The Bethnal Green Mulberry Saga
Readers may wonder what has become of the Bethnal Green Mulberry and what the future holds for the oldest tree in the East End.
When I was first taken to see the Bethnal Green Mulberry five years ago, I had no idea what part it would play in my life or the long fight that would ensure to prevent it being dug up. I had no idea that it would lead to me becoming a ‘Mulberry Martyr’ when I fell out of an ancient Mulberry and broke my wrist last summer while picking Mulberries for the campaign.
Next Saturday afternoon, 15th February at 2:30pm, I shall be giving a lecture on the subject of the Bethnal Green Mulberry, recounting the history of Mulberries in London, the tale of the most venerable East End specimen, the story of the fight to save it, and the next steps to ensure its survival.
The lecture is organised by the Friends of the Geffrye Museum at St Peter de Beauvoir Church, Northchurch Terrace, N1 4DA.
Tea and scones will be served.
The Bethnal Green Mulberry (Photograph by Bob Philpots)
The Haggerston Mulberry
The Dalston Mulberry
The Whitechapel Mulberry
The Mile End Mulberry
The Stoke Newington Mulberry
The Spitalfields Mulberry
The Tower of London Mulberry
Click here to read my feature in The Daily Telegraph about the scandal of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
Read more here about the Bethnal Green Mulberry
The Fate of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
How Old is the Bethnal Green Mulberry?
Here We Go Round The Bethnal Green Mulberry
A Plea For The Bethnal Green Mulberry
The Reckoning With Crest Nicholson
So Long, Henrietta Keeper
With sadness, I report the death yesterday of my friend Henrietta Keeper, the irrepressible ballad singer, at the fine age of ninety-three
Friday was always an especially good day to have lunch at E. Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd, because not only was Maria Pellicci’s delicious fried cod & chips with mushy peas likely to be on the menu, but also – if you were favoured – you might also get to hear Henrietta Keeper sing one of her soulful ballads. Celebrated for her extraordinary vitality, the venerable Henrietta (known widely as “Joan”) was naturally reticent about her age, a discretion which you will appreciate when I reveal that she was able to pass as one thirty years her junior.
Henrietta tucked into her customary fried egg & chips as the essential warm-up to her weekly performance while I sat across the table from her enjoying the cod & chips with mushy peas, and helping her out with her chips. “My husband died fourteen years ago, of emphysema from smoking and he ate a lot of hydrolized fat.” she admitted to me, her dark eyes shining with emotion,“When he died, I threw away the biscuits and I bought a book on nutrition and studied it, and now I’ve got strong. I only eat wholemeal bread, white bread’s a killer. I am keeping well, to stay alive for the sake of my children because I love them. I don’t want to go the same way my husband did.”
“Anna Pellicci makes me laugh, ‘She says, ‘Are you still here?”” continued Henrietta, with affectionate irony, leaning closer and casting her eyes around the magnificent panelled cafe that was her second home,“I first came to Pelliccis in 1947 when I got married. No-one had washing machines then, so I used to take my washing to the laundrette and come here with my three babies, Lesley hanging onto the pram, Linda sitting on the front and Lorraine the baby inside.” Yet in spite of being around longer than anyone else, Henrietta possessed a youthful, almost childlike, energy and wore a jaunty bow in her hair. “I’m so tiny,” she declared to me batting her eyelids flirtatiously, “I’m just a little girl.”
As a prelude to the afternoon’s performance, I asked Henrietta the origin of her singing and she grew playful, speaking with evident delight and invoking emotions from long ago. “It all started with my dad when I was a little girl, he had a beautiful voice.” she recalled fondly, “He was a road sweeper, but years ago there wasn’t much work – so, when he couldn’t get a job, he used to stand outside the pub singing. And people put money in his hat, and he took it home and gave to my mum. That was the only entertainment we had in those days. Everybody was poor, so the best thing was to go to the pub and make your own music. When I was sixteen years old, I used to sing duets with my dad in pubs. The first song I sang was “Sweet Sixteen – When I first saw the love light in your eyes, when you were sweet sixteen…”
Henrietta got lost in the sentiment, singing the opening line of Sweet Sixteen across the table in a whisper, before the choosing the moment to assure me,“I’m a ballad singer, I don’t like to sing ‘Hey, Big Spender!’ even though I think Shirley Basset’s marvellous – that suits her voice, not mine.” I nodded sagely in acknowledgement of the distinction, before she continued with a fresh thought, “But I like Country & Western. Have you heard of Patsy Cline and Lena Martell? I like that one, ‘I go to pieces each time I see you again…'”
Born in the old Bethnal Green Hospital in the Cambridge Heath Rd, Henrietta and all her family – even her great-grandparents – lived in Shetland St opposite. Evacuated at the age of ten to Little Saxham, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, Henrietta found herself with a devout Welsh family who worked on the land and went to church on Sundays. Here Henrietta excelled in the choir and “that’s how I learnt singing. I got to sing, ‘My Lord is Sweet,’ on my own and I loved it.” she confided to me with a tender smile.
