Margaret Rope’s East End Windows
A familiar East End scene of 1933 – children playing cricket in the street and Nipper the dog joining in – yet it is transformed by the lyrical vision of the forgotten stained glass artist Margaret Rope, who created a whole sequence of these sublime works – now dispersed – depicting both saints of legend and residents of Haggerston with an equal religious intensity.
This panel is surmounted by a portrayal of St Leonard, the sixth century French saint, outside a recognisable St Leonard’s church, Shoreditch, with a red number six London bus going past. Margaret Rope’s extraordinary work mixes the temporal and the spiritual, rendering scenes from religious iconography as literal action and transforming everyday life into revelations – describing a universe simultaneously magical and human.
Between 1931 and 1947, the artist known simply to her family as ‘”Tor,” designed a series of eight windows depicting “East End Everyday Saints” for St Augustine’s church off the Hackney Rd, portraying miracles enacted within a recognisable East End environment. For many years these were a popular attraction, until St Augustine’s was closed and Margaret Rope’s windows removed in the nineteen-eighties, with two transferred across the road to St Saviour’s Priory in the Queensbridge Rd and the remaining six taken out of the East End to be installed in the crypt of St Mary Magdalene, Munster Sq. Intrigued by the attractive idea of Margaret Rope’s transcendent vision of the East End, I set out to find them for myself.
At St Saviour’s Priory, Sister Elizabeth was eager to show me their cherished windows of St Paul and St Margaret, both glowing with lustrous colour and crammed with intricate detail. St Paul, the patron saint of London, is depicted at the moment of his transformative vision, beneath St Paul’s Cathedral – as if it were happening not on the road to Damascus but in Ludgate Circus. The other window, portraying St Margaret, has particular meaning for the sisters at St Saviours, because they are members of the Society of St Margaret, whose predecessors first came from Sussex to Spitalfields in 1866 to tend to the victims of cholera. In Margaret Rope’s window, St Margaret resolutely faces out a dragon while Christ hands a tiny version of the red brick priory to John Mason Neale, the priest who founded the order. Both windows are engaging exercises in magical thinking and the warmth of the colours, especially turquoise greens and soft pinks, delights the eye with its glimmering life.
I found the other six windows in the crypt of St Mary Magdalene near Regents Park, now used as a seniors’ day centre, where they are illuminated from the reverse by fluorescent tubes. The first window you see as you walk in the door is St Anne, which contains an intimate scene of a mother and her two children, complete with a teddy bear lying on the floor and a tortoiseshell cat sleeping by the range.
Next comes St George, who looks like a young athlete straight out of the Repton Boxing Club, followed by St Leonard, St Michael, then St Augustine and St Joseph. All share the same affectionate quality in their observation of human detail that sets them above mere decorative windows. These are poems in stained glass manifesting the resilient spirit of the East End which endured World War II. Another window by Margaret Rope in St Peters in the London Docks, completed in 1940, showed parishioners celebrating Midnight Mass at Christmas in a bomb shelter.
Margaret Edith Aldrich Rope was born in 1891 into a farming family on the Suffolk coast at Leiston. Her uncle George was a Royal Academician, and she was able to study at Chelsea College of Art and Central School of Arts & Crafts, where she specialised in stained glass. Unmarried, she pursued a long and prolific working life, creating over one hundred windows in her fifty year career, taking time out to join the Women’s Land Army in World War I and to care for evacuees at a hospital in North Wales during World War II, before returning to her native Suffolk at the age of eighty-seven in 1978.
Her nickname “Tor” was short for tortoise and she signed all her works with a tortoise discreetly woven into the design. Upon close examination, every window reveals hidden texts inscribed in the richly coloured shadows. So much thought and imagination is evident in these modest works executed in the magical realist style. They transcend their period as neglected yet enduring masterpieces of stained glass and I recommend you make your own acquaintance with the stylish work of Margaret Rope, celebrating the miraculous quality of the everyday.
St Leonard is portrayed in a moment of revelation outside St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch, with Arnold Circus in the background and a London bus passing in the foreground
The lower panel of the St George window
A domestic East End scene from the lower panel of the St Anne’s window
This tortoise-shell cat is a detail from the panel above
The lower panel from the St Michael window
Mother Kate, Prioress of St Saviour’s and Father Burrows with his dog, Nipper, standing outside St Augustine’s in York St, now Yorkton St. In the right hand corner you can see the tortoise motif that Margaret Rope used to sign all her works.
