Manny Silverman, Tailor
Manny Silverman, aged nine in 1941
Manny Silverman has a lucky ticket. It is a bus ticket numbered 9999, punched with a single hole to indicate the destination as Brick Lane and it dates from Manny’s childhood, growing up in Bacon St in the nineteen forties. Until this day, Manny keeps the ticket as a talisman, and, “I’ve been very lucky,” Manny assured me several times while he was telling me his story. Yet while it is apparent that Manny has enjoyed good fortune in his life, it soon became clear there were other forces than simply good luck at work in shaping Manny’s destiny.
Diminutive of build with delicate hands, weary eyes, and a gracious deferential style, Manny wears his history lightly. Fastidiously groomed and neatly dressed, he picked me up from the station at East Finchley in his two seater open-topped Mercedes. At home, Manny produced photocopies of his birth certificate, his indenture papers as an apprentice, his medal for performing King John, his letter offering a directorship of Moss Bros and – of course – his lucky bus ticket. Speaking of the ups and downs of his life, Manny was neither apologetic nor swanky, instead his tone was that of wonder at how it has all turned out.
“I was born in Mother Levy’s Nursing Home in Whitechapel in January 1932. My parents had only come from Lithuania a few months before, so I arrived just in time. My father Abraham was a tailor and my mother was Altke, known as Ettie, and I had a younger sister, Lilli. At first, we lived in Myrdle St, and then we moved to Bacon St where I spent my childhood. We shared two rooms, the four of us, and in the winter the pipes froze and when the spring came they burst. We had no running water and the toilet was in the yard. Each week, we used to go the Hare St (now Cheshire St) public baths and pay one penny to have a wash.
When I saw those baths, years later from first class carriage of a train coming into Liverpool St Station, I thought, ‘You’ve been lucky somewhere along the line.’ If you are the child of first generation immigrants, the first thing they want you to have is a trade that you can carry, because if you can sew or cut hair then you always have the opportunity to make money at your finger tips. And I thought, ‘Here I am, after all this time, still doing the same thing, even if they don’t ask me to sew a suit anymore.’
I only spoke Yiddish when I went to school in Wood Close at the age of four, and my schooling was limited because I was evacuated several times during the war. At twelve, I overcame the shyness that is still with me, braved the blackout, and made my way along to join the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club in Chance St. My first experience was seeing Maxie Lea and I made lifelong relationships there, not necessarily friends, but when we meet up it is as if time has stood stood still. I was never athletic but really good at drama and when we entered the London Federation of Boys’ Clubs contest, all the members came along to support us. At seventeen, I won a medal for playing King John and I’ve still got the script. I also got a good crit for my performance as Cassius, I always played heavies.
After I left school in 1946, at the age of fourteen, I was overseen by the Jewish Board of Guardians. My father had been ill for a while and they were helpful to me when he died. Harry Moss, Chairman and Managing Director of Moss Bros, was one of the patrons of the Boys Club. (They started as Moses Brothers but decided that ‘Moss Bros’ sounded better than ‘Moses Bros.’) He said to me, ‘Look, you can join us in our workshop in Covent Garden.’ In those days, Moss Bros still did bespoke tailoring and they had six cutters.
At twenty-one, I got itchy feet and left on good terms, on the understanding I could come back. And then, when Monty Moss who produced our plays at the Boys’ Club got engaged, I dropped in to wish him congratulations and he said, ‘You’re not working?’ He took me into Harry Moss’ office, and I told them I didn’t want to be a tailor anymore, so Harry said, ‘Start work as a porter in the secondhand department.’ The business had begun in the 1850s with Old Moses, who bought unredeemed pledges of suits and sold them in Kings Cross and Covent Garden, wheeling a barrow between both places. In the secondhand hand department, I recorded what I thought the suits were worth alongside what they had been bought for and in no time, Harry Moss said, ‘Will you do a bit of buying for me?’ I saw a lot of opportunities for the company that no-one else could see.
In the following years, I was made production director, deputy managing director, chief executive, and unemployed – replaced by a member of the Moss family. After forty years with the company, I found myself in my mid-fifties, out of work with a young family and a large mortgage. Some friends of mine asked me to join them and in 1987 we bought Norman Hartnell, the Royal Couturier, which was in administration, with a view to relaunch it. We made worldwide news and employed Marc Bohan from Dior as designer on the principle that if he brought 10% of his clientele with him, we would have a success. But we ran out of cash and that was the end of that. Since 1985, I have been working as an expert witness in the fields of criminal negligence and insurance claims. I say to people, ‘I will never tell you what you want to hear, but – whatever I advise you to do – I will always explain.’ This is how I operate.