Returning to the East End at the time of the doodlebugs, Henrietta was out playing with her friend Doris when they heard the sound of the Luftwaffe overhead followed by explosions. In the horror of the moment, Doris suggested they take refuge in Bethnal Green Tube Station, but Henrietta had the presence of mind to refuse and went instead to join her family sleeping under the railway arches. That night, one hundred and seventy three people were killed on the staircase as they crowded into the entrance of the tube, including Henrietta’s friend Doris. “It’s not for your eyes,” Henrietta’s father told her when they laid out the bodies on stretchers upon the pavements in lines, but she recalled it in vivid detail all her days.
We ate in silence for a while before Henrietta resumed her story.“When my children started school, I joined the Diamond “T” Concert Party,” she told me,”I had a friend who worked at Tate & Lyle in Silvertown and one of the things they did for the community was organise entertainments. We used to go to old people’s homes, churches and hospitals, and I became one of their singers for thirty years. We had quite a laugh. The only reason I left was that everyone else died.”
I understood something of Henrietta’s circumstance, her story, the origin of her singing and how she made use of her talent over all these years. I realised it was imperative that Henrietta continued singing, that was how she won the longevity she desired, and for one born and bred in Bethnal Green, Pelliccis was the natural venue. Yet there was one mystery left – why did everyone know Henrietta as ‘Joan’ ?
“My mum was called Henrietta, and because I was the eldest I was called Henrietta, but I hated it so I when I went for my first job interview, as a machinist in Mare St making army denims, I told them I was called, “Joan.” she confessed, “They was more cockney there than I am, they said, ‘What’s your name, love?’ and I didn’t like calling out ‘Henrietta’ because it sounded so posh, I just said the first name that came into my head – ‘Joan.’ All my neighbours and my mother-in-law know me as Joan, but my family know me as Henrietta. And that’s how I told a little white lie, in case you might be wondering.”
As our conversation passed, we had completed our meals. Joan ordered a piece of bread pudding to take home for later and I polished off a syrup pudding with custard. And then, the moment arrived – Henrietta took her microphone from her bag and composed herself to summon the spirit of the place, a hush fell upon the cafe and she sang…
“I’m a ballad singer, I don’t like to sing ‘Hey, Big Spender!”
Henrietta Keeper – “I’m so tiny, I’m just a little girl.”
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The Wyvern Bindery Is Moving
The Wyvern Bindery has been a fond landmark on the Clerkenwell Rd for as long as I can remember, but now it is moving east on 13th March to 187 Hoxton St, N1 6RA
“We’re inspired by William Morris and by Eric Gill,” explained Mark Winstanley, self-styled “gentleman bookbinder” of the busy Wyvern Bindery in the Clerkenwell Rd – “Morris articulated the three crucial elements you need to run a successful bindery. You need a clientele with an appetite for hand made bindings. You need a skilled labour force to do the binding, And you need a nice rich city like London.”
Fortunately Mark has all three, and is ideally placed to bring the first two together in Clerkenwell, once the historic centre of London’s print trade and now the preserve of media and design companies. “Gill’s idea of a workshop was that everyone should own their personal set of tools,” he continued, recognising the need for individual autonomy within the workplace – a principle evidenced by the diverse group of young bookbinders working on different projects at the Wyvern Bindery, assisting each other and coming regularly to consult Mark whilst we were in conversation.
