Dorothy Rendell’s London
As a prelude to my lecture about The Life & Works of Dorothy Rendell (1923-2018) this Thursday 14th at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts and the opening of Dorothy’s Rendell’s posthumous solo show this Saturday 16th March at Abbott & Holder, I am publishing this selection of her drawings, seen publicly for the first time today. Click here for tickets for my lecture.
After I picked these drawings, I realised they told the story of Dorothy’s life in London from her art school days in Soho, via her studio in South Kensington, to her job at Harry Gosling School and her home in Mile End Place.
When Dorothy was a student at St Martin’s School of Art in the postwar years, she was fascinated by this view of Frith St, Soho, where men gathered to read prostitutes cards in the newsagents window and she drew the same scene several times from her vantage point of a first floor window across the road.
Frith St
Frith St
Frith St
Old Compton St with Bar Italia in the background
Shepherd Market
Shepherd Market
Shepherd Market
Shepherd Market
‘The Reading Room’
Art School Dance
Art School Model
Dorothy invited the Carl Lewis Quartet to practice in her studio in South Kensington that had formerly belonged to Jacob Epstein
Teaching at Harry Gosling School
In the art room
Mile End Place
Self-portrait by Dorothy Rendell
Drawings copyright © The Estate of Dorothy Rendell
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Down The Old Roman Rd
The recent sunshine encouraged me to enjoy a Sunday stroll down the Roman Rd and experience the manifold wonders of this celebrated thoroughfare, tracing a path eastward from Bethnal Green across two millennia.
Have you ever noticed that the Roman Rd is not aligned with the Bethnal Green Rd that precedes it to the west? This clue reveals that the Roman Rd was there long before the Bethnal Green Rd was laid out. Old Ford Rd to the north was the former route eastward to Norwich from London, continuing the path of Old St and Old Bethnal Green Rd towards the ford over the River Lea. Yet Old Ford Rd became frequently waterlogged in winter which caused the Romans to lay out a new road – a little to the south – which they called ‘Pye Rd’. This was the road we know as the ‘Roman Rd’ and the Bethnal Green Rd was cut through relatively recently to connect it with Bishopsgate.
The prevailing character of the Roman Rd declares itself in the higgledy-piggledy terrace that you encounter upon the north side beyond Museum Gardens and the fire station. In the nineteenth century and for much of the last century, these terraces of small shops lined the entirety of the Roman Rd with the small trades and family businesses that were lifeblood of the East End for generations and define its architectural landscape even to this day.
Beyond Globe Town, you encounter postwar redevelopment in the form of the three checkered towers of Cranbrook Estate designed by Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey & Berthold Lubetkin in 1963, with the sculpture of the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green and his dog by Elisabeth Frink in the foreground.
Crossing Regent’s Canal, you enter Mile End Park, carved out from the bombsites of former streets in an ambitious yet not entirely realised plan to connect Victoria Park with the Thames by a green corridor. Grove Rd bounds its eastern extremity, lined with some fine Victorian villas.
William Wigginton’s curious St Barnabas of Bethnal Green, with its spire knocked off in the blitz and its shrine outside adorned by biblical texts, stands sentinel at the beginning of the longest remaining stretch of small shops in Roman Rd. As I passed that Sunday, the congregation of the devout were saying their prayers.
On each side of Roman Rd, long elegant nineteenth terraces of houses extend to north and south. Many of the most attractive of these have already been renovated, and skips and scaffolding attest to those currently in progress. Yet equally, you do not have to look far to discover evidence of a crude imperative to maximise redevelopment at the expense of the neighbourhood, manifest in cheap new buildings that show little respect for their gracious predecessors.
To my mind, the heartland of the Roman Rd is the stretch between W F Arber’s Printworks at 459 and George’s Plaice at 484. Yet since Gary Arber and Tom Disson have both slung their hooks in recent years, and George’s Plaice is now demolished, perhaps I will have to rethink? Reassuringly, there are still some long established shops that remain in this section – Sew Amazing, Thompsons Ironmongers and Denningtons Florists to name only a couple of favourites. Yet the thought of the fabled Roman Rd on the penumbra of living memory, when it was lined with an infinite variety of small shops, remains intoxicating.
Once you pass under the arch with its fanciful inscription in Latin and enter the pedestrianised Roman Rd Market, you enter a more domestic territory where street life takes precedence over traffic and residents walk slowly, exchanging greetings. There is a tangible sense of community here and the Passmore Edwards Library is an inspiring example of the philanthropy of the past. I often wonder if the proprietors of G Kelly, my favourite eel & pie shop (currently closed for rebuilding), have ever considered their position on the highway once known as Pye Rd? This final section of the Roman Rd is distinguished by some fine greengrocers before it all peters out at Parnell Rd, where the route once descended to the ford over the River Lea.
