Spitalfields Life

The Bethnal Green Gasometers

May 9, 2019

by the gentle author

If you care about the fate of the Bethnal Green gasometers, I recommend you attend the public consultations held by St William Homes (a joint venture by National Grid and the Berkeley Group) who are currently considering the option of retaining the gasometers as part of their redevelopment of the site.

The exhibition takes place this Saturday 11th May from 11:00am – 4:00pm, Monday 13th from 3:00pm – 7:00pm and Tuesday 14th from 11:00am – 3:00pm at the Redeemed Christian Church of God, 7-8 The Oval, Bethnal Green, E2 9DT.

Behold the majestic pair of gasometers in Bethnal Green, planted regally side by side like a king and queen surveying the Regent’s Canal from aloft. Approaching along the towpath, George Trewby’s gasometer of 1888-9 dominates the skyline, more than twice the height of its more intricate senior companion designed by Joseph Clarke in 1866.

Ever since these monumental gasometers were granted a ‘certificate of immunity against listing’ by Historic England, which guarantees they will never receive any legal protection from destruction, their fate has been in the balance.

The Bethnal Green gasometers were constructed to contain the gas that was produced by the Shoreditch Gas Works, fired by coal delivered by canal. The thick old brick walls bordering Haggerston Park are all that remains today of the gas works which formerly occupied the site of the park, built by the Imperial Gas Light & Coke Company in 1823.

Crossing Cat & Mutton Bridge, named after the nearby pub founded in 1732, I walked down Wharf Place and into Darwen Place determining to make as close a circuit of the gasometers as the streets would permit me.

Flanked by new housing on either side of Darwen Place, the gasometers make a spectacularly theatrical backdrop to a street that would otherwise lack drama. Dignified like standing stones yet soaring like cathedrals, these intricate structures insist you raise your eyes heavenward, framing the sky as if it were an epic painting contrived for our edification.

Each storey of Joseph Clarke’s structure has columns ascending from Doric to Corinthian, indicating the influence of classical antiquity and revealing the architect’s chosen precedent as the Coliseum, which – if you think about it – bears a striking resemblance to a gasometer.

As I walked through the surrounding streets, circumnavigating the gasometers, I realised that the unapproachable nature of these citadels contributes to their magic. You keep walking and they always remain in the distance, always just out of reach yet looming overhead and dwarfing their surroundings. In spite of the utilitarian nature of this landscape, the relationship between the past and present is clear in this place and this imparts a strange charisma to the location, an atmosphere enhanced by the other-wordly gasometers.

After walking their entire perimeter, I can confirm that the gasometers are most advantageously regarded from mid-way along the tow path between Mare St and Broadway Market. From here, the silhouette of George Trewby’s soaring structure may be be viewed against the sun and also as a reflection into the canal, thus doubling the dramatic effect of these intriguing sky cages that capture space and inspire exhilaration in the beholder.

We hope that the developer recognises the virtue in retaining these magnificent towers and integrating them into their scheme, adding value and distinction to their architecture, and drama and delight to the landscape.

The view from Darwen Place

Decorative ironwork and classical columns ascending from Doric to Corinthian like the Coliseum

The view from Marian Place

The view from Emma St

The view from Corbridge St

The view from Regent’s Canal towpath

George Trewby’s gasometer of 1888 viewed from Cat of Mutton bridge over Regent’s Canal

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Memories of Ship Tavern Passage

May 8, 2019

by Gillian Tindall

Contributing Writer Gillian Tindall recalls her first job in a bookshop in Ship Tavern Passage in the City of London in the fifties. Gillian’s next book is about memory and will be published by Chatto & Windus in October.

Gillian Tindall in the fifties

I was born in London but the blitz of the Second World War intervened too soon for me to have retained any memory of the house of my birth. Like most of the London babies and children of my generation I was bundled off to the countryside, in my case Sussex.

With the passing years this became my place of childhood. For though most of London had not been comprehensively wrecked by German bombs, the notion persisted for a good ten years after the war that most of it was only fit for redevelopment. London was admittedly very dirty still in that time of open fires before Clean Air Acts and the disappearance of steam trains. I remember my seven-year-old surprise – on a rare London visit one spring – at seeing how green the new leaves were in the parks. I was used to the joys of primrose and bluebells in the country, but against the sooty black town branches that ‘came off’ on your hands (“Darling, I told you not to touch!”) these London leaves amazed me with their delicate beauty.

