plaster angel presides solemnly from the ceiling, I was able to open Samuel Pepys’ prayer book. It was heart-stopping to turn the pages. Dark leather covers embossed with intricate designs enfold the volume, which he embellished with religious engravings and an elaborate hand-drawn calligraphic title page.
Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys are buried in a vault beneath the nave. Within living memory, when the Victorian font was removed, a hole was exposed that led to a chamber with a passage that led to a hidden chapel where a tunnel was dug to reach the Pepys vault. Scholars would love to know if he was buried with his bladder stone upon its silver mount, but no investigation has yet been permitted.
If you seek Samuel Pepys, St Olave’s is undoubtedly where you can find him. Walk in beneath the gate laden with skulls, across the graveyard bulging with the bodies of the long dead, cast your eyes along the flower beds for any shards of human bone, and enter the church where Samuel and Elizabeth regard each other from either side of the nave eternally.
St Olave’s at the corner of Seething Lane
“To our own church, and at noon, by invitation, Sir W Pen dined with me and Mrs Hester, my Lady Betten’s kinswoman, to dinner from church with me, and we were very merry. So to church again, and heard a simple fellow upon the praise of Church musique, and exclaiming against men’s wearing their hats on in the church, but I slept part of the sermon, till latter prayer and blessing and all was done without waking which I never did in my life…” SAMUEL PEPYS, Sunday 17th November, 1661
Samuel Pepys’ memorial in the south aisle
Samuel Pepys’ prayerbook
Engraved nativity and fine calligraphy upon the title page of Pepys’ prayerbook
Door to the vestry
The oldest monument in the church, 1566
Memorial of Peter Capponi, a Florentine merchant & spy, 1582
Paul Bayning, 1616, was an Alderman of the City & member of the Levant company
A Norwegian flag hangs in honour of St Olave
The gate where Pepys walked in from the Navy Office across the street
Sculpture of Samuel Pepys in the churchyard
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The Pubs Of Old London
The Vine Tavern, Mile End
I cannot deny I enjoy a drink, especially if there is an old pub with its door wide open to the street inviting custom, like this one in Mile End. In such circumstances, it would be affront to civility if one were not to walk in and order a round. Naturally, my undying loyalty is to The Golden Heart in Commercial St, as the hub of our existence here in Spitalfields and the centre of the known universe. But I have been known to wander over to The Carpenters’ Arms in Cheshire St, The George Tavern in Commercial Rd and The Marksman in Hackney Rd when the fancy takes me.
So you can imagine my excitement – especially now the pubs have re-opened – to discover all these thirst-inspiring images of the pubs of old London among the thousands of glass slides left over from the days of the magic lantern shows given by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute a century ago. It did set me puzzling over the precise nature of these magic lantern lectures. How is it that among the worthy images of historic landmarks, of celebrated ruins, of interesting holes in the ground, of significant trenches and important church monuments in the City of London, there are so many pictures of public houses? I can only wonder how it came about that the members of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society photographed such a lot of pubs, and why they should choose to include these images in their edifying public discourse.
Speaking for myself, I could not resist lingering over these loving portraits of the pubs of old London and I found myself intoxicated without even lifting a glass. Join me in the cosy barroom of The Vine Tavern that once stood in the middle of the Mile End Rd. You will recognise me because I shall be the one sitting in front of the empty bottle. Bring your children, bring your dog and enjoy a smoke with your drink, all are permitted in the pubs of old London – but no-one gets to go home until we have visited every one.
The Saracen’s Head, Aldgate
The Grapes, Limehouse
George & Vulture, City of London
The Green Dragon, Highgate
The Grenadier, Old Barrack Yard
The London Apprentice, Isleworth
Mitre Tavern, Hatton Garden
The Old Tabard, Borough High St
The Three Compasses, Hornsey
The White Hart, Lewisham
The famous buns hanging over the bar at The Widow’s Son, Bow
The World’s End, Chelsea, with the Salvation Army next door.
The Angel Inn, Highgate
The Archway Tavern, Highgate
The Bull, Highgate
The Castle, Battersea
The Old Cheshire Cheese, Fleet St
The Old Dick Whittington, Cloth Fair, Smithfield
Fox & Crowns, Highgate
The Fox, Shooter’s Hill
The Albion, Barnesbury
The Anchor, Bankside
The George, Borough High St
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Sandra Esqulant, The Golden Heart
David Hoffman Speaks
Photographer David Hoffman will be in conversation with Gaynor Tutani at the Museum of the Home on Wednesday 20th November at 6:30pm, discussing his new book and exhibition ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END.
This is the only event David is doing in person, so if you want to hear him speak please book now because it is likely to sell out quickly.
From squatting in Whitechapel’s’s Fieldgate Mansions, to becoming a celebrated protest photographer, David Hoffman shares his journey of documenting hidden histories of homelessness, racism, and the beauty and grittiness of the East End.
This in conversation with Museum of the Home’s Gaynor Tutani is centred around the Museum’s current exhibition, Endurance & Joy in the East End: The Photography of David Hoffman and the publication of his monograph by Spitalfields Life Books, Endurance & Joy in the East End 1971–1987.