Gary Arber used to regale me with tales of the phenomenal number of pubs that lined the Roman Rd in his youth and the possibilities of multiple refreshment continuously on offer between here and Bethnal Green. I dreamed of undertaking a pub crawl to visit all these establishments. Yet such is the depletion of pubs in the Roman Rd that I fear if I were to do so today, I should return home sober.
St John on Bethnal Green by Sir John Soane marks the beginning of the Roman Rd
This nineteenth century brick fire station has been replaced by a brutalist concrete fire station to the east and is now a Buddhist centre
Cranbrook Estate designed by Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey & Berthold Lubetkin in 1963, with the sculpture of the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green and his dog by Elizabeth Frink
Regent’s Canal
Mile End Park, carved out from the bombsites of former streets in a ambitious yet not entirely realised plan to connect Victoria Park with the Thames by a green corridor
Grove Rd, lined with some fine Victorian villas
A shrine with biblical texts at St Barnabas Bethnal Green
Elegant nineteenth terraces of houses extend to north and south
The meeting of the old and new in Roman Rd
The meeting of the old and new in Roman Rd
Passmore Edwards Library is an inspiring example of the philanthropy of the past
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Pearl Binder At The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Artist & Writer Pearl Binder (1904-1990) came from Salford in the twenties to live in a hayloft in Whitechapel while studying at Central School of Art. Subsequently, she published ODD JOBS in 1935, a series of illustrated pen portraits including this account of a visit to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which was introduced to me by her son Dan Jones.
This week the Association of Heritage Crafts designated bell founding as craft in critical danger of being lost forever in this country, which makes Pearl Binder’s account especially poignant and emphasises how essential it is that we save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to preserve these skills for future generations.
‘Casting bells is a similar process to making puddings and just as tricky’
In more primitive times, owing to the difficulty of transport, bells had to be cast right outside the church for which they were intended. The bell-founders, like gipsy tinkers, travelling with their tools from one place of worship to the next. As roads and vehicles improved, however, it was found more practical to cast the bells in a static foundry.
The present Whitechapel Bell Foundry dates from 1570 and was built on the site of the old Artichoke Inn. During the last three centuries, carillons of every size have been cast here for churches and cathedrals all over the world – also orchestral bells, fire bells, ship’s bells, cattle bells, hand bells, and even muffin bells. The famous Bow Bells came from here and in 1858 Big Ben was cast in the middle foundry.
During the Great War the foundry ceased to cast church bells and made gun cradles instead.
Today, like any other commodity, bells have to be turned out at cut price to keep pace with modern competitive methods. Nevertheless, the standard of work Mears & Stainbank is still very high.
The head moulder, who has been with the firm over forty years, came to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a boy of fourteen to be apprenticed to the head moulder of those days, who himself in the eighteen-seventies had started work in a colliery at the age of eight, beginning every morning at six, with a score of other children, under the supervision of a foreman armed with a whip.
Within living memory one outstanding craftsman has emerged from the crowd of workers employed at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. A moulder developed extraordinary skill in designing metal founts for the lettering and ornamental devices for the bells, cutting and casting the letters himself in the foundry. These founts are still in use today, long after his death.
A common labourer, Tom Kimber, taught himself in his spare time to draw armorial bearings with exquisite precision. By rights such a man should have been attached to the College of Heraldry. However, he died as he lived, humbly hauling dirt by day for his weekly thirty shillings and copying inscriptions from the bells in the evenings.
For many years, after his ordinary day’s work, he copied the blazon on every bell sent to the foundry for repair, puzzling out for himself the Latin inscriptions. In this way he compiled in several big albums an invaluable record of centuries of ecclesiastical heraldry. Here are a few inscriptions.
This is from a tenor bell twice recast:
JOHN OF COLSALE MANOR MADE MEE IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1409
This is from from an Essex village church:
PRAY WITH GODLY MIND FOR US, O VIRGIN MARY
This is from Berkshire in 1869:
I MOURN THE DEAD, CALL THE PEOPLE AND GRACE FESTIVALS
This is from from Peasenhall Suffolk in 1722:
IN THIS ROOM NOW GABRIEL STRIKE SWEETLY
And this from a Norfolk village:
GODAMENDWHATISAMESANDSENDLOVEWHERENONIS 166
It is good to recall that John Bunyan was a bell ringer.
You enter the Whitechapel Bell Foundry through a sunny courtyard. On a window sill a green plant is thriving in an old bell mould.