I left the East End when I moved to East Finchley in 1969. I always admired the scarlet geraniums outside this house and when it came on the market I was lucky enough to be able to buy it. I try to go back to the East End, with my son who is in his forties, once a year. He says, ‘Dad, I already know where you went to school.’ But I do like to go back, I’m an unashamed romantic, when it comes to the past. It’s not just to look at where I came from, it’s part of who I am. You can’t not be what you are, and I was a cockney.”
Manny Silverman’s lucky bus ticket to Brick Lane.
Manny at his Bar Mitzvah in 1945.
Manny learns tailoring at fourteen years old.
Manny won a medal for playing the lead in Shakespeare’s “King John” at seventeen.
Manny in the swinging sixties.
Manny was Chief Executive of Moss Bros from 1980 to 1987.
Manny bought Royal Couturier Norman Hartnell in 1987
Manny (Emmanuel) Silverman
Read my other Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club Stories
Maxie Lea MBE, Football Referee
At the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club 86th Annual Reunion
The Trade Of The Gardener
It is my pleasure to publish this piece by Sian Rees from her fascinating horticultural blog PLANTING DIARIES, Gardens, Planting Styles & Their Origins . I am proud that Sian is a graduate of my blog writing course.
There are only a few places available on my last ever Advanced Blog Writing Course on 28th & 29th March. You are eligible if you already have a blog or some experience in writing. Drop me a line if you would like to know more SpitalfieldsLife@gmail.com
The Gardener, 1814
Stories about the real world and real lives were considered as interesting and exciting as fiction in children’s books of Georgian England. Trades were a popular subject – what people did and how things were made were described and illustrated with woodcuts, bringing these occupations to life for the young reader.
One such example is Little Jack of all Trades (1814) from Darton & Harvey, publishers of many children’s books from the later eighteenth century into the Victorian era. Author William Darton begins by likening workers in the various trades to bees in a hive, where everyone has their specific role to play within a larger inter-connected structure:
‘all are employed – all live cheerfully and whilst each individual works for the general good, the whole community works for him. The baker supplies the bricklayer, the gardener and the tailor with bread; and they, in return, provide him with shelter, food and raiment: thus, though each person is dependent on the other, all are independent.’
I was delighted to see that the book includes a profile of a gardener, who appears alongside other practical tradespeople such as the carpenter, blacksmith, cabinet maker, mason, bookbinder, printer and hatter – to cite but a few.
The gardener is portrayed handing a large bouquet of flowers to a well-dressed woman – most probably the wife of his employer. Our gardener is a manager – his two assistants behind him are engaged in digging over the soil and watering a bed of plants – while we learn his specialist skills include grafting and pruning.
In the background, a heated greenhouse extends the season for the production of fruits and other crops. Smoke from the building’s stove is visible rising from the chimney on the right. All the tools of the gardeners’ trade remain familiar to us today:
‘the spade to dig with, the hoe to root out weeds, the dibble to make holes which receive the seed and plants, the rake to cover seeds with earth when sown, the pruning hook and watering pot.’
From a contemporary perspective, it is interesting that Darton’s description of the gardener makes the connection between gardening and well-being:
‘Working in a garden is a delightful and healthy occupation; it strengthens the body, enlivens the spirits, and infuses into the mind a pleasing tranquillity, and sensations of happy independence.’
William Darton (1755 – 1819) was an engraver, stationer and printer in London and with partner Joseph Harvey (1764 – 1841) published books for children and religious tracts. His sons Samuel & William Darton were later active in the business.
Darton & Harvey’s books for children always contain plentiful illustrations, packed with details of clothes, buildings and interiors, that convey a powerful sense of working life in the early nineteenth century.
More recently, the status of gardening as a skilled trade has been undermined and eroded – so it is pleasing to see the gardener in this book taking his place on equal terms alongside other tradesmen.