In other respects London seemed a compelling but faintly sinister place, wonderfully busy with huge shops, tall buses and taxis hailed ‘for a treat,’ yet reputedly full of ‘slums’ that I never managed to locate. My mother wore a hat and her best coat when going ‘up to Town,’ yet sometimes I would glimpse in dark doorways or down side-streets people far shabbier and stranger than any to be seen in our country village. I longed to explore further.

The years passed and everything changed. My mother was dead, we moved house, and I found myself living near Hampstead Heath with my father. Grocery shopping and cooking in the intervals of working for a college entrance exam suited me fine, and my exploring project took off. But once the exam was done there was a vague feeling I ought to have a job. This was the modernity of the fifties: goodness me, a girl should not be hanging round at home, poor dear! A job was found for me in a bookshop off Gracechurch St in the City of London and, for a mercifully brief period in my life, I joined the inexorable morning and evening tide of rush hour travel.

Neither the bookshop nor its two other branches exist any more. Several years after my brief sojourn there it collapsed with, what I have been told, was an impressive backlog of debt and mismanagement. Indeed, even to my utterly ignorant perceptions, it seemed rather chaotically run. It was in Ship Tavern Passage which led into one end of Leadenhall Market and still does, though the alley as I knew it is gone. The market is flourishing still, if somewhat transformed. Its elaborate columns and façades beautified with dark red paint and gilding. The tempting meat and vegetable stalls that I remember and the one sandwich bar – to which I gratefully escaped for a late snack when lunch-hour customers had returned to their offices – have gone, to be replaced by restaurants and wine bars. The sole remaining old building in Ship Tavern Passage is, confusingly, an inn called the Swan (which I am told was only saved in 1985 from the developers’ wrecking ball by a last minute protest). The site that was occupied by the bookshop where I worked and by its modest neighbouring shops is now covered by the corporate architecture of Marks & Spencer.

I liked talking to customers about the books they were seeking, though many of these seemed to be allocated monthly by a national membership organisation, an institutional precursor to modern, informal book clubs. (Why – if these volumes were for members at a special rate – they had to be obtained in a bookshop puzzles me today. But so it was. The standard price for a hardback was seven shillings and sixpence, and there were relatively few paperbacks). However, my task – according to the dragon-lady who was head-assistant – was to dust the books full-time, since soot still reigned everywhere. I remember my forearms being permanently grey, for I soon learned to push up the sleeves of the black jersey I seem to have worn every day. The habit, though not the jersey, has remained with me for life.

In the basement was a less prestigious department where china was sold (a bad sign in a bookshop, as I now know) and pictures were brought in to be framed. Sometimes I would be sent down there, where I was terrorised by an ever-returning customer who was enraged that the picture he had left for framing had disappeared. In vain, would I repeat to him that it was nothing to do with me, while the other assistant (who knew nothing of the picture either and talked to me of little else beside her secret and exciting extra-marital affaire) hid in the stock-room. Once, I was rescued from the furious customer by a grander and much nicer lady than the dragon upstairs. She was the buyer for books, who used to take refuge in the basement to avoid being overwhelmed by publishers’ reps.

I was paid £5 a week cash in a small brown envelope, handed to me by a pay-clerk who for some reason disapproved of me – or perhaps just of life and his own circumstances. This modest sum would have been just enough for me to live on week to week, bed-sitters and fares both then being extraordinarily cheap. But as I was living at home with my father my wage was all – apart from the small cost of sandwiches – spending money. Only it was very difficult then in the City to buy the sort of things girls needed, such as stockings, underclothes and hair-ribbons. Even though ‘lady-typists’ had been a known species for most of the twentieth century, the Square Mile remained a preserve of men in three-piece suits and bowler hats.

I had got onto terms with only small segments of London and the City not at all, as I scuttled between Liverpool St tube station and Ship Tavern Passage, afraid of being late and incurring the dragon’s displeasure. Yet occasionally the nicer lady would suggest that I be sent on an errand to one of the big banks in Lombard St with – what I can only suppose – were the day’s takings, in a small canvas bag. Security did not seem to have been an issue in those peace-seeking, post-war times.