The first room is the tuning department. Etiquette ordains a bell shall be cast well on the large side to allow the scraping involved in the process of tuning to be carried out without stinting metal, otherwise the tone would be sharp. The diameter and thickness of the bell determine the tone, a twenty-ton bell having as much as one ton removed in the course of tuning.
A workman guides the knife edge which scrapes the sides of the dish bell (the trade name for orchestra bells) on a revolving platform. With a loud grinding noise, metal chips fly off, glittering like tinsel.
With a hammer encased in felt and several hundred tuning forks, the senior tuner painstakingly tests the pitch of the completed bell before it is passed as perfect.
Once a bell is perfectly tuned, it cannot get out of tune. What does happen is the sides of the bell get flattened by the constant impact of the clapper, and the clapper must be changed around so it hits another spot.
The next room is dimly lit. Here old bells affected by climate are sent to have their corrosion chipped off. Woodwork is painted with lead paint, ironwork with red oxide, and holes are drilled in certain defective clappers and filled with rubber to bring out the note. Here also the strickles (wooden shapes) and the disused moulds of all the old bells are stored.
On the waist of each mould an inscription and the destination of the bell are engraved. When the bell is cast the letters will appear in relief. That monster strickle attached to the high ceiling belongs to Big Ben.
This notice is pinned to the board:
Leading out of this room is the dusty, whitewashed foundry where the biggest castings are made. Those heavy oak beams supporting the ceiling came from Queen Victoria’s Great Exhibition in Hyde park, now mouldering peacefully in Crystal Palace.
In the opposite corner to the big furnace is the drying kiln, carefully watched so that no damp may remain in the moulds.
Purposeful litter crowds this foundry: heaps of coal for the big furnace, heaps of coke for the pot-holes as the small furnaces are called, sanguine bricks, clay burned yellow by repeated firings, empty baskets, piled trestles, sieves of all sizes, spades, casings, and the inevitable earthenware teapot.
Big Ben, which took shape in this room, was actually cast in a clay mould, but for over sixty years now metal casts – perforated to allow the gases to escape – have been in use here. Yet the ancient process of ‘beating’ – softening the clay by continually hand beating with a metal rod – still survives.
Casting bells is a similar process to making puddings and just as tricky. You may use exactly the same ingredients in exactly the same manner as last time, yet the result is by no means calculable. The metal used in casting bells is composed of one part of tin to four parts of copper, a greater proportion of copper rendering the bell softer, a greater proportion of tin making it more brittle.
A carillon of eight bells can ring 5040 different changes. One ringer to one bell is the rule, although there is on record one phenomenal bellringer who could actually ring two different bells at the same time.
At the end of the last workshops glows a row of crucibles used for all except the largest castings.
A secret flight of worn stone steps leads down below to a chain of mouldering windowless cellars where the pot-holes are stored. From the construction and disposition of these cellars, their site on the notorious highway to Colchester in what used to be a notorious neighbourhood of crimping dens, and from the fact that Dick Turpin frequented the old Red Lion Inn, less than a stone’s throw away, it seems reasonably certain that they were once used as a coiner’s den.
The casting is most beautiful to watch. First the molten bell metal is lifted in its vessel from the crucible by ten men pulling steadily together. The orange-hot vessel is tilted, pouring the liquid metal in a dazzling pool into a large beaker and showering bright sparks like fireworks in all directions.
The workmen, in caps, leather aprons, and heavy gloves, stand ready, their serious faces lit by the radiance. Not a word is spoken. They move without instruction, grouping and regrouping with natural unison.
The large beaker is wheeled into the foundry, hoisted into position by pulleys, and tilted to the required angle by manipulating the control wheel. One of the workmen swiftly removes surface cinders from the liquid, as one removes tea leaves from a cup of hot tea, and the glowing metal pours slowly into the bell mould until the bubbling at the riser (hole) indicates that the mould is full.
The laden bell mould is set aside to cool. In a couple of days the emerging bell will be scraped, polished and tuned. And half a century hence perhaps it will wend its way back to the foundry again.
Pearl Binder (1904-1990)
You can help save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a living foundry by submitting an objection to the boutique hotel proposal to Tower Hamlets council. Already we have lodged over six hundred letters of objection but we aim to deliver over a thousand. If you have not already done so, please take a moment this weekend to write your letter of objection. The more objections we can lodge the better, so please spread the word to your family and friends.
HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY
Use your own words and add your own personal reasons for opposing the development. Any letters which simply duplicate the same wording will count only as one objection.
1. Quote the application reference: PA/19/00008/A1
2. Give your full name and postal address. You do not need to be a resident of Tower Hamlets or of the United Kingdom to register a comment but unless you give your postal address your objection will be discounted.