“There’s always been a bookbinding trade, but without Morris life for a bookbinder would be much more difficult today,” Mark conceded with an affectionate nod, “Hannah More, Rosie Gray and I started the Wyvern Bindery in 1990 in the Clerkenwell workshops. We got it going from nothing and we turned over thirty-five thousand pounds in the first year, with a little bit of luck and some hard work. And after five years, we took this shop at five thousand pounds a year.”
If you pause on the Clerkenwell Rd and look through the window of the Wyvern Bindery, you can witness the entire process of bookbinding enacted before your eyes. Among presses and plan chests, surrounded by racks of multi-coloured rolls of buckram and leather, and shelves of type and tools, the bookbinders work, absorbed at tables and benches, trimming pages and card for covers at guillotines, sewing and gluing and pressing and tooling, working with richly subtly hued canvas and leather, and finally embossing them with type for titles. In a restricted space, they pursue individual tasks while also engaging in an elaborate collective endeavour, sharing equipment and bench space as their projects require different areas of the shared workshop – all within a constant dynamic harmony.
“In the seventies when I started, the trade was opening up and it was easier to get into it without an apprenticeship.” recalled Mark, “I was one of the students on the very first full-time year’s course in craft book binding at the London College of Printing in 1976. My teacher was Art Johnson and he taught me to make books that lasted and were well made, with honesty.”A principle apparent today in the unpretentious work produced at the Wyvern Bindery, creating bindings that do not draw attention to themselves – avoiding ostentation in favour of work that is neat and well finished. “People ring up and say, ‘This is what we want it to look like. Can you work it out in twenty-four hours and we’ll fly off on Monday morning to do a pitch to Coca-Cola with it,’ -not a fancy leather binding that takes six weeks.” admitted Mark, revealing how his ancient trade thrives amongst the new media that surround him “We apply craft skills to a commercial proposition. It might not be art but it’s clean and neat and it’s done on time.” he said plainly.
If you think Mark’s pragmatism is not entirely convincing, your suspicion will be confirmed when he admits to the irresistibly seductive melancholy of damaged old books that demand restoration. A magnetism that led him to Ethiopia recently, where he was invited to restore a sixth century testament, the Abba Garima Gospels written around 560, the oldest illuminated church manuscript in Africa.“Written in one day – because God stopped the sun for three weeks – it is still a living document,” he assured me, his eyes sparkling with passion, “A seriously holy book that people pay to have read to them, believing that it can cure the sick, this is one of the greatest church documents in the world.”And then Mark showed me snaps of fragments of the beloved book, explaining how he painstakingly unpicked the stitches that were causing tears to the pages and reattached them all to the spine with Japanese tissue.
Bookbinding emphasises a sense of time and mortality for the binder, because alongside the bindings that Mark creates to preserve the content of new books, old damaged tomes are coming in for repair, illustrating the fate of his predecessors’ works, a fate that will also come to his own in turn. “When you see the work of the great book binders, like Riviere, Morrells and Bumpus – all dead and gone now – they jump at you, the quality of the leather and gold tooling, the attention to detail, the hand-sewn headbands and good quality card.” Mark declared to me, confiding his sense of personal connection. And I understood that the care he puts into these repairs honours those who came before him, expressing a latent hope that his work will be similarly respected by generations yet to come.
The first printing in London was done in Clerkenwell, while in the nineteenth century it became a place of booksellers and now Mark Winstanley has found an elegant way to make the artisan skills of the bookbinder serve the current inhabitants. The Wyvern Bindery with its hand tools and glue pots may appear the anachronism in Clerkenwell today, yet the truth is it carries the living spirit of the culture that has defined this corner of London for more than five hundred years.
Wyvern Bindery, 56/8 Clerkenwell Road.
Pages from the Abba Garima Gospels dating from before 560.
The Gospels restored with pages mounted on Japanese tissue by Mark Winstanley.
Mark Winstanley at the Clerkenwell Workshops in 1990
Photographs of the bindery copyright © Nicola Boccaccini
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Gram Hilleard’s Postcards From London
It is my delight to publish these postcards designed and conceived by comic genius Gram Hilleard
“The idea behind these postcard provocations is simple. London loves to sell the world its history while at the same time destroying it by selling out to asset-stripping developers and big business. If you visit a souvenir shop the nostalgic postcards you find there show London many years ago, whereas my postcards highlight the awful changes of contemporary London. Unfortunately my research brings up some ugly truths, especially when you join the dots to consider the bigger picture!” – Gram Hilleard
Postcards copyright Gram Hilleard
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Phyllis Archer, First Lady of Fournier St
It is my pleasure to publish these extracts from the memoir of Phyllis Grant Archer (1911-88), recounting the years she lived with her son Rodney in Fournier St.