I enjoyed these outings into the sparrow-populated, starling-haunted streets, that were still lined with heavy Victorian buildings, not a glass tower in sight. But how ignorant I was! As I went by, Mary Woolnoth’s bell would chime – ‘with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.‘ I had barely heard of TS Eliot then, let alone that he passed eight years in his thirties in tedious bank-employment just there, or had I any idea that he would become for me the prince of poets, haunting much of my adult work on place and history.

I also do not think I knew that a year or two before a temple of Mithras had been unearthed on a building site not far off, and was even then being laboriously (and rather ineptly) removed for re-erection at a different site nearby. I certainly did not know (since no one else seemed to then either) that the space which became Leadenhall Market was once the heart of the Roman basilica and forum, constructed in the first century AD. Its ruins were uncovered in 1881, when the iron structure of the Victorian market was going up. Only recently has it been confirmed that this was indeed the forum, the epicentre of judicial and financial administration. Some of the ruins are there to this day, carefully preserved in the basement of an upmarket gentlemen’s barbers, Nicholson & Griffin, on the corner of Gracechurch St.

I should like to go back to the old, unpretentious Leadenhall Market and the days when a cup of tea cost tuppence ha’penny and a cup of weak coffee thripence because coffee was posher. I should like to go back to the time when tube fares too were in pennies and no-one but the drunks round Spitalfields slept in the streets, because the newspapers every evening had columns and columns of attics and basements and little backrooms to rent for tiny weekly amounts.

I should not like to go back to being that dreamy girl in a grubby black jersey, a duffle coat and ‘ballet-slippers,’ who knew nothing much about anything and had all her life before her. However alarming various different national and world trends seem to be, and however tiresome it is for me no longer being able to walk all day round London (after a lifetime of doing this my over-used feet hurt and I get too tired), I think I should much rather be the me of today. Life has been satisfactory, and sometimes wonderful, but I do not want the labour of starting it all over again.

Ship Tavern Passage off Gracechurch St as portrayed by Henrie Pitcher in 1911 yet it was unaltered in the fifties when Gillian Tindall first knew it

Ship Tavern Passage today

You may like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall

At Captain Cook’s House in Mile End

In Stepney, 1963

Stepney’s Lost Mansions

Where The White Chapel Once Stood

The Old South Bank

Leonard Fenton, Actor

In Old Deptford

Lifesaving in Limehouse

From Bedlam To Liverpool St

Smithfield’s Bloody Past

The Tunnel Through Time

Two Events At London Metropolitan Archive

May 7, 2019

by the gentle author

Spitalfields Life is delighted to participate in the WORD ON THE STREET festival which runs at London Metropolitan Archive in Clerkenwell for the month of May. These events are free but advance booking is essential.

Spitalfields Breakfast by Isaac Cruickshank, 1794

THE LIVES OF THE JOURNEYMAN WEAVERS

A lecture by Julian Woodford, author of The Boss of Bethnal Green

Saturday 11th May 1:30pm

The story of London’s wealthy silk merchants and their fine houses in Spitalfields is familiar, but the lives of the poor journeymen weavers who actually made the silk are less commonly described. Julian Woodford will outline the realities of their existence, how they lived, worked and died. As many as twenty-thousand weavers lived in Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Shoreditch and Whitechapel at the peak of the industry in the eighteenth century, mostly Huguenots of French ancestry.

Click here to book for Julian Woodford’s lecture

STORYTELLING FOR BEGINNERS

Wednesday 15th May 6:00pm

This writing workshop with The Gentle Author will be a practical exploration of what constitutes a story and how to fashion a compelling narrative from facts and anecdotes. The session will be of special interest to those attempting to write their own family histories and anyone else who wants to tell a story.

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s writing workshop

These events are presented in partnership with the Huguenots of Spitalfields

Sally Flood, Poet

May 6, 2019

by the gentle author

“I think my life is more in poetry than anything else”

“I had always written, as a child,” admitted Sally Flood with a shrug, “but it wasn’t stuff you showed.” In the years when her thoughts wandered whilst working in the factory in Princelet St, Sally wrote poems on the paper that backed the embroidery in the machine she operated – but she always tore up her compositions when her boss appeared.