3. Be sure to state clearly that you are OBJECTING to Raycliff Capital’s application.
4. Point out the ‘OPTIMUM VIABLE USE’ for the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is as a foundry not a boutique hotel.
5. Emphasise that you want it to continue as a foundry and there is a viable proposal to deliver this.
6. Request the council refuse Raycliff Capital’s application for change of use from foundry to hotel.
WHERE TO SEND YOUR OBJECTION
You can write an email to
planningandbuilding@towerhamlets.gov.uk
or
you can post your objection direct on the website by following this link to Planning and entering the application reference PA/19/00008/A1
or
you can send a letter to
Town Planning, Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, London, E14 2BG
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Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Fourteen Short Poems About The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Darton’s Nursery Songs
I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Nick Darton whose ancestor William Darton Junior (1781 – 1854) was a publisher in the City of London two hundred years ago and published these charming Nursery Songs on June 15th 1818.
The Juvenile Review described it as ‘A very foolish book, ….. what, for instance, can be more ridiculous than the idea of “a dish running after a spoon,” or the moon being in a fit?’ yet it was published in many editions over the next fifty years and numerous other publishers followed in a similar tradition.
William Darton Junior attended the Friends School in Clerkenwell but was removed at the age of eight to help in his father’s publishing business in Gracechurch St. After two years, he was sent to Ackworth School in Yorkshire before returning to London when he began his apprenticeship with his father at the age of fourteen. He showed early promise as an engraver and was adding his signature his own work even before his full seven years of apprenticeship were up. In 1804, he left his father’s business in his early twenties to set up by himself at Holborn Hill, concentrating on the publication of children’s books, games, educational aids, pastimes and juvenile ephemera.
Over coming weeks, I shall be publishing more from Nick’s collection of his ancestor’s wonderful chapbooks.
Let us go the wood, says this pig
What to do there? says this pig & c.
When the bough breaks,
The cradle will fall,
And sown will come cradle
And baby and all.
To bed, to bed, says sleepy head.
Let’s stay awhile says slow,
Put on the pot, says greedy gut.
We’ll sup before we go.
See Saw Margery Daw
Pat it and prick it and mark it with C
And then it will serve for Charley or me.
The Clock struck one,
The mouse came down,
Hickory Diccary Dock.
Who comes here? A Grenadier
What do you want? A pot of beer
Where’s your money? I’ve forgot
Get you gone, you drunken sot.
Cushy Cow bonny, let down thy milk.
Jack & Jill
Baa baaa, black sheep, have you any wool?
Little Jack Horner
The Lion & The Unicorn
Little Robin Redbreast sat upon a tree
Little boy blue, blow your horn
The cat’s run away with the pudding bag string
There was an old woman, she lived in a shoe
Ding Dong Bell, Pussy Cat’s in the Well
The Man in the Moon
The little husband
There was a little man & he had a little gun
Little Johnny Pringle
Taffy was a Welchman, Taffy was a Thief
Four & Twenty Blackbirds baked in a pye
He’ll sit in a barn
And keep himself warm
And hide his head under
his wing, Poor Thing!
Images courtesy of Nick Darton
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The Legacy Of Dorothy Rendell
Just a handful of unexhibited oil paintings and three boxes of sketchbooks bear witness to the significant talent of Dorothy Rendell (1923-2018), which might have made her famous if she had received the recognition she deserved. Instead it led her to a job in Harry Gosling School and ultimately to a modest life of fulfilment as an inspirational and passionate art teacher in the East End.
Poet & Novelist Stephen Watts who knew Dorothy writes an appreciation of her work today on the occasion of the creation an archive of her drawings at Bishopsgate Institute. Dorothy’s drawings accompanying this feature are seen publicly for the first time.
Dorothy Rendell first solo show opens at 2pm on Saturday 16th March and closes at 6pm on Saturday 23rd March at Abbott & Holder, Museum St, WC1A 1LH
In advance of the exhibition, I shall be giving an illustrated lecture on The Life and Works of Dorothy Rendell at 6pm next Thursday 14th March at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts. Click here for tickets.
Self portrait by Dorothy Rendell, c.1960
The Bishopsgate Institute holds three green boxes containing drawings by the artist Dorothy Rendell who died in 2018 at the age of ninety-five. For much of her life she lived at 12 Mile End Place, a short street of old terraces hidden through an archway off the Mile End Rd, a quiet enclave. Mile End Place – fittingly it seems to me – abuts the Jewish Cemetery on Alderney Rd that W. G. Sebald evoked in his novel Austerlitz.
Dorothy studied at St Martin’s School of Art during the Second World War and might have made a name from her art in her lifetime if she had not fallen foul of the institutionalised prejudice and discrimination against women that pervaded the British art world in the post-war years.