Edited and annotated by her daughter Elayne Archer, Phyllis’ memoir CROSSING TROUBLED WATERS recounts her experiences as a war widow emigrating from London to Toronto with her two young children in 1944, before returning to spend her final years in Spitalfields thirty-six years later.
Phyllis Archer with Rodney & Elayne in Paris, 1962
In early 1980, my mother Phyllis and brother Rodney bought a very old house in the heart of the old immigrant East End. The area was then very rundown, only just beginning its resurgence to the fancy, trendy and historic neighbourhood of today. The house was 31 Fournier St, between Commercial St and Brick Lane. My mother loved all the history. She also loved the sound of the bells ringing from Christ Church and the Imam calling the faithful to prayer from the mosque.
Above all, my mother loved the house. It had four floors and a basement. It was built in 1726 and had been used for many years as a small clothing factory and then, for several years before she and my brother moved in, as the office of a minicab company. At first, my mother lived in the house alone for six months while my brother sold his house in North London. She lived without an indoor toilet or running water, not much in the way of electricity, beyond an occasional light bulb hanging from the ceiling. My mother described this time thus –
“I had many visitors. There were two social workers who lived in flats in the bowels of the church and people sent by Irving Tarn, the estate agent whose father had bought up half the houses in the area. He was very nice to me. he called me ‘the first lady of Fournier St’ because I was the first woman owner in the street.
Dennis Severs, a Californian who had a fantastic old house on Folgate St, came almost every day to get water in for me, using an old teakettle he’d bought in the market. It cost 25p and it leaked but Dennis had it soldered and it was ideal. For his kindness, Rodney gave him the picture of himself holding the sceptre and orb which is now a prized exhibit in Dennis’ Victorian parlour.”
At 31 Fournier St, my mother lived on the top two floors and my brother in the bottom three. She maintained that the exercise of the stairs was good for her. The attic had been the workplace of the Huguenot weavers and my mother imagined a canary’s cage hanging by the window to warn when the air was too thick with lint. The windows of her kitchen overlooking the walled garden were of eighteenth-century glass which distorted the view slightly. Of course, the house was a building site for the first two years but my mother loved it, except for the evenings when the rain poured in and she and my brother had to empty buckets of water into the kitchen sink until they could afford to repair the roof.
Every day my mother wandered the neighbourhood. She loved to browse the markets and usually returned with a plate, cup or bowl – often with cracks or chips – the older the better. Most of all, my mother loved to go to the Market Cafe at 5 Fournier St run by Clyde Armstrong and his sister Phyllis. There she would eat a hearty meal of meat, roast potatoes, yorkshire pudding, brussel sprouts and always a pudding – trifle, jam roly-poly or crumble with custard. She regaled the other customers – taxi drivers, market porters, old timers and new arrivals – with tales of London the thirties and her work at the Daily Mail. ‘Lord Rothermere made a pass at me in the lift!’ and ‘My boss, a lesbian, once did the same.’ In the afternoon, my mother often sat in the walled garden or in the front room on the second floor with one of my brother’s cats on her lap.
She entertained many friends visiting from Toronto, taking them to the Olde Cheshire Cheese where she ate hearty meals, regaling her friends with stories of the pub’s famous patrons as if they were personal friends. ‘Dr Johnson was a regular customer, he would take home oysters for his cat,’ my mother informed me as she gobbled her bread and butter pudding. She could sometimes be a little over the top.
‘Was I impossible, kids?’ she asked my brother and me once after such a performance. Rodney replied, ‘You were a little impossible, Mother, but you were also quite wonderful.’
During her years in Fournier St, my mother suffered a series of falls, resulting in broken hips, wrists and thighs. My mother’s eye sight was also an issue and she was always concerned about losing sight in her ‘good eye.’ Yet my mother remained upbeat and went out walking every day with a cane. My brother accompanied her to the doctor for her eyes, her liver and her broken bones, describing these visits thus –
“It was hard to see my mother as vulnerable because she had always seemed so strong to me throughout my life. Finally I saw Phyllis’ fear of mortality. I am sure many go through this reversal of the parent-child relationship. When I was teaching a class of students in their twenties and thirties, I found myself looking for a young woman with bright red hair, hazel eyes and a dazzling complexion – the woman my mother had been before motherhood, before war, before widowhood, before life treated her so horribly.