Then, when she was fifty years old, Sally took some of her poems along to the Basement Writers in Cable St and achieved unexpected recognition, giving her the confidence to call herself a poet for the first time. Since then, Sally’s verse has been widely published, studied in schools and universities, and she has become an experienced performer of her own poetry. “At work, I used to write things to make people laugh,” she explained, “I used to say, ‘Embroidery is my trade, but writing is my hobby.'”

“I’ve got drawers full of poems,” she confided to me with a blush, unable to keep track of her prolific writing, now that poetry is her primary occupation and she no longer tears up her compositions. “I’ve got so much here, I don’t know what I’ve got,” she said, rolling her eyes at the craziness of it.

Ambulance helicopters whirl over Sally’s house, night and day, the last in a Georgian terrace which is so close to the hospital in Whitechapel that if you got out of bed on the wrong side you might find yourself in surgery. Sally moved there more than half a century ago with her young family, and now she has three grandchildren and five great grandchildren. Framed pictures attest to the family life which filled this house for so many years, while today boxes of toys lie around awaiting visits by the youngest members of her clan.

“In 1975, when my children were growing up and the youngest was fifteen, I decided that I need to do something else, because I didn’t want to be one of those mothers who held onto her children too much.” Sally recalled, “So I joined the Bethnal Green Institute, and it was all ballroom dancing and keep fit, but I found a leaflet Chris Searle had put there for the Basement Writers, so I decided to write a poem and send it along to them. Then I got a letter back asking me to send more – and I was amazed because the poem I sent was one I would otherwise have torn up. Of your own work, you’ve got no real opinion.”

“On my first visit, I went along with my daughter, but there were children of school age and I was turning fifty. I wasn’t sure if I should be there until I met Gladys McGee who was ten years older than me. She was so funny, I learnt so much from her – she had been an unmarried mother in the Land Army. I started going regular, and the first poem I read was published.”

“I think my life is more in poetry than anything else. I sometimes think my writing is like a diary. Chris Searle of the basement writers made such an impression on my life, he gave me the confidence to do this. And when I did my writing, my life took off in a certain direction and I met so many fantastic people.”

Sally’s house is full of cupboards and cabinets filled of files of poems and pictures and embroidery, and the former yard at the back has become a garden with luscious fuchias that are Sally’s favourites. After all these years of activity, it has become her private space for reflection. Sally can now get up when she pleases and enjoy a jam sandwich for breakfast. She can make paintings and tend her garden, and write more poems. The house is full with her thoughts and her memories.

“My grandparents were from Russia and they brought my father over when he was four years old.” Sally told me, taking down the photograph to remind herself, “He became cabinet maker and he was one of the best. In those days, they used to work from six until ten at night, so they knew what work was. I was born in Chambord St, Brick Lane, in 1925, and I grew up there. From there we moved to a two-up two-down in Chicksand St and from there to Bethnal Green, just before the war broke out. We had a bath in the kitchen with a tabletop. It was the first time we had a bath, before that we went to bathhouse. I’m telling you the history of the East End here!

I was evacuated to Norfolk at first. We took the surname Morris from father’s first name, so that people wouldn’t know we were Jewish. The people up there had a suspicion against Londoners and they thought we were all the same. But I was lucky, we ended up in a hotel on the river in Torbay in Devon. Life was fantastic, we used to go fishing. It was a different experience from my life in London. I joined the girl guides, I could never have done that otherwise. Where I was evacuated, they wanted to train me to be a teacher, but my mother came and took me back and said, “They’re going to exploit you, you’re going to be a machinist.”

“Being evacuated meant I went outside my culture, and I saw that English people were nice. I think that’s why I married outside my religion. We were together fifty-five years and I always say it wasn’t enough. If I hadn’t been evacuated I wouldn’t have done that.”