Sisters of St Saviour’s Priory, portrayed in the lower panel of the St Margaret window, 1932
Margaret Rope’s St Paul and St Margaret, now in the entrance of Saviour’s Priory, Queensbridge Rd
Stained glass artist, Margaret Edith Aldrich Rope known as “Tor” (1891-1988)
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At The Velho & Alderney Rd Cemeteries
Lilacs at Alderney Rd Cemetery
Spring is a poignant season to visit ancient cemeteries and remember the long dead, when the new grass is flourishing, fresh and green, and the scent of flowers hangs in the air. I spent a contemplative few hours exploring the Velho Sephardic Cemetery in Mile End, which is Britain’s oldest Jewish cemetery, opened in 1657, one year after the readmission of the Jews to this country in 1656, and the nearby Alderney Rd Ashkenazi Cemetery which has inscriptions dating from 1697.
A gothic door in an old wall opens to reveal the Velho Cemetery, sequestered from the public gaze just yards from the Mile End Rd. In 1657, Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, a Portuguese merchant, and Simon de Cacares, an Amsterdam-born merchant, leased an orchard plot on this site next to an inn called The Soldier’s Tenement for fourteen years at an annual rent of ten pounds, which was about ten times its market value. Yet, in spite of the financial opportunism of landowner Henry Clowes, the Jewish community was treated with respect by many others – as reflected in the tolling of church bells from Aldgate and along the Whitechapel Rd when bodies were carried out here from the City of London.
Today, you step into a large walled space approaching the size a of football pitch, with slabs placed in neat lines, yet overturned in places by trees sprouting and overgrown with thick grass and bluebells. Almost all the stones have lost their inscriptions, worn away over time, with just a few images discernible and enough lettering to distinguish Hebrew and Portuguese, reflecting the continental origins of many of those buried here.
An unmarked area contains the remains of plague victims from 1665/66, while the high levels of child mortality demanded that infants were buried in closely-packed rows of three foot graves. Between 1708 and 34, six hundred and thirty children were buried here, almost half of all those interred in that period. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Jewish population in London had grown to between six and seven hundred, with around five hundred Sephardim but, testifying to significant numbers of Ashkenazim, Benjamin Levy purchased adjoining land in Alderney Rd in 1696 for an Ashkenazi Cemetery. And the Velho itself was superseded in the eighteenth century by the Nuevo Cemetery, occupying land to the east purchased in 1724.
Entering the gate in the wall in Alderney Rd, you enter another of the East End’s secret sacred places and the atmosphere is quite different from the Velho. In this smaller, more domestic enclave sheltered by tall trees, you discover elaborate table tombs surrounded by vertical stones, like lines of broken teeth, erupting from the recently cut grass where lilac and fruit trees bloom. A twentieth century monolith lists those famous in death and a handsome warden’s cottage both reflect the recent care expended upon this site, which received burials until 1852 and where the devout still attend regularly to light candles for the most worthy of the departed.
The warmth of the sun and the depth of the shade rendered both cemeteries as welcoming tranquil places – where grief and sadness and loss have ebbed away, and the peace that is unique to the graveyard prevails.
The door to the Velho Cemetery
Tomb of David Nieto – born in Venice, he came to London be Rabbi at Bevis Marks Synagogue and established the first Jewish orphanage in 1713
Plaque of 1684 commemorates the laying of the foundation stone of the boundary wall
Entrance to Alderney Rd Cemetery
Tomb of Samuel Falk, the Cabbalist who died in 1782 and was known as the “Baal Shem of London”
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The Auriculas Of Spitalfields
An auricula theatre
In horticultural lore, auriculas have always been associated with Spitalfields and writer Patricia Cleveland-Peck has a mission to bring them back again. She believes that the Huguenots brought them here more than three centuries ago, perhaps snatching a twist of seeds as they fled their homeland and then cultivating them in the enclosed gardens of the merchants’ grand houses, and in the weavers’ yards and allotments, thus initiating a passionate culture of domestic horticulture among the working people of the East End which endures to this day.
You only have to cast your eyes upon the wonder of an auricula theatre filled with specimens in bloom in Patricia’s Sussex garden to understand why these most artificial of flowers can hold you in thrall with the infinite variety of their colour and form. “They are much more like pets than plants,” Patricia admitted to me as we stood in her greenhouse surrounded by seedlings,“because you have to look after them daily, feed them twice a week in the growing season, remove offshoots and repot them once a year. Yet they’re not hard to grow and it’s very relaxing, the perfect antidote to writing, because when you are stuck for an idea you can always tend your auriculas.” Patricia taught herself old French and Latin to research the history of the auricula, but the summit of her investigation was when she reached the top of the Kitzbüheler Horn, high in the Austrian Alps where the ancestor plants of the cultivated varieties are to be found.