She was often stoic and brave but could be sad and complain, ‘O Rodney, you have no idea what I have been through. I wanted to be a writer too but I had to work so hard to bring you and your sister up, I never found time to develop my abilities.’
Other times, my mother would talk about how well things had worked out. How fortunate she was to have two loving if difficult – she thought – children, and then be spending her last years in a wonderful neighbourhood.”
I visited my mother in London for the last time in November 1988. I hardly recognised her when I walked into the ward and I think she understood this and waved at me. I asked ‘How are you doing, Mother?’ She replied, ‘Oh well, I suppose I could be worse.’
One day, when my brother accompanied me, she grabbed both our arms. ‘I’m going now, kids,’ she said. “Martin has my latest will. My memoir is under the bed and you know where my rings are.’ She looked at Rodney and said ‘We’ve been a good couple, haven’t we?’ And then to me she said, ‘You’ve been a wonderful daughter, Elayne.’
My mother’s ashes were scattered in the garden of 31 Fournier St, and my brother and I placed a plaque on the wall there in her memory.
The walled garden at 31 Fournier St
Phyllis with Elayne & Rodney as children
31 Fournier St
Phyllis in Toronto, 1947
31 Fournier St
Phyllis in Spitalfields, spring 1988
Elayne (photo by Nancy Siesel)
Rodney in Fournier St
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The Magnificent Old Ladies Of Whitechapel
Photographing daily on the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel for the last thirty years, Phil Maxwell has taken hundreds of pictures of old ladies – of which I publish a selection of favourites here today. Some of these photos of old ladies were taken over twenty-five years ago and a couple were taken quite recently, revealing both the continuity of their presence and the extraordinary tenacity for life demonstrated by these proud specimens of the female sex in the East End. Endlessly these old ladies trudge the streets with trolleys and bags, going about their business in all weathers, demonstrating an indomitable spirit as the world changes around them, and becoming beloved sentinels of the territory.
“As a street photographer, you cannot help but take photos of these ladies.” Phil admitted, speaking with heartfelt tenderness for his subjects, “In a strange kind of way, they embody the spirit of the street because they’ve been treading the same paths for decades and seen all the changes. They have an integrity that a youth or a skateboarder can’t have, which comes from their wealth of experience and, living longer than men, they become the guardians of the life of the street.”
“Some are so old that you have an immediate respect for them. These are women who have worked very hard all their lives and you can see it etched on their faces, but what some would dismiss as the marks of old age I would describe as the beauty of old age. The more lines they have, the more beautiful they are to me. You can just see that so many stories and secrets are contained by those well-worn features.”
“I remember my darkroom days with great affection, because there was nothing like the face of an old lady emerging from the negative in the darkroom developer – it was as if they were talking to me as their faces began to appear. There is a magnificence to them.”
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
See more of Phil Maxwell’s work here
Julie Begum, Someone Still Evolving
Portrait of Julie Begum by Sarah Ainslie
In the course of my work, I often discover that the people I meet are connected to others I have interviewed. This is especially true of Julie Begum, a woman of magnanimous spirit and moral courage who is widely respected for her involvement in many diverse threads of culture and community in the East End. When I asked Julie how I should describe her, she replied ‘As someone who is still evolving.’
Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I met Julie in the cafe on the top of the Idea Store in Whitechapel where a wall of glass affords magnificent views down onto the market and eastwards towards Spitalfields. Here at the heart of the East London, with all the different currents of life flowing around us, proved the ideal location for Julie to speak to us of her life and experiences in the surrounding streets.
“I was born in Mile End Hospital, Stepney, in 1968 and I grew up on the Digby Estate in Globe Town, but before that my parents lived in one room in a flat belonging to my uncle on the Chicksand Estate in Spitalfields. I have my mum and dad and two brothers, and Globe Town is my manor.