Later, when her superb evocations of the daily and quotidian lives of ordinary people might have brought her recognition, she suffered from not being remotely a part of the New-Brit Conceptualist movements that came to dominate art in the East End and beyond. She was – quite simply – painted out of the history of East End (and other) art, as a number of artists and writers always are painted out of their rightful places.
If The Gentle Author had not chanced upon Dorothy and her work very late in her long life and not had the intuition to recognise the glimmer of it, and had Bishopsgate Institute not existed in the form and spirit it does, we might have lost all possibility of any awareness of Dorothy Rendell’s great art forever.
Perhaps it is better not to talk of her life’s art as a ‘career,’ for she was no career artist and it was this which gives her work quality. She was an outsider, though not at all an ‘outsider artist.’ She saw people’s ordinary lives and observed them at close quarters. What she did was to place herself outside the bounds of the art world and draw and paint for the whole of her life. The sadness is that almost certainly much of her art is, at least for the moment and quite possibly for longer, lost or misplaced, or unplaced.
In the interview conducted in her last months, she describes her years in Italy where her drawings were ‘scattered everywhere.’ And she tells us that she would often give portrait sketches to the children at Harry Gosling School, where she taught art for many years. Where are those sketches or the children, now?
Her art undoubtedly suffered – not in quality or the courage she showed throughout her life – but from not being given an audience. Yet how much did she suffer? Dorothy Rendell developed an astonishing degree of inurement to the lack of recognition and she made of that a strength. Perhaps it was a canny and life-affirming form of self-preservation learnt early on of necessity and practiced with calm enjoyment right through to the end? In amidst the drawings, for instance, are recipes for meals that she loved.
Let us be glad of the three boxes at Bishopsgate Institute and other holdings as yet unexamined. In the first smaller box are seven artist’s notebooks. Sometimes in the same notebook are drawings in pencil, ink and water colour wash of roughly A4 size and mostly undated.
Many of the drawings in these notebooks are sketches, often of people, often done quickly yet with great accuracy, evoking individuals with a deep objective sympathy. It is an art of silent participation, even when single figures are portrayed – they are isolated but they are part of a community. These sketches have a quickened deft simplicity such that lives are held still and ‘taken’ or ‘kept’ while the people themselves then move on.
I knew Dorothy from around 1974 and saw her all too sporadically thereafter until I lost touch with her maybe fifteen year ago. I would sometimes see her, stopped by Altab Ali Park or outside Whitechapel Bell Foundry or on the Mile End Road, on her way somewhere. She stopped and was feeling what was around her. One of her favourite words was ‘marvellous,’ but she said it with real verve, and to her it meant the unexpected miracle of survival, the way things win through when every logic and oppression seeks to erase them.
The second green box is larger but also contains notebooks: early ones from Italy and France, from the fifties and the sixties. Some are dated and a few are named: Mantova, for instance, and a number of French villages. They have a carefree quality, of a young woman’s perception of where she was. Then there is a file marked ‘Doctor’s Clinic, Bow Road’ dated 2003 or 2004: here the names seem to matter more: Fakia & Huba, Jameel & Mum, Aisha, Raheda Begum, Jyotsna, Tahida. Delicate but strong portraits and all of women, either alone or with their children, waiting but not with a doctor or nurse. These women are mostly British Bangladeshi or Somali: strong and lovely portraits of held calm. Some of the women and their children, grown now, will still be living with their families locally. Will any of them be able to see their lives in these drawings ? Will they see these drawings ever, as would be so right and fitting.
The third box contains larger files of single, sleeved drawings, of carefully worked portraits, sometimes developed from earlier sketches. Rarely signed or dated, many are of children at school and we can fairly guess that these are from Harry Gosling School, just off the Commercial Rd at Aldgate. Dorothy Rendell taught art there for many years until her retirement around 1980.
Most of the children are ten or eleven years old and, assuming they were born around 1960, would be approaching retirement themselves right now. Harry Gosling’s head teacher was Sybil Parry, who became a close friend of Dorothy’s. It was through this school that I came to know Dorothy, because my partner taught children newly arrived after the Bangladesh 1971 War of Independence at the ESL Unit that was based at Harry Gosling School.
I know pupils remember their strong teachers, the East End had many such examples and their lives need telling. How many of those now old children would be moved to see Dorothy Rendell’s art! What happened to Maureen Castle, to Trevor and Mohamed and Denise?
There is a third file with sixty drawings from Rowton House and various drop-in centres, or of other friends and acquaintances. But what happened to Dorothy Rendell’s other notebooks, to all her finished paintings, her life’s work? How fitting that she lived so many years adjacent to the cemetery evoked by W. G. Sebald – the writer of the disappearing world.