Auriculas were first recorded in England in the Elizabethan period as a passtime of the elite but it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that they became a widespread passion amongst horticulturalists of all classes. In 1795, John Thelwall, son of a Spitalfields silk mercer wrote, “I remember the time myself when a man who was a tolerable workman in the fields had generally beside the apartment in which he carried on his vocation, a small summer house and a narrow slip of a garden at the outskirts of the town where he spent his Monday either in flying his pigeons or raising his tulips.” Auriculas were included alongside tulips among those prized species known as the “Floristry Flowers,” plants renowned for their status, which were grown for competition by flower fanciers at “Florists’ Feasts,” the precursors of the modern flower show. These events were recorded as taking place in Spitalfields with prizes such as a copper kettle or a ladle and, after the day’s judging, the plants were all placed upon a long table where the contests sat to enjoy a meal together known as “a shilling ordinary.”
In the nineteenth century, Henry Mayhew wrote of the weavers of Spitalfields that “their love of flowers to this day is a strongly marked characteristic of the class.” and, in 1840, Edward Church who lived in Spital Sq recorded that “the weavers were almost the only botanists of their day in the metropolis.” It was this enthusiasm that maintained a regular flower market in Bethnal Green which eventually segued into the Columbia Rd Flower Market of our day.
Known variously in the past as ricklers, painted ladies and bears’ ears, auriculas come in different classes, show auriculas, alpines, doubles, stripes and borders – each class containing a vast diversity of variants. Beyond their aesthetic appeal, Patricia is interested in the political, religious, cultural and economic history of the auricula, but the best starting point to commence your relationship with this fascinating plant is to feast your eyes upon the dizzying collective spectacle of star performers gathered in an auricula theatre. As Sacheverell Sitwell once wrote, “The perfection of a stage auricula is that of the most exquisite Meissen porcelain or of the most lovely silk stuffs of Isfahan and yet it is a living growing thing.”
Mrs Cairns Old Blue – a border auricula
Glenelg – a show-fancy green-edged auricula
Piers Telford – a gold-centred alpine auricula
Taffetta – a show-self auricula
Seen a Ghost – a show-striped auricula
Sirius – gold-centred alpine auricula
Coventry St – a show-self auricula
M. L. King – show-self auricula
Mrs Herne – gold-centred alpine auricula
Dales Red – border auricula
Pink Gem – double auricula
Summer Wine – gold-centred alpine auricula
McWatt’s Blue – border auricula
Rajah – show-fancy auricula
Cornmeal – show-green-edged auricula
Fanny Meerbeek – show-fancy auricula
Piglet – double auricula
Basuto – gold-centred alpine auricula
Blue Velvet – border auricula
Patricia Cleveland-Peck in her greenhouse.
Patricia Cleveland-Peck’s book Auriculas Through the Ages, is available here
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Eleanor Crow’s Chemists
These days, chemists have become the heroes of the High Street and what better way to celebrate them than with this gallery of paintings by Eleanor Crow, including examples as far apart as Belgravia and Woodford Green.
“Some of the most successful and long-lasting small shops are chemists. It is significant that strict rules govern location and competition, protecting an existing viable pharmacy business from the arrival of a new competitor. It is a policy that results in a chemist within a short distance of most residential areas and everyone benefit from this as well as the shopkeepers. Longevity is a marker of success in the world of shops and I was delighted by the large number of chemists retaining their historic frontages.” – Eleanor Crow
W & CK King, Amwell St, Clerkenwell
W & CK King has been on Amwell St since 1843, retaining its Victorian fascia and Edwardian fittings. Most of the shops in this row, known as Thompson’s Terrace, were purpose-built in the eighteen-twenties as part of the New River and Lloyd Baker estates. Like Lloyd & Son, just down the street, they are a rare survival.
Chrystall, The Broadway, Woodford Green
Chrystall has been a chemist for over a century. Situated close to the Edwardian Monkhams Estate in Woodford on the border with Essex, the surrounding suburb grew up as the railway extended from London in the nineteenth century. This is now the last Edwardian frontage left in a run that originally contained all the necessary small shops including a fishmonger and an ironmonger.