The talk will explore Hoffman’s life’s work and his commitment to capturing the realities of inequality and injustice in Britain, revealing harsh truths with remarkable clarity. His work is recognised for its contemporary relevance amid the cost of living and housing crisis, racial tension, and social division such as those seen in the August 2024 riots in the UK.
Museum of the Home is committed to discussing ideas of home and belonging. The evening will celebrate David Hoffman, his art and photographs, whose allure and pain remain with us in the present day. Attendees will be inspired by his works and reminded of the importance of figures such as Hoffman, those whose life purpose has been to uncover and document the uncomfortable, while promoting the joy, hope and perseverance of humanity that refuses to be extinguished.
Cover price is £35 but you can buy it from Spitalfields Life for £30
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
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On Night Patrol With PC Lew Tassell
Police Constable Lew Tassell of the City of London Police
“One week in December 1972, I was on night duty. Normally, I would be on beat patrol from Bishopsgate Police Station between 11pm-7am. But that week I was on the utility van which operated between 10pm-6am, so there would be cover during the changeover times for the three City of London Police divisions – Bishopsgate, Wood St and Snow Hill. One constable from each division would be on the van with a sergeant and a driver from the garage.
That night, I was dropped off on the Embankment during a break to allow me to take some photographs and I walked back to Wood St Police Station to rejoin the van crew. You can follow the route in my photographs.
The City of London at night was a peaceful place to walk, apart from the parts that operated twenty-four hours a day – the newspaper printshops in Fleet Street, Smithfield Meat Market, Billingsgate Fish Market and Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market.
Micks Cafe in Fleet St never had an apostrophe on the sign or acute accent on the ‘e.’ It was a cramped greasy spoon that opened twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. During the night and early morning it served print-workers, drunks returning from the West End and the occasional vagrant.
Generally, we police did not use it. We might have been unwelcome because we would have stood out like a sore thumb. But I did observation in there in plain clothes sometimes. Micks Cafe was a place where virtually anything could be sourced, especially at night when nowhere else was open.”
Lew Tassell
Middle Temple Lane
Pump Court, Temple
King’s Bench Walk, Temple
Bouverie St, News of the World and The Sun
Fleet St looking East towards Ludgate Circus
Ludgate Hill looking towards Fleet St under Blackfriars Railway Bridge, demolished in 1990
Old Bailey from Newgate St looking south
Looking north from Newgate St along Giltspur St, St Bartholomew’s Hospital
Newgate St looking towards junction of Cheapside and New Change – buildings now demolished
Cheapside looking east from the corner of Wood St towards St Mary Le Bow and the Bank
HMS Chrysanthemum, Embankment
Constable Lew Tassell, 1972
Photographs copyright © Lew Tassell
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Mary Burd, Clinical Psychologist
‘You cannot overestimate sitting down quietly with someone and listening to what they have to say’
Mary Burd worked as Clinical Psychologist at the Jubilee St Practice in Stepney between 1979 and 2009, beginning as a mental health trainee and eventually becoming Head of Mental Health Services in Tower Hamlets. Over this time, she saw great changes both in the nature of the East End and in the health service itself. In thirty years of work, Mary grew deeply engaged with the lives of those that she served and, when I interviewed her recently, she spoke to me with deep affection for the people and the place.
“When I was twenty and first came to London in the sixties, a friend of mine said to me on a spare evening, ‘Why don’t you come to the East End? I work in a youth club there.’ That visit to Dame Colet House was my very first time working in Tower Hamlets, I helped out in the youth club and I can remember it was pretty tough. I had to guard the cash box from Les whose main interest was to raid it.
Ultimately, it was chance that brought me to work in the East End. In my early thirties, I decided that I needed to change career – I had been working in publishing – so I went and did a psychology degree at Brunel University and then studied Clinical Psychology at the University of East London. It was a three year course with placements and I was based at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. In my final year I could chose, and I always wanted to work in General Practice, so I went to the Jubilee St Practice in 1977 which was operating in portacabins then.
I remember sitting around the table with the group of GPs. A rather elderly gentleman asked me, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I’ve come because I would like to provide psychological help within practices, rather for everybody to have to go to the Outpatients Department.’ And he said, ‘I think you’d be better off working in John Lewis.’
In spite of this, I had an amazing time and I did a lot of work with Health Visitors, helping them with babies and toddlers who had behavioural problems. Often, they couldn’t sleep or didn’t eat properly. I used to accompany the Health Visitors and help them think about what was going on. I got a research grant to look at the application of psychology in Primary Care, but it was really just an excuse to stay on at the Jubilee St Practice. At the end of that, the Director of Nursing said, ‘We really like the work you have done with Health Visitors and we are creating a psychology post for someone to do that sort of work.’ So that was how I started off.
I had a job that I loved working in General Practice in the East End. In those days, there was very little mental health provision and I was lucky enough to go into a practice which was forward thinking. It comprised three doctor’s practices that had come together and, when one of those GPs died, his relationship with his patients was so strong they all joined his funeral cortege.