Sally put the photograph of her parents back on the shelf carefully, and turned her head to the pictures of her husband, her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, on different sides of the room. I watched her looking back and forth through time, and the room she inhabited became a charged space in between the past and the future. This is the space where she does her writing. And then Sally brought out a book to show me, opening it to reveal it short poems in her handwriting accompanied by lively drawings of people, reminiscent of the sketches of L. S. Lowry or the doodles of Stevie Smith.

Sally is a paradoxical person. A natural writer who resists complacency, she continues to be surprised by her own work, yet she is knowledgeable of literature and an experienced teacher of writing. Appearing at the door in her apron and talking in her tender sing-song voice, Sally wears her erudition lightly, but it does not mean that she is not serious. With innate dignity and a vast repertoire of stories to tell, Sally Flood is a writer who always speaks from the truth of her experience.

Maurice Grodinsky, Sally’s father is on the left with Sally’s mother, Annie Grodinsky, on the right, and Freda, Maurice’s mother, in between. At four years old, Maurice was brought to Spitalfields from Bessarabia at the end of the nineteenth century. The two children are Marie and Joey – when this picture was taken in 1925, Sally was yet to be born.

Sally with her first child Danny in the early nineteen fifties.

Sally’s children, Maureen, Jimmy, Pat and Theresa in the yard in Whitechapel in 1962.

Sally’s husband, Joseph Flood.

Sally in Whitechapel, early sixties.

Sally with her children, Danny, Theresa, Jimmy, Maureen, Pat and Michael.

Sitting by the canal in the nineteen seventies.

Sally with Gladys McGee at the Basement Writers.

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Linda Carney, Machinist

May 5, 2019

by the gentle author

This is the lovely Linda Carney working at her machine in Spitalfields in 1963 and looking glamorous in the same way Lynn Redgrave, Julie Christie, Rita Tushingham and Barbara Windsor did playing happy-go-lucky girls in those films of London in the sixties. Linda’s combination of kooky glasses, stylish outfit and optimistic humorous attitude in a mundane workplace was an act of youthful defiance in itself.

Linda worked in factories making clothes all over Spitalfields, in Brune St above the Jewish soup kitchen, in Fournier St in what is now Gilbert & George’s studio and in Fleur de Lys St. It was at the latter address, she once spotted the long-haired seventeen-year-old Dan Cruickshank giving an interview to reporters on the doorstep, explaining why he was squatting an old building in Elder St, “I’m saving our heritage,” he declared. But Linda, with irrepressible anarchic ebullience, wagged her finger and called out, “You just don’t want to pay rent!” It was a scene worthy of a whimsical sixties comedy and I can imagine Linda, tottering off, arm in arm with her girlfriends, all laughing like drains.

When I met Linda outside the Jewish soup kitchen on Brune St, she described the neighbourhood in her time. “It still is busy here, but it was much more busy then because people started out earlier and worked longer hours,” said Linda, excited to return to her former workplace.”If you worked all night, you never felt on your own because you had all-night cafes servicing the market.” Looking up and down Brune St, Linda got quite carried away describing the characters among those coming to the soup kitchen from the surrounding streets of derelict tenements.

In those days – she told me – bales of cotton were carried in and out of the warehouse next door, supplies were delivered to the food warehouses in Tenterground, trucks caused chaos around Spitalfields Market at night, pubs opened at dawn, furriers in Whites Row compared pelts by daylight, Coles’ poulterers in Leyden St slaughtered fowls to order, hatters and button makers and purveyors of ribbons and trimmings worked frantically, while – further afield – the shoemakers of Hoxton and the furniture makers of Bethnal Green were all busy too. Obviously this was only a fraction of the activity but I think you can understand what Linda meant by saying Spitalfields was busier then.

Linda earned three pounds a week doing piecework for companies in Cutler St who provided the cloth, cut ready to sew. She and her co-workers made a hundred pairs of trousers in a day in the factory on the top floor of the soup kitchen. Assembling the clothes, one would sew the seams, another the buttonholes, another the buttons, the zipper and so on. “You couldn’t let anybody down. You couldn’t even go to the toilet” admitted Linda with a frown, showing me the scar where she caught her finger in a machine once and recalling in wry amusement that, in spite of her injury, the others were reluctant to stop the belt that drove all the machines, crying out, “Don’t turn it off! I haven’t finished my piecework yet!” “And that’s what made you a machinist” said Linda, in robust summary of her occupation.