Drawings from The Dorothy Rendell Archive at Bishopsgate Institute
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Frank Merton Atkins’ City Churches
A collection of photographs by Frank Merton Atkins – including these splendid pictures of City churches published today for the very first time – have recently been donated to the Bishopsgate Institute by his daughter Enid Ghent who had kept them in her loft since he died in 1964.
‘My father worked as a cartographer for a company of civil engineers in Westminster and he drew maps of tram lines,’ Enid recalled, ‘Both his parents were artists and he carried a camera everywhere. He loved to photograph old pubs, especially those that were about to be demolished. Sometimes he got up early in the morning to take photographs before work and at other times he went out on photography excursions in his lunch break. He was always looking around for photographs.’
Captions by Frank Merton Atkins
Christ Church, Spitalfields, 1 October 1957
All Hallows Staining Tower, 25 June 1957, 1.22pm
Cannon Street, looking west from corner of Bush Lane, 7 June 1957, 8.21am
St Botolph Aldgate, from Minories, 31 May 1960, 1.48pm
St Bride from Carter Lane, 31 May 1956, 8.20am
St Clement Danes Church, Strand, from Aldwych, 14 October 1958, 1.22pm
St Dunstan in the East (seen from pavement in front of Custom House), 13 June 1956, 1.14pm
St George Southwark, from Borough High Street, 14 August 1956, 8.15am
St James Garlickhithe, from Queenhithe, 20 May 1957, 8.23am
St Katherine Creechurch, 27 May 1957, 8.32am
St Magnus the Martyr, from the North, 26 June 1956, 8.17am
St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, 26 June 1956, 8.23am
St Margaret Lothbury, 2 August 1957, 1.12pm
St Margaret Pattens, from St Mary At Hill, 13 June 1956, 1pm
St Mary Woolnoth, 8 August 1956, 5.49pm
St Pauls Church, Dock Street, Whitechapel, 3 September 1957, 1.09pm
St Pauls and St Augustine from Watling Street, 7 May 1957, 8.25am
St Vedast, from Wood Street, 30 July 1956, 8.17am
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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An Exhibition Of Dorothy Rendell
I am overjoyed to announce a posthumous exhibition of the paintings of Dorothy Rendell, the artist I interviewed in the last months of her life in 2017.
The show runs for just one week. It opens at 2pm on Saturday 16th March and closes at 6pm on Saturday 23rd March at Abbott & Holder, Museum St, WC1A 1LH
In advance of the exhibition, I shall be giving an illustrated lecture on The Life and Works of Dorothy Rendell at 6pm next Thursday 14th March at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts. Click here for tickets.
Additionally, I shall be talking about Dorothy’s works at Abbott & Holder on Saturday 23rd March at noon.
Self portrait by Dorothy Rendell
I enjoyed visiting Dorothy Rendell to hear her stories, admire her paintings and share her company. At ninety-four years old, Dorothy was taking her ease, relaxing in the warm with a glass of red wine and a cigarette while contemplating the winter sunlight in the garden of her tiny cottage at Mile End Place. Blessed with magnificent cheek bones and a profile worthy of Edith Sitwell, Dorothy was a natural raconteuse who possessed the hauteur of another age, tempered by an endearing, caustic sense of humour.
Studying at St Martin’s School of Art during World War Two, Dorothy began her career as an artist with a studio in Kensington that had belonged to Jacob Epstein where she encountered the likes of Henry Lamb, Carel Weight and Orovida Pissarro. Yet it was in Stepney, working for more than forty years at Harry Gosling School, that she discovered the joyful expression of her abilities and here she undertook a series of portraits of pupils that spanned her career.
Just a handful of unexhibited oil paintings bear witness to a significant talent which might have made Dorothy famous if she had received the recognition she deserved. Instead it led her to the East End – by way of Italy – and ultimately to a modest life of fulfilment as an inspirational and passionate art teacher.
“Very few people really say what they think and say it bluntly and openly regardless, they couch it round with tact, but I am not like that. At ninety-four, I do not belong to any age. When I think ‘fifty years ago today,’ it does not seem all that time ago to me.
I had to give up my art work because I had no money and I could not find anywhere to paint. I had a huge studio at the back of a house in Warwick Gardens, Kensington, which was freezing cold and falling down, the rain would drip in. It had once belonged to Jacob Epstein. It was the most romantic studio. People used to love coming round and I had constant visitors. I used to paint there but I wasted an awful lot of time working to make money when I should have been painting. I exhibited at the Leicester Gallery and at the Royal Academy, but I never had a solo show. I just put things up here and there. I muddled through life really, but I have had an interesting life.