When I first came to the East End, there were only a few practices that had more than one doctor and a few helpers. There were a lot of elderly doctors operating out of converted shops. I remember going to a practice to talk about the service and the only examination couch was in the kitchen, and it was propped up on old medical journals. There was so much dust you could write your name in it and there were files scattered about the place without any proper confidentiality. It was completely archaic and that was in the early eighties, not so very long ago. Because healthcare was so prized by people in the East End, who had never been used to decent medical services, I think they put up with things that people in other areas of London might not have done.
Jubilee St Practice became my home in the East End. I was always ambitious and I used every attempt to get funding for my work, and I taught on the East London Vocational Training Scheme, training GPs. I found that GPs who came onto the East London Scheme tended to stay in Tower Hamlets, so I got to know them all. It meant that, when they came to practice, they were receptive to the things I was doing and it gave me easy access into the world of General Practice.
As the doctors practicing in High St shops retired, the Family Practitioner Council invested in new practices. The new GPs coming in were of a high calibre and they wanted to practice in decent surroundings to give the best possible care. They were keen on the idea of a multi-disciplinary team, so they worked with nurses and Heath Visitors. By the time, I left every practice in Tower Hamlets had onsite psychological support.
In the early days, I set up a referral service. So a GP could come to me and say, ‘I’ve Mrs X and she’s terribly depressed at the moment, do you think you could see her?’ I would not work with a practice unless they would give a minimum of an hour a month to discuss the patients. There was a tremendous sense of partnership. We worked so closely and it was a fantastic time.
I was very often asked to write housing letters but in all my time I only wrote two, because I knew there was absolutely no point. Instead, I can remember writing the the local authority saying, ‘What is the point of me providing a service to a young woman with four children living on the fourteenth floor of a tower block?’ By then, many families were moving out but there were still many extended families. I remember asking a young mother, ‘How often do you see your ma?’ and she said, ‘Oh not very often, only three times a week.’ I think living cheek by jowl brought pressures. The positive was stronger than the negative but, even so, some people were oppressed, not the young children but the mothers. Their own mothers used to go round and do the washing for them, and there was a real dependency.
I was in Jubilee St during the big influx of Sylheti people and we had a big problem in that General Practices did not refer people with mental health problems from that community. In the eighties, we were the very first to set up a Bangladeshi counselling service and we trained somebody who spoke the language to run it, and then we did the same for the Somali community. There is a difficulty because some people think that a service by their own community is not as good as one provided by white healthcare professionals. We used the insights of the Bangladeshi and Somali counsellors to help us to work with those populations.
Patients would sometimes talk to me about ‘those Paki bastards’ and I would always point out that this language was not acceptable. In my time, I saw a lot of people from the Bangladeshi community. I can remember one woman whose husband was a complete nightmare but culturally there was no way she could leave him. It was very hard to work with her because it was absolutely clear where her distress was coming from – it was from her relationship with her husband – but she could not alter that in any way. I could only offer her a place to talk about it and a place to consider other things that she might be able to do to improve her life, so that she understood she was not totally alone with her problem.
I did a lot of teaching of young doctors and medical students and I think – wherever in the world you are – you cannot overestimate sitting down quietly with someone and listening to what they have to say. Doctors who are always trained to do things find that very difficult to understand.
I joined the Jubilee St Practice in 1979 and I retired in 2009. I also worked in St Stephen’s Rd, Bow, in an all women practice which was unique in the East End at the time, when most doctors were older men. The working atmosphere at the practice was collegiate and they were very interested in the emotional life of their patients, which I think was unusual then. They looked after their staff very well.
I also worked in Wapping, where the GP had a bed with a pink quilt. I thought, ‘What’s this doing in the General Practice?’ In fact, it was where the GP slept when he was on call at night. He had his own bedroom at work. I observed the changing nature of the Wapping population. When the City people started to move in, they had much higher expectations and demanded to be seen when they needed to be seen.
There are a lot more children now with mental problems than when I started. There are multiple reasons. Not all children are in families where they get the nurturing that they need. Diet has a bit to do with it too. We could talk about air pollution. A lid used to be kept on by quite severe discipline. In general, children are much more disturbed now than twenty years ago. Families are much more disconnected with less extended families.
Over thirty years in the East End, I saw a major improvement in health services. District nursing and health visiting was of a very high quality in Tower Hamlets. The great thing about the East End was that it attracted people who are creative and want to improve health care. Every healthcare professional who has worked in Tower Hamlets and moved on still talks about working in the East End because there was a tremendous sense of collaboration and the patients were inspiring – because life was not easy for them.
I had a fantastic career, I was so lucky. Every year, the Bengali services had a Disability Awareness Day at Swanlea School in Whitechapel. The Bengali Disability Council set it up and they presented me a wonderful plaque for my services to the Bengali people of Tower Hamlets. That was the most moving occasion I have ever experienced. I got the MBE for services to healthcare in East London too, but the other award meant more to me because it meant I had been accepted by the community.”
Mary with former colleagues at the Jubilee St Practice
Mary Burd, Clinical Psychologist
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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