The Basket Maker
The Carpenter
The Black Smith
The Wheelwright
The Cabinet Maker
The Boatbuilder
The Tin Man
The Mason
Images from The Victorian Collection at the Brigham Young University courtesy of archive.org
Click here to see the entire contents of LITTLE JACK OF ALL TRADES
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Barnett Freedman, Artist
David Buckman profiles Barnett Freedman (1901–1958) who was born in Stepney. A major retrospective, Barnett Freedman – Designs for Modern Britain opens at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester on 14th March and runs until 14th June.
I am giving a lecture about the work of Barnett Freedman and other twentieth century artists, Street Life: Painting the East End , at Pallant House on 30th April Click here for tickets
Barnett raises his hat in Kensington Gardens to celebrate designing the Jubilee stamp for George V
Odds were heavily stacked against Barnett Freedman becoming a professional artist. Born in 1901 to a poor Jewish couple, living at 79 Lower Chapman St, Stepney, who had emigrated to the East End of London from Russia, Barnett’s childhood was scarred by ill-health and he was confined to bed between the ages of nine and thirteen. Yet he educated himself, learning to read, write, play music, draw and paint, all within a hospital ward. His nephew, Norman, recalled that “He played the violin for the king,” but that “When he acquired a bicycle his mother cut off the tyres as she considered it too dangerous for her son to ride.”
By sixteen, Barnett was earning his living as a draughtsman to a monumental mason for a few shillings a week. He made the best of this unexciting work in the day, spending his evenings at St Martin’s School of Art for five years from 1917. Eventually, he moved to an architect’s office, working up his employer’s rough sketches and, during a surge of war memorial work, honing his skills as a lettering artist.
For three successive years, Barnett failed to win a London County Council Senior Scholarship in Art that would enable him to study full time at the Royal College of Art under the direction of William Rothenstein. Finally, Barnett presented a portfolio of work to Rothenstein in person. Impressed, he put Barnett’s case to the London County Council Chief Inspector himself and a stipend of £120 a year was made, enabling Barnett to begin his studies in 1922. Under the direction of Rothenstein, Barnett’s talent flourished, taught by such fine draughtsmen as Randolph Schwabe and stimulated by fellow students Edward Bawden, Raymond Coxon, Henry Moore, Vivian Pitchforth and John Tunnard. Eight years after his entry, Rothenstein took Barnett onto the staff.
Although he could be prickly and even alarming on occasion, Barnett was revered by his former students. My late friends Leonard Appelbee and his wife Frances Macdonald, both artists, never stopped talking of his kindness. Burly Leonard used to help lift Barnett’s heavy lithographic stones when they were too much for the artist to manage alone, and when once Leonard and Frances considered moving to Hampstead, Barnett retorted – “You don’t want to go there. It’s an ‘orrible place!” According to Professor Rogerson, “He was a volatile character who did not respect authority and was always at war with the civil servants … yet I know people who were taught by him who say he was a very careful and punctilious teacher who paid a lot of attention to his students – though he could fire off if he was angry. At heart, I think he pretended to be a harsh kind of person but he was very good to a lot of people.”
After leaving the Royal College in 1925, Barnett had his share of problems. He painted prolifically but sold little – with his work only gradually being bought by collectors, although the Victoria and Albert Museum and Contemporary Art Society eventually bought drawings. In 1929, ill-health prevented him from working for a year. In 1930, he married Claudia Guercio whom he had met at art school, born in Lancashire of Sicilian ancestry. She also became a fine illustrator. Their son Vincent recalls that the home they created “was a warm place, vibrant with sound and brilliant colours, excitement darting from the music at night, the pictures on the walls, and the constant talking.”
Barnett enjoyed a long association with Faber and Faber, and his colour lithography and black-and-white illustrations for Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer,’ published in 1931, are outstanding. Works by the Brontë sisters, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens, Edith Sitwell, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy benefited from his inspired illustration. Barnett believed that “the art of book illustration is native to this country … for the British are a literary nation.” He argued that “however good a descriptive text might be, illustrations which go with the writings add reality and significance to our understanding of the scene, for all becomes more vivid to us, and we can, with ease, conjure up the exact environment – it all stands clearly before us.”