I came to the East End because I could not get a job anywhere else, people were terribly against women artists. They still are in this country. I used to go for teaching jobs and I had very good credentials, including references from Henry Lamb, Vivian Pitchforth and Mr Dickie who was an Inspector of Schools, but I never got the job because some man would come along and swipe it. This used to infuriate me because I knew that I was better and I was better at teaching too. I never thought I would own a house and when I came to live in Mile End Place, people said, ‘You’re crazy, you’ve bought a load of rubble, but I think it’s marvellous!’ All of my life has been flukes like that.
I started drawing very early on, at ten years old. Dorothy Rushforth, my mother, came from the north of England and went to art school, she was quite advanced for her time. My father came from a long line of gentleman farmers in Devonshire and he was a bit of a villain. His family lost all their money through one of them being a gambler. So he travelled the world on luxury liners doing doubtful business deals and brought people back and my mother had to entertain them and cook for them. They just frittered away their lives.
My mother encouraged me to draw and when I was eighteen I got a prize for the best artist in the school but nobody mentioned it and nobody took me to prize giving. It is most extraordinary when I think about it now! Of course, the war was on and one was whisked from here to there.
I came up to London in wartime and I was by myself, I did not know a soul. I got one room in an attic in Pembroke Sq, Notting Hill Gate. There were lots of interesting people and a very good cinema there, with marvellous French films, I had never seen anything like them. It was exciting. Then I got into St Martin’s School of Art through doing evening classes because I had to work in the day to earn money. At art school, I met Vivian Pitchforth who was a well known draftsman and if you were taught how to draw by him, it was a great honour. Somehow, he noticed me. I do not know how because I never said a word to anyone.
The art school was in Charing Cross Rd then, it was lovely. I inhabited all those dumps in Old Compton St where you got cheap meals for tuppence ha’penny. We all used to go to them, I am quite sure we were eating horseflesh! There were lots of little cafes, it was wonderful. Robert Beulah who was a Royal Academician, his mother ran a cafe there and she quite liked me, she thought I was quiet and well behaved – so we had a little clientele there. It was very good. I loved my years in Soho, living in that awful attic in Notting Hill Gate which is probably worth a fortune now! How life changes.
I met Henry Lamb, the artist, and I thought he was marvellous, he was very quiet and very scholarly. He became my friend and he followed my work when I left art school, and he used to write to me over the years. I never earned any money as an artist, I had not got the gift of making money, I would always belittle my work. I do a picture and think, ‘That’s quite good’ but then I would think ‘That bit there needs changing.’ I remember doing a painting of lemons, I was quite pleased with it. I did it in my father’s bank which was open on Sunday, so I put all these lemons on the counter with a cauliflower and I painted them. I did not think much of it yet years after I put it in an exhibition and people said, ‘You’re brilliant!’ It means a lot when you are eighteen but there you are, what does it matter now? I enjoyed doing it.
I tried getting my work exhibited by galleries but it was an awful fag, I made a living by doing odd jobs. I travelled a lot and I read a terrific amount because I was too shy to talk to people – and that was a good thing because I got a wide vocabulary. I travelled all over Italy, you did not hitch then but I got lifts somehow and I used to draw in cafes. I found that this was terribly popular and I could draw because of my marvellous tuition. It was wonderful.
When I first went to Florence, somebody sent me there and said, ‘Try and make a go of it!’ I did not have any money, if I had a few quid I was surprised. I shared a house with extraordinary people. One or two very wealthy, one or two officers in the army, a Spanish girl, various other people, and me. I used to go out and draw in the evening because I love watching Italian life outdoors. Those drawings are scattered all over Italy. It was fun, I loved drawing ordinary people sitting around chatting. They did not mind where I came from. I loved it. I would love to be Italian.
Eventually, I came to the East End and I had to go round awful schools. I was not used to these East End types of all nationalities but I stuck it out – I think I must had a bit of character – and I eventually got a job at Harry Gosling School where they had a remarkable headmistress. She was astonishing, she became my best friend instantly. She was called Sybil Mary Parry. She got me going on life really. She got some brilliant results. She was a state scholar, which means she was the best eighteen year old taking exams in the county. She was very intelligent and she had a big clientele of boyfriends, who all played rugby for Wales. I can still hear here shrieking across the room when the television was on and Wales were playing.
The school was in a very poor part of the East End and I could see that for the children it was life or death to get a good education, and she saw to it that they did. She was very eccentric, she would talk to people all the time and even go round to the betting shop herself to put her ten bob on the Derby. Sibyl used to keep a bottle of sherry in her filing cabinet. She was a marvellous character. She is not forgotten.