My dad came to London in 1962 as part of the voucher system to attract immigrants from Commonwealth countries. His father died when my dad was ten and he went to work in a rickshaw workshop in Sylhet. He was the second son of a large family and the eldest brother chose not to come, so the family funded my dad to go overseas to earn money and send it back. He did that for a long time and he paid for his siblings’ education. He worked as a machinist in the East End rag trade in Jewish and Turkish factories, whatever he could find. It was a dying trade then.
When immigration laws changed and it was more difficult to come and go, he decided that if he was going to stay here he would get married. So he went back to Sylhet and married my mum who was the eldest daughter in her family. She took care of her brothers and sisters at home, she did not go to school. She went once and saw a child getting beaten and decided she was not going to go back. She is a non-literate person and my dad did not even finish primary school. They were not the most educated people.
My mother was only a teenager when she arrived in London and then she had me and my two brothers. For both my parents, coming here was not something they had not anticipated in their lives but they did it because it was expected of them by their families. They made a home for themselves here but it was quite a hostile environment. There were other migrants – not just Bengalis, Irish, Caribbean and from other parts of the the world – and they clung to those relationships. They were all sorts and they were all in it together. I remember my mum used to leave me with her Irish neighbour when she needed to go off and do things. It was informal and friendly in the early days.
We lived on a mostly white council estate with a few black families and just a couple of other Bengalis. The atmosphere in Globe Town was quite nasty at the time. We were careful about not hanging about in public and going to school could be a challenge. If we were with adults, we would be safe. We had a neighbour, Pauline, who worked in the school and sometimes she took us and, if my mum could go, we would be fine.
If there was an incident, we would leg it. We had to go past this dry-cleaner’s shop that had an alsation and they would set dogs, on us on the way there and back, as a way of scaring us. That sort of thing happened on a daily basis, hostility in the street. There was quite a lot of paki-bashing going on, not just for children but for adults as well. People were being assaulted and they would go out in groups for security if they could. Sometimes you just had to get on with life and face it. We continued to play outside.
We had a very nasty family on the estate of known troublemakers who were always in trouble with the police and were known racists. I remember when my dad got arrested after Philip the son made me eat some dog shit because he thought that was what we ate. I went running home to my parents and my dad came out and challenged him. Then Philip’s dad came out and they got into an altercation. And the police arrested my dad for getting in a fight. I remember having to go to a phone box to get hold of someone to come and see my dad in the police cell in Bethnal Green. I was seven, eight or nine at the time. Things like that did not happen all the time but it created an atmosphere. You realised that the world was not a friendly place. Yet we also had neighbours who were very kind and supportive, and I was sad to leave the estate because it was where I grew up.
What I have drawn from those experiences is I want the world to be a better place and I am really pleased that those things don’t really happen any more in the same way. It has made me aware of social justice and the need for a fairer society, which is regardless of peoples’ backgrounds. My family were very keen to lead a certain kind of life, to be acknowledged and taken seriously, and not to be judged for what people think you might be.
My parents did not talk much about anything. As children, we did not know why they had come to this country or anything about what had happened to their families in Bangladesh. We did not know there had been a war there.
Globe School was really lovely. I loved it. It’s why I wanted to become a teacher. We had some really good teachers there, inspirational in lots of ways. Morpeth School, where I went next, was the opposite – it was more like being in a prison. There was lots of fighting in the corridors, a pupil took an overdose in the toilets and teachers were being assaulted by the kids. I became part of it, it was very nasty bullying environment. I adapted to being in a difficult place. I did not acknowledge my brothers in the playground because you did not want anyone to know who you were. We pretended we did not know each other. It was a horrible place.
That was the East End at that time. The boys came out of school and went to prison and the girls ended up having babies. There was no expectation of anybody, whether black, white or brown. School was merely a containment space for lots of young people.
Quite early on, I knew I did not want to get married or have children, so I realised I needed to earn a living. I thought, ‘What can I do that I can earn a living by? Maybe I can get a job doing something?’ I did not have a clue but I realised I needed to get some qualifications because I did not get any at Morpeth School, so I went to a sixth form centre to get some. After that, I did some A Levels and I decided it was time to think about getting a job. I was walking down the Holloway Rd with a friend and we saw an advert for a teaching training course in the window of the North London Polytechnic so I went in to have a look and ended up signing up for a B Ed and spent four years there.