He was also an outstanding commercial designer, producing a huge output of work for clients including Ealing Films, the General Post Office, Curwen Press, Shell-Mex and British Petroleum, Josiah Wedgwood and London Transport. The series of forty lithographs by notable artists for Lyons’ teashops was supervised by Barnett, including his famous and beautiful auto-lithographs ‘People’ and ‘The Window Box.’ Barnett wrote and broadcast on lithography and other aspects of art, with surviving scripts showing him to have been a natural talent at the microphone. When artists were being chosen for the series ‘English Masters of Black-and-White’ just after the Second World War, the editor, Graham Reynolds included Barnett among an illustrious band alongside George Cruikshank, Sir John Tenniel and Rex Whistler.
Barnett joined that select group who served as Official War Artists. Along with Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden, he accompanied the expeditionary force in the spring of 1940, before the retreat at Dunkirk, yet Barnett did not shed his iconoclasm and outspokenness when he donned khaki. Asked if he would paint a portrait of the legendary General Gort, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Barnett’s response was, “I am not interested in uniform … Oh well, perhaps I might if he’s got a good head?” On his return, Barnett continued to produce vivid, powerful pictures for the War Office and the Admiralty, gaining a CBE in 1946. But despite hobnobbing with military luminaries, Barnett never became posh, retaining his East End manner of speaking. Vincent Freeman recalls how Barnett once hailed a taxi-cab, “‘to the Athenaeum Club’, to which the incredulous driver retorted – ‘What, YOU?'”
After hostilities, Barnett remained busy with many commissions until in 1958, when he died peacefully in his chair at his Cornwall Gardens studio, near Gloucester Rd, aged only fifty-seven. Vincent recalls his final memory of his father, “discussing a pleasant lunch he had enjoyed with the family’s oldest friend [the artist] Anne Spalding.” Barnett was widely obituarized and his work was given an Arts Council memorial exhibition and tour. Subsequently, exhibitions such as that at Manchester Polytechnic Library in 1990 and new books have periodically enhanced his reputation.
Barnett Freedman is among my top candidates for a blue plaque, as one of the most distinguished British artists to emerge from the East End. There was a 2006 campaign to get him one in at 25 Stanhope St, off the Euston Rd, where he lived early in his career, but English Heritage rejected him, along with four others as of “insufficient stature or historical significance” – an unjust decision exposed by the Camden New Journal. The artist and Camden resident David Gentleman was one among many who supported the plaque, writing “He was a very good and original artist whose work deserves to be remembered. He influenced me in the sense of his meticulous workmanship. He was a real master of it.”
Professor Ian Rogerson, author of ‘The Graphic Work of Barnett Freedman’, considers Barnett “the world’s best auto-lithographer … A lot of people who do not seem to have contributed as much to the arts have managed to get blue plaques. Freedman’s work is being increasingly collected – and he is being recognised more and more as a major contributor to British art.” Of Barnett’s remarkable output, his son Vincent says – “A huge optimism and compassion shows itself to me in all his work and life. Humanity was his central driving force.”
Freedman family portrait with Barnett standing far left.
Barnett painting on the roof top as a war artist
Barnett shows his wife Claudia a mural he painted as the official Royal Marines artist.
Recording the BBC ‘Sight & Sound’ programme ‘Artists v Poets’ in February 1939, Sir Kenneth Clark master of ceremonies with scorer. Artists from left: Duncan Grant, Brynhild Parker, Barnett Freedman, Nicolas Bentley, and poets – W. J. Turner, Stephen Spender, Winifred Holmes and George Barker.
Barnett enjoys a successful afternoon fishing at Thame, Buckinghamshire, in the thirties.
Designs for the ‘London Ballet.’ (courtesy Fleece Press)
The Window Box, lithograph.
Advertisement for London Transport from the nineteen thirties.
Advertisement for the General Post Office rom the nineteen-forties.
Advertisement for Shell at the time of the Festival of Britain, 1951.
Design for Ealing Studios.
Cover for ‘Memoirs of a an Infantry Officer,’ Faber and Faber.
Cover for Walter de la Mare’s 75th Birthday Tribute, Faber and Faber.
Barnett Freedman’s ‘Claudia’ typeface.
Design for Dartington Hall, Devon.
Lithographs for ‘Oliver Twist,’ published by the Heritage Press in New York, 1939.
Barnett Freedman works courtesy Special Collections, Manchester Metropolitan University
Barnett Freedman is featured in my book East End Vernacular, Artists Who Painted London’s East End Streets in the 20th Century
Click here to order a copy of EAST END END VERNACULAR for £25
Celebrating Pubs, Cafes, Chicken Shops & Launderettes
Illustrator Sarah Tanat-Jones sent me her drawings of London’s old pubs, cafes, launderettes and chicken shops. Obviously these are subjects close to my heart, but I especially admire Sarah’s gleefully brash pop aesthetic and the levity of her quality of line.