“My mother was a seamstress for Savile Row, a tailoress from home, collecting her work from the West End. My grandmother rolled cigars at home, there was a big industry. It was a skill. Those skills are coming back, I think, because you see the girls today that are making their own clothes and selling them in the market. We used to make our own clothes too, because you need to have something a little different.”

Although Linda’s father worked in the Truman Brewery, his family were all dockers. She told me about the two floors of vaults beneath Wapping High St that stretch as far as Tobacco Dock, built by French prisoners of war imprisoned at the Tower of London. Apparently these cellars were sealed up just as they were when the docks closed and remain untouched to this day, full of a vast stock of the best wine and champagne waiting to be discovered. “We’d go down to the lock-ups,” said Linda with a rapturous grin, “All the best stuff was there, cinnamon, paprika, saffron, rum, ivory, tea and champagne. I’ve drunk all the best teas in the world. If some spilt from a broken chest, you could get a handful for yourself.”

At this point in our pavement chat, an African-American gentleman, who lived in the ground floor flat of the converted soup kitchen, came outside for a cigarette and joined the conversation – which prompted Linda to raise the subject of race. “We always had mixed race here because it was a port,” she declared audaciously, producing a photo of her multiracial school netball team from 1959. “So we all got brought up together. I used to go to clubs to listen to ska and reggae, where coloured groups like the Stylistics were playing to a mixed audience, which the musicians liked because they couldn’t do it in America. We mixed a lot more than our parents thought, because we were enjoying life and we didn’t have any money. We had stop-overs, and a lot of us married Afro-Carribeans, Asians and Chinese. We were a melting pot.”

Touched by Linda’s monologue, our new friend generously invited us into his flat to take a look. We entered the central door that once led to the factory floors up above, rented out to support the soup kitchen. This was the door Linda passed through when she came to work every day. She was entranced, “It feels strange but homely, because it is so familiar” she said. Clasping her hands in delight and raising her eyes to explore the space, Linda explained that, when it was the soup kitchen, one side of his flat was used for distributing clothes and the other side for food.

To my surprise, Linda recalled the smell of bacon here in the early mornings, as the Jewish workers in the kitchen used to enjoy making themselves illicit bacon sandwiches. Then before we left, completing the sentimental pilgrimage, Linda revealed that she last walked through this hallway in 1968. Mesmerised by each other, as Linda and the bemused contemporary resident shook hands in farewell, two worlds met for a fleeting moment, distant by birth yet united in sympathy and mutual curiousity.

Linda Carney in Brune St

Portraits © Sarah Ainslie

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Jimmy Huddart, Spitalfields Market Porter

May 4, 2019

by the gentle author

A market porter of forty years standing, Jimmy Huddart is proud to display the clothing of his trade. He keeps this apron pristine for ceremonial occasions now, but it is of the traditional design made of the full width of strong canvas, with leather straps and reinforcement across the front where the boxes cause most wear. In use, an apron like this would quickly acquire a brown tinge yet provide its owner with at least two years of wear, with prudent repairs. In the pocket, Jimmy always kept his porter’s knife and string to sew up broken sacks. And the offcuts from these aprons were used to make “cotchel” bags, which held all the fruit and vegetables that the porter might acquire for his own use, gathering it in the lining of his coat as he went about his work. “Cotchelling up,” they called it – and today, although employees in the market now get a vegetable box to take home, it is still referred to as a “cotchel.”

The most significant item in the outfit is the porter’s licence, indicated by the enamel badge. Throughout Jimmy’s time in the market, you could only work as a porter if you had one of these and it was a badge of office, denoting its own rights and privileges which had to be earned. At first, young men entered the market as “empty boys,” collecting and sorting empty wooden boxes and claiming the deposits, until they had earned the right to become licenced porters. Before the introduction of fork-lift trucks, this was intense physical work, manhandling crates of fruit and sacks of vegetables, and manoeuvring the heavy wooden barrows piled high with produce which had a life of their own once you set them going.