Walden Chymist, Elizabeth St, Belgravia
EstablIshed in 1846 and serving this quiet corner of Belgravia for over one hundred and fifty years, Walden Chymist is still an independently-run pharmacy. The shopfront is Grade II listed and Lata Patel, who has run the business since 1980, is proud of her splendid facade with its old gilded letters and original architectural detailing.
Allchin & Co, Englands Lane, Belsize Park
The shop was opened by Alfred Allchin, a nineteenth-century pharmaceutical chemist and creator of Allchin’s Smelling Salts. Still an independent pharmacy, the current owners retain the name of the business but have recently chosen to conceal the original signs with their elegant gilded lettering behind new plastic ones.
A Maitland & Co, Piccadilly, St James
Chemist, Vallance Rd, Whitechapel
ThIs curIous single-storey shop on the corner of Whitechapel Rd was the site of a three-storey building that housed an apothecary and a surgeon in the nineteenth century, reflecting the proximity of the Royal London Hospital. Rebuilt as a chemist after bomb damage in the Second World War, it acquired large shop windows on both sides in the fifties. Chemists J. Liff traded here until the sixties when another chemist, Beck & Sherman, took over. They boarded over the windows on the Vallance Rd side and installed the mosaic tiling that first caught my attention, creating a dynamic contrast with the bold type and arrow pointing around the corner to the Whitechapel Rd.
Click here to order a copy for £14.99
At a time of momentous change in the high street, Eleanor’s witty and fascinating personal survey champions the enduring culture of Britain’s small neighbourhood shops.
As our high streets decline into generic monotony, we cherish the independent shops and family businesses that enrich our city with their characterful frontages and distinctive typography.
Eleanor’s collection includes more than hundred of her watercolours of the capital’s bakers, cafés, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, chemists, launderettes, hardware stores, eel & pie shops, bookshops and stationers. Her pictures are accompanied by the stories of the shops, their history and their shopkeepers – stretching from Chelsea in the west to Bethnal Green and Walthamstow in the east.
Samuel Pepys At St Olave’s
I am currently reading Samuel Pepys Diary for 1665 as a diversion
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. Consequently, 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 at Woolwich, 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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At Home With My Mother
Anthropologist & Writer Delwar Hussain sent me this account of recent weeks of self-isolating, alone with his mother in the family house in Spitalfields
Portrait by Patricia Niven
I went out for a run this morning. It was a mild spring day and the sky was the blue-and-white of china plates with one side of the road in shade and the other bathed in warm sunshine. It has been nearly two weeks since my mother and I have been isolated together at home. Though neither of us has any symptoms of the coronavirus, she is over seventy and last year was hospitalised with a chest infection, so we decided we needed to retreat for her protection.
I ran down the middle of empty roads following the sunlight through the City, along Liverpool St, and headed towards Holborn. It felt good to be outside with the wind on my face, the changing temperature on my skin and my body, active after being indoors for so many days. Following government advice to avoid public places, the streets were deserted yet, here and there, life continued. Builders worked, the noise of their machinery reverberating around. South American cleaners had just finished their shifts and chatted between each other at a distance. African security guards sat statue-like at receptions in glass and steel towers. Those finding themselves in the gig economy ferried around bags of food and parcels. A few people queued outside a branch of Boots the chemist, waiting for it to open with a look of despondency on their faces.
Along Cheapside, opticians were open but Church’s shoe shop was closed. The plinths in the windows lay empty as though an industrious robber with refined taste had swiped them. The clothes shop next door had its doors shut too, displaying a familiar sign about needing to protect their staff and customers.
I sped past, narrowly missing a delivery man who was packing his car with bouquets of flowers. He flinched as we were about to brush against each other, not just because he carried flowers in his latex-gloved hands but because these are times when any bodily contact is a potential threat. I was close enough to see that the cards he held were for Mothers Day.
Initially, my mother’s routines did not change. She would wake up, have breakfast, feed Styger our cat, look at her plants – the beans and gourd seeds are in, the coriander is already growing, the onions are coming up, as well as the mula – then prepare lunch for any family passing through the house. In the afternoons she speaks to her sister in Bethnal Green, has tea, settles down to watch Hollyoaks, the Channel 4 News and then Eastenders before getting started on supper.
Once the virus hit, siblings, nieces, nephews and her grandchildren stopped coming. With fewer people around, she cooks less. Her trips to Whitechapel market or to the grocery shops on Brick Lane came to an end. She stopped seeing her sister but she is on the phone more often and has learnt to use the video function on WhatsApp.