I think my parents would been really happy if I had simply got married and had kids. They did not expect me to do very much. They did not understand my need to do something else, but my father would listen to a reasoned argument. We were brought up to reason. When the news was on we might not agree on the issues but we were encouraged to argue why. So I was able to persuade my father that getting an education would be something worthwhile and he agreed.
He had very particular ideas about life and what people should do. He said ‘If you live in my house, you live by my rules,’ and I accepted that until I realised, ‘I can’t live by your rules, so I am leaving’ and that was what I did. It wasn’t pleasant, it created quite a rift yet I respected his standards. I was eighteen.
I was lucky, I had good friends and I was introduced me to someone who lived in a shared women’s house that was short-life housing in Turner’s Rd, Bow. The place was falling apart but there was a spare room, so I moved in. There were women from different backgrounds, all sorts. It was eclectic. I ended up being the housing officer for that house because all my friends ended up living there too. If there was a spare room and a friend needed somewhere to live, and as long as they paid the rent, it was fine. We had a really nice time and it became quite normal for me as I had grown up in a family household. At home, we always had somebody staying over. In Bengali culture, people are not possessive about where they sleep, having your own bedroom or your own things.
During my last teaching practice, I was at a school where I saw a lot of racial discrimination and inequality. What disheartened me the most was it was coming from the head teacher who was African-Asian. The black and white staff were not working together and there was a bad attitude towards the kids. It made me think, ‘I don’t want to be a teacher if this is the case.’ So I nearly gave up, but my lecturer at North London Polytechnic, who was one of the few black women there, she gave me a good talking-to. She convinced me to finish the course. ‘Even if you don’t want to teach,’ she said, ‘you need to finish.’ That was good on her part and I did qualify but I didn’t end up teaching in a primary school as I had planned. I re-qualified to teach adults in further education. At least adults know their own minds and, teaching them, there is a sense of equality whereas I saw things were being done to children.
I taught in Tower Hamlets College and met some amazing people. I think it is really important to teach skills that people can use to improve their lives and have a good life. But after a few years, they were enforcing new terms and conditions, and I realised I did’t want to spend the rest of my life as a teacher. I was still in my twenties so I thought, ‘I’ll try to have an adventure.’ So I interviewed for Voluntary Service Overseas and I was posted to the Orange Free State in South Africa but it wasn’t possible under segregation because I was Asian. Then I was offered Pakistan, also not ideal for a person of Bengali heritage considering our recent history.
Instead they sent me to Nepal in the foothills of the Himalayas, as remote as you can be from East London. My job was to train teachers in the villages to interact with their pupils not just teach by rote. It made me very aware that I did not know very much about these people and I wanted to learn about them for a year first. I was completely clueless and I needed to learn what it was like to be hungry, be cold and without family or friends – to test myself. It taught me to take life more seriously and appreciate it better.
I hated it when I came back. I walked into a supermarket and walked out again because I couldn’t bear it. It was so stark, coming from a place where there was only six items in a shop. We have so much stuff that we do not need. I do not enjoy being a consumer of material culture.
After that I worked with Praxis Community Projects, for refugees and asylum seekers in Bethnal Green as a basic skills co-ordinator, teaching English and IT, whatever they needed to survive here. It was tough work because of the hostility those people face and I had to leave when the funding ran out. So eventually I joined the Museum of Childhood and then the Geffrye Museum, collecting oral histories of the experience of growing up in the East End. It is quite a rarified world, museums and galleries.
In 2000, I started Swadhinata Trust with Ansar Ahmed Ullah, and a few other like-minded people, to provide answers for young Bengali people who were wondering about their identities and history. When I was growing up there was nowhere to find out about why my parents came here.
My mother has been diagnosed with dementia and now I am preparing myself and my family for old age and what that it is going to mean for us. I volunteer for the Youth Offending Team working with young people and supporting families dealing with the situation where a member of their family has committed a crime, after they have gone to court, pleaded guilty, shown remorse and want to make good. They need to show they are going to learn from the experience, by making better choices and making amends.
I think I was lucky when I was a child that, even though things were being done to me that weren’t very pleasant, I had positive people around me, parents and teachers, who made me realise that there are other ways of living.”
Julie cooking at home (Photo by Sarah Ainslie)
Julie in Brick Lane at the time of the anti-fascist marches (Photo by Phil Maxwell)
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