Drawings copyright © Sarah Tanat-Jones
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The Lost World of the Laundrettes
Rebecca Wright At Dennis Severs’ House
Illustrator Rebecca Wright sent me her fine portfolio of drawings of Dennis Severs’ House which it is my pleasure to publish for the first time publicly today
The Smoking Room
“When I first saw Dennis Severs’ House on television a few years ago I immediately wanted to visit, it looked beautiful and eccentric. I am an illustrator and I was looking for a project. History, architecture and the curious have always interested me, so the house was a perfect fit.
Between jobs it has taken a year and a half to draw each of the main rooms, now I would like to draw the landings and staircases. I began with the front room on the ground floor and finished in the back cellar, and I found some rooms more complicated than others to draw.
The Ladies’ Drawing Room on the first floor took ages because of all the different fabrics and crockery. It has been a lovely experience, studying each room while practicing drawing and experimenting with lighting to get the atmosphere right. One of my favourites is the Smoking Room which has a lot of details like the bird cage and the knocked-over bottles, and the smoke drifting in the sunlight.
I placed Madge the cat is in each of my pictures because the house is her home and she is the presiding spirit.” – Rebecca Wright
The Kitchen
The Drawing Room
The Victorian Parlour decked for Christmas
The Ladies’ Room
The Blue Bedroom
The Regency Room
The Charles Dickens Room
The Paupers’ Attic
The Back Cellar
Illustrations copyright © Rebecca Wright
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Norton Folgate, E1 6BX
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A Date For The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry
The Public Inquiry called by Secretary of State, Robert Jenrick, into the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry commences on Tuesday 5th May and runs until Friday 15th May, with eight days of hearings. It is being held at Tower Hamlets Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, E14 2BG, and is open to the public up to a capacity of two hundred.
Please put these dates in your diary now because we need as many people as possible to attend to demonstrate the massive strength of public feeling that exists to save the bell foundry.
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The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Four Hundred Years at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Pearl Binder at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Dorothy Rendell at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
John Dempsey’s Portraits
Fifty Years Porter, Charing Cross, 1824
It is my delight to present John Dempsey’s street portraits from the eighteen-twenties held in the collection of the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery. Originally attributed to George Scharf, they were identified as the work of John Dempsey (1802-74) by curator David Hansen who discovered a folio of fifty-one portraits in 1996 in a drawer labelled ‘U’ for unknown.
Dempsey was an itinerant jobbing artist without any formal training who created ‘Likenesses of Public Characters’ in London and the provincial cities of England, as he travelled around in search of commissions for portrait miniatures and silhouettes. No record exists of any exhibitions and in 1845, he was declared bankrupt. Yet his achievement is unique and enduring.
In spite of Dempsey’s unconventional perspective and disproportionate figures, he created portraits full of humanity that evoke the presence of street people and the outcast poor with compassion and vitality. These are portraits of individuals and they are full of life. As an itinerant artist in an age that did not distinguish between street traders and beggars, he dignified his fellow travellers through his portraits. He understood their lives because he shared their precarious existence.
When I first saw these pictures, I was startled by how familiar they appeared to me and I assumed this was because I have spent so much time looking at prints of The Cries of London. But then I realised that I recognised the demeanour and expression of John Dempsey’s portraits because I see them, their crew and their kin, every day as I walk around the streets of London two centuries later.
Sharp, Orange Man, Colchester, 1823
Watercress, Salisbury
Black Charley, Bootmaker, Norwich, 1823
Muffin Man
Mary Croker, Mat Woman, Colchester, 1823
Sam’l Hevens, Old Jew, 1824
Charles M’Gee, Crossing Sweeper, London, c 1824
Old Bishop, Pieman, Harwich
Woolwich, 1824
Match Woman, Woolwich, 1824
Mark Custings (commonly called Blind Peter) and his boy, Norwich, 1823
Copeman, Gardener, Yarmouth
A Bill Poster, 1825
The Doorkeeper, Royal Managerie, Exeter ‘Change, (London) 1824
Images reproduced courtesy of Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery
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