One of the biggest changes in our routines is that we watch telly together in the evenings. This is something we used to do when I was younger but, as my siblings and I grew older and found other sources of interest and entertainment, we stopped watching with her, except perhaps the odd thing – the Olympics 100-Metre Dash, the World Cup and Eurovision.
Despite not speaking English, my mother is a wealth of knowledge on British popular television from the Two Ronnies, Tommy Cooper, Dane Edna – fixtures on television when she moved to London in 1978 – to contemporary films, game shows, serials, football and sports, and music and talent shows. As the technology has grown more and more complex, defeating me, she still manages to find her way around the remote control.
So now in the evenings, as she sips her glass of hot water and lemon and I flick through the stream of messages about the virus on my phone, we watch Arabic and French detective series, pottery competitions and the recent adaptation of ‘The Pale Horse’ by Agatha Christie, which I liked and she thinks is merely adequate. She enjoys Masterchef. She is more interested in the contestants and their back-stories than she is in the food they prepare, which she considers to be monotonous and usually undercooked, even if the judges find it magnifique.
As I approached Holborn on my run, there were fewer people on the street. Another runner passed me in a face mask and protective gloves, making me feel I transgressed by not wearing them. The virus is an existential matter, bringing our collective and individual fears about mortality and frailty to the fore. At this stage, rather than the virus being a source of alarm, my mother’s worry is about food. This is exacerbated by the news, and what friends and family are telling her about empty supermarket aisles.
My mother was born in Bengal which has a history of famine, including the 1974 famine soon after Bangladesh was founded, as well as the more well-known Bengal Famine of 1943 when Winston Churchill diverted food to feed British troops stationed in East Asia. An estimated three million people perished from starvation, malaria and other associated diseases. These histories have become embedded in the identity of Bengalis, including those – like my mother – who have lived in London for over forty years. Want, shortage and scarcity are facts that I and my siblings had instilled into us. As a result, we always bought in bulk, in spite of our embarrassment, remonstrations and complaints as we were made to lug home sacks of rice, lentils, spices, salt, sugar and tea, and drums of oil.
I turned back at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, aware that my energy would not stretch any further, passed the High Court and then headed towards St Pauls where there were more people on the street. On closer inspection they were tourists, with the city to themselves, taking photographs without any competition now. They all wore face masks and gloves. Finally, I turned into Bishopsgate and sprinted home through the empty Spitalfields Market.
Outside our front door, one of my younger brothers was standing with a bunch of flowers and a box of doughnuts for my mother which, in all likelihood, would once have been eaten by him. He did not want to come inside and risk infecting her. Would I take them to her?
That evening, my mother and I watched a scientific documentary about birth. One of the questions scientists have been asking is how babies and mothers bond from the moment of birth. I did my best to translate this for her into Sylheti, a language I am growing increasingly rusty with now that my mother is one of the few people I use it with. Yet she understands without me having to say anything. ‘It’s like asking why we breathe,’ my mother says, matter-of-factly. ‘If babies and mothers don’t bond, then there is no life.’
From Delwar’s window
Empty Spitalfields
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The Plagues Of Old London
Distinguished historian Gillian Tindall sent me this fascinating history of the Plague in London from her self-isolation
‘Bring Out Your Dead,’ A Street in London 1665, by Edmund Evans, 1864
Inhabitants of modern developed countries too easily lose sight of the essential fragility of human life. If you are fortunate enough to live in a society with a decent health service, effective drugs readily available and an average life-expectancy well beyond the Biblical three-score years and ten, you may accept this state of affairs as normal. Until just recently …
Yet our ancestors, for centuries and centuries, knew better – or perhaps I should say ‘knew worse’ ? Their common experience was that life was fragile and easily destroyed. Epidemics of fatal sickness were not exceptional events of once a century but frequent scourges lasting years, better at one time then suddenly worse at another, and never really going away.
So much was made of the Black Death of the fourteenth century by chroniclers a generation later that their estimates of how many died, in London and elsewhere, are now believed to have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. What is more significant is that the Bubonic Plague stayed around for the next three centuries. Consequently, the history of London through the Tudor period and into the Stuarts’ had a great many ‘plague years’.