“I grew up in Bethnal Green, Brady St, and, at the age of twelve, I used to go to the market to watch all the tussle and bustle, and all the porters with their barrows. At school, I was very much interested in carpentry but I couldn’t get an apprenticeship, although by then I had already been introduced to the market. I loved to go up the Spitalfields with my Uncle Bill, he worked for a haulage company and we used to go around the farms in Kent to collect the English plums and apples and deliver them to the market. There was something about it, the atmosphere and the characters – a love of it developed inside me – and I wanted to become a porter. If you worked in the market or the docks you earned better than the average salary.

When I was fifteen, my uncle got me a job with Percy Dalton at the corner of Crispin St and Brushfield St. He was a well-dressed Jewish man, softly spoken, who had started his business with a barrow selling roast peanuts and he took me under his wing. The first day I started working for Percy Dalton, he showed me how to sweep the shop. He was that sort of person, hands on. He had a fruit shop at the front and in the warehouse there’d be eight people roasting peanuts. The peanut factory backed onto the alley where the lorries came, he had these red vans with Percy Dalton on the side that you always saw outside dog meetings and football matches. He was a likeable man, very popular, and people often came to him for advice. If you were in trouble you could go and speak to him, he would lend you money if you needed it. He always said, get a corner shop and you get two premises for the price of one.

I used to go out with the drivers all around the London Docks to pick up the fruit and make deliveries. I looked forward to it among my duties – being a boy, they took care of me and bought me breakfast, and they taught me how to stack a lorry. But I wanted to be a porter, so I asked in the market if I could work as an empty boy until I came of age. A job come up as a banana boy for Ruby Mollison, helping him to ripen the bananas, hanging them up in the ripening room. I used to wear a leather glove when I had to put my hand under the banana stalk because I was frightened of the spiders. When you cut a bunch of bananas, you cut a “v” shape and they come away from the stalk, and that’s where your spider might be. They could be very dangerous, especially if they were pregnant, and if you were bitten you’d have to go to hospital because your arm could get paralysed by the poison.

Then a chance came up at Gibson Pardoe as an empty boy with the view of getting a licence, and I worked with them for a year until Alf Hayes of the porters’ union came to me and said, “There’s an opportunity to work in the flower market as a porter, would you be interested?” and I was issued a porter’s licence at twenty-one. But there was decline in the fruit trade in the nineteen seventies and they brought in fork-lift trucks. The job changed, it became less physical and where you once needed four porters now you only needed two. I can recall the first time I was given an electric truck. It was one of two milk floats all sprayed up without a scratch on them and they said to me, “treat it like it was new-born baby.” My first trip with it was to go over to Commercial St, and I was making a delivery there when a forty-ton truck came past and clipped it, taking half the fibre-glass roof with it. Luckily, I wasn’t seriously injured, only shaken up. I explained to governor what happened, that it was an accident and he said, “Did you get the number plate ?” He never asked if I was hurt or injured in any way. I suppose you could say, that’s the market sense of humour.

I became elected to the union. In life, I always believed in fairness and I recognise there has to be give and take. I had to build up trust from my members and in dealing with the traders too, yet most of the problems were solved over a cup of tea and a handshake. I was the porters’ representative for ten years but Alf Hayes, who was my inspiration, he had been porters’ representative for forty years before me. The porters’ union was founded in the depression of the twenties and thirties. Although they had to keep it a secret, they invented a form of recognition so they could discuss it – it was “union” backwards, “you’ve got none.” It was lost on those who weren’t in the know, and the union became fully recognised in the late nineteen thirties.

My sport was road running and thirty-five of us formed the Spitalfields Market Runners. Celebrating the tercentenary of the market in 1982, we were supported by the traders and greengrocers and porters in a relay from the Spitalfields Market to Southend Pier and back. We each ran ten miles and the whole of the market came together to do something for charity.“

Jimmy remembers when unemployed porters once waited for work under the clock at the centre of the Spitalfields Market and how the union acquired an office so that traders seeking a porter could telephone, thereby saving the humiliation of the porters. Yet now, in common with the other London markets, the porters are deregulated, losing their licences as the balance in the labour market has shifted again. However, after forty years as a porter, Jimmy chooses to remain positive – because experience has granted him a broad perspective upon the endlessly shifting culture and politics of communal endeavour in market life.