She used to publicise my children’s art and I became quite well known with the inspector. He really loved this school and he used to come every week or so just to see it. What a school! It turned out some marvellous people and I still hear from them. Old people get in touch and say, ‘You used to teach me.’
You are dropped in, and you either survive or you die – but I survived.”
Orovida Pissarro, Camille Pissarro’s granddaughter. “I met her through Carel Weight whom I encountered in Warwick Gardens, he had a studio down the road. One day, I was looking outside a junk shop in the Earl’s Court Rd and he asked me, ‘What are you wanting?’ I said, ‘I’m going out to buy a chair because I have a quartet coming to practice in my studio and I have not got four chairs.’ He said, ‘Come with me, I can give you a chair.’ So he took me to his house and we became friends.
I used to cook for Orovida at her home in Redcliffe Gardens, she was a great gourmet. She was Jewish but she loved roast pork. After the meal, she would go to sleep and I would be painting away. She had no children, she was hermaphrodite. I realised that very quickly. She had lovely things and she would get out bundles of letters from Zola. I loved going to see her but she was eccentric and very demanding, she liked daft things on the television like Doctor Finlay’s Casebook. She used to have a birthday party every year with a lot of interesting people and I went along with Carel Weight, and we would have a feast of roast pork. She was a very good painter and her paintings were quite interesting. Orovida liked being painted and it was a marvellous interior with lovely things round her. I knew her for years until she died.”
Wapping – “I got a window from a pub beside Wapping Pier Head and it took me weeks. I did drawings and squared it up. I am not one of those who does quick ones.”
Wapping, View from an upper window at Wapping Pier Head in spring
View across Mount Pleasant from Doughty St -“I had a friend who had a flat there, next door to Dickens’ House. I had many a meal there and stayed the night. She was a teacher and a writer, but she was always having affairs in Paris. With her job and boyfriends, the crises she put me through. A good friend.”
One of Dorothy’s pupils at Harry Gosling School
“This little boy was one of the pupils I taught. A little horror! He’d been badly behaved – so the head teacher told me, ‘Take him and make him sit for you!’ So he had to sit still for about two or three days. I think I did a painting of him too”
“This is a nice little girl who had a terrible life. She was pretty and I liked her, so I drew her. I think I probably went to her house. It was squared up for a painting but I don’t know what happened to the painting. Children are very good to draw as long as they are not commissioned, when they are commissioned they are hellish. One mother came to me and wanted a portrait of her daughter. She looked a nice kid and I didn’t charge very much. She wore jeans, but when she turned up she was all dressed up – it was awful!”
“I used to give them their drawings. They used to beg me for them and were so persuasive that I used to hand them over, until one day a boy took my drawing and folded it up in half and put it in his pocket. I nearly screamed! They never did that in Italy, they treasure their drawings there.”
“This is Harry. Miss Parry, the head teacher, she adored this drawing. Harry was really thick and he used to look at you with that blank expression, but he was marvellously funny and he made a tremendous effort. Somebody who used to work with me said, ‘I’m going to bring Harry to Miss Parry’s funeral,’ and I said, ‘But he’ll be middle aged now.’ She found him and he came to the funeral. I couldn’t believe it. He was a lorry driver for Charringtons.”
“This was a little Afghan girl, I thought she was beautiful. She was a vain little girl who would sit for hours in the art room. Miss Parry thought it was better for pupils to sit with me than to sit and do nothing, so she would send the badly behaved ones to the art room and I would draw them. They liked being drawn, they were flattered by it.”
“I never had any absentees from my art classes, they were always very keen. As my head teacher used to say, ‘They’ll always go to art with you!’ They enjoyed doing it. There were always a certain number who could not draw, who found it very difficult. I would get them started making patterns but they would think they could not do that. So I would say, ‘Yes you can.’ I would get something like an electric light bulb and say, ‘Make some patterns from what you can see with that.’ – repeating and so forth. And they would come up with some marvellous things. Then they got keen. You have to think up strange things to get children really interested.”
“This little girl, I got to know her mother and father, and she went on to grammar school. The children of immigrants always did much better than the English ones because their parents wanted them to work.”
“This was in the doctor’s waiting room. Quite a well known doctor round here invited me to draw there.”
“When I started teaching I thought I would teach in the West End but they would not take women, so I had to move to the East End – but I don’t regret that at all because I got so wrapped up in it and there were all these places where I could go and draw.” Dorothy Rendell (1924-2018)
Paintings copyright © Estate of Dorothy Rendell
Portrait of Dorothy Rendell © Lucinda Douglas Menzies