Nor was this plague the only major affliction. A ‘sweating sickness’ appeared which no one today has yet satisfactorily identified. Dean Colet, the founder of St Paul’s School, died of it in 1519 in the midst of an otherwise healthy life – though this might, in retrospect, have been a blessing. Colet’s younger friend Thomas More, sharing the same religious and political views, was beheaded fifteen years later for disagreeing with Henry VIII. The sweating sickness appears to have disappeared by the following century as mysteriously as it had come. Malaria which had been an endemic nuisance and destroyer of health, as it still is in some parts of the world today, also declined, probably because many of the mosquito-haunted marshes and fens were drained.
But Bubonic Plague returned to London, on a regular basis, in the troubled times of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, finally reaching its zenith in the Great Plague of 1665, which has become our bench-mark for all other epidemics.
Recently, a neighbour of mine, contemplating the notion of social isolation, emailed me, saying `Our niece has just brought us some soup! She never normally visits us. Do you think that if we painted “Lord have mercy upon us” on the front door other people would bring us free food?’
In the Great Plague, whole households were shut up to die together because the infection was believed to be airborne. There was indeed an airborne version of pastorella pestis and the earlier Black Death may have been that, but it is now evident that the Great Plague was a visitation of the common plague, passed by the fleas, lice, rats and mice that lived in close proximity with Londoners. The angry inhabitant who declared ‘As soon as any house is infected, all the sound people should be out of it and not shut up therein to be murdered,’ actually got it right.
The illusion that Plague was transmitted from person-to-person has created myths of heroism, in particular relating to the village of Eyam in Derbyshire. Although it was understood at the time that the Plague arrived in flea-infested cloth ordered from London by a tailor, the wrong conclusion was drawn. When the tailor’s assistant became ill, not only were his family shut up to die but the entire village as well. Encouraged by a high-minded Vicar, they incarcerated themselves, thinking to save the neighbouring villages. As a result, over half – or possibly more- of the population of Eyam died.
Yet almost everywhere else in country districts the Plague died out quickly – a natural consequence, as we now recognise, of people living in less-crowded and less-infested conditions. In the summer of 1665, a stonemason who had been working in London, rode home to his village in the Cotswolds with the Plague upon him. He died and so did the rest of his immediate household. Their deaths are marked ‘plague’ in the burial register but no one else died in the parish that August, except for one very old man.
Meanwhile in London, a few intelligent and observant people got the message. In the parish of St Giles in the Fields where the Plague first manifested itself (infested cloth again, from Rotterdam), William Boghurst, a local apothecary, stayed on duty throughout, ministering to his customers. As he wrote later in his book on the sickness (entitled Loimographia but actually quite readable), he had been at bedsides taking pulses and blood, holding up the choking and dying, even dressing sores. Like the doctors and surgeons far grander than he, he had no cure to administer yet he remained plague-free himself, having accurately recognised the conditions that exacerbated the problem as –
‘thickness of inhabitants, those living as many families in a house, living in cellars, want of fitting accommodations as good fires, good dyett, washing, want of all good conveyances of filth, standing and stinking waters, dung hills, excrements, dead bodies lying unburied and putrefying, churchyards too full crammed …’
He added, ‘exceptionally hot weather,’ and remarked how there had been, ‘such a multitude of flies that they lined the insides of the houses… and swarms of ants covered the highways.’
Boghurst’s remedy? He advocated keeping a clean house, disposing of human waste at a distance, consuming only the freshest meat and milk, and being particularly careful about clean water. More than two centuries before it was generally accepted that diseases came from microscopic organisms, he was already practising the correct methods. He was also in favour of eating fresh fruit and vegetables, of which many of his contemporaries were unaccountably wary. He was also, beyond any doubt, a great advocate of hand-washing.
(The Dance of Death that follows is by Luke Clennell 1825)
The Desolation
The Queen
The Pope
The Cardinal
The Elector
The Canon
The Canoness
The Priest
The Mendicant Friar
The Councillor or Magistrate
The Astrologer
The Physician
The Merchant
The Wreck
The Swiss Soldier
The Charioteer or Waggoner
The Porter
The Fool
The Miser
The Gamesters
The Drunkards
The Beggar
The Thief
The Newly Married Pair
The Husband
The Wife
The Child
The Old Man
The Old Woman
Gillian Tindall’s new book The Pulse Glass and the Beat of Other Hearts is published by Chatto & Windus
You may like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall
Wenceslaus Hollar At Old St Paul’s
Memories of Ship Tavern Passage
Gillian Tindall’s Wartime Memories
At Captain Cook’s House in Mile End
