At Victoria Park Model Steam Boat Club
Contributing photographer, Lucinda Douglas-Menzies became fascinated by the Victoria Park Model Steam Boat Club while out walking in the park. Over successive Sundays, her interest grew as she went back to watch the regattas, meet the members and learn the story of the oldest model boat club in the world, founded in 1904. Her photographic essay records the life of this society of gentle enthusiasts, many of whom have been making and racing boats on this lake for generations, updating the designs and means of propulsion for their intricate craft in accordance with the evolution of maritime vessels over more than a century. Starting on Easter Sunday, the club holds as many as seventeen regattas annually.
“Meet you at ten o’clock Sunday morning at the boating lake!” was the eager response of Norman Lara, the chairman, when Lucinda rang to enquire about his club. “On the morning I arrived, a group of about a dozen model boat enthusiasts were already settled in chairs by the water’s edge with a variety of handmade boats on display,” explained Lucinda, who was treated to a tour of the clubhouse by Norman. “We are very lucky, one of the few clubs to have this. Tower Hamlets are very good to us, they keep the weeds down in the lake and last year we were given a loo,” he said, adding dryly, “It only took a hundred years to get one.”
Meanwhile, the members had pulled on their waders and were preparing their vessels at the water’s edge, before launching them onto the sparkling lake. Here Norman introduced Lucinda to Keith Reynolds, the club secretary, who outlined the specific classes of model boat racing with the precision of an authority, “There are five categories of “straight running” boats. These include functional, scale boats (fishing boats, cabin cruisers, etc), scale ships (warships, cruise boats, liners, merchant ships, liners, merchant ships – boats on which you could sustain life for more than seven days), metre boats (with strict rules of engine size and length) and – we had to create a special category for this one – called “the wedge,” basically a boat made of three pieces of wood with no keel, ideal for children to start on.” In confirmation of this, as Lucinda looked around, she saw children accompanied by their parents and grandparents, each generation with their boats of varying sophistication and period design, according to their owners’ experience and age.
Readers of Model Engineering Magazine were informed in 1907 that “the Victoria Park Model Steam Boat Club were performing on a Saturday afternoon before an enormous public of small boys who asked, ‘What’s it go by mister?'” It is a question that passersby still ask today, now that additional racing classes have been introduced for radio controlled boats with petrol engines and even hydroplanes.
“We have around sixty members,” continued Keith enthusiastically, “but we could with some more, as a lot don’t sail their boats any longer, they just enjoy turning up for a chat. It’s quiet today, but you should come back next Sunday to our steam rally when the bank will be thick with owners who bring their boats from all over. Some are so big they run on lawn mower engines!”
It was an invitation that Lucinda could not resist and she was rewarded with a spectacle revealing more of the finer points of model boat racing. She discovered that “straight running,” which Keith had referred to, is when one person launches a boat with a fixed rudder along a course (usually sixty yards long) where another waits at the scoring gates to catch the vessel. The closer to a straight course your boat can follow, the more points you win, defined by a series of gates around a central white gate, which scores a bull’s-eye of ten points if you can sail your boat through it. On either side of the white gate are red, yellow and orange gates each with a diminishing score, because the point of the competition is to discover whose boat can follow the truest course.
Witnessing this contest, Lucinda realised that – just like still water concealing deep currents – as well as having extraordinary patience to construct these beautiful working models, the members of the boat club also possess fiercely competitive natures. This is the paradox of sailing model boats, which appears such a lyrical pastime undertaken in the peace and quiet of the boating lake, yet when so much investment of work and ingenuity is at stake (not to mention hierarchies of individual experience and different generations in competition), it can easily transform into a drama that is as intense as any sport has to offer.
Lucinda’s photographs capture this subtle theatre adroitly, of a social group with a shared purpose and similar concerns, both mutually supportive and mutually competitive, who all share a love of the magic of launching their boats upon the lake on Sundays in Summer. It is an activity that conjures a relaxed atmosphere – as, for over a century, walkers have paused at the lakeside to chat in the sunshine, watching as boats are put through their paces on the water and scrutinising the detail of vessels laid upon the shore, before continuing on their way.
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Ann Sotheran’s West End Champions
The Champion
Perhaps more than anywhere else in London, Oxford St is where the grief of the world can descend upon me without warning – especially when I make the foolish mistake of going to the West End to buy a pillowcase. In such circumstances, there is fortunately a nearby refuge where I can seek respite from the urban clamour. It is The Champion in Well St – just minutes walk from the nightmarish agglomeration of chain stores – where Ann Sotheran‘s magnificent stained glass windows cast a spell of benign quietude.
The Champion has been there on the corner of Wells St and Eastcastle St since before 1869 and you would be forgiven for assuming that the glorious array of stained glass dates from this era, but you would be mistaken because it was designed and installed in 1989. The husband and wife publicans who live upstairs informed me that this imaginative notion was the inspiration of a member of the Samuel Smith family of brewers who own the pub and commissioned the glass from Ann Sotheran to endow it with distinction.
Thirty years later these gaudy portraits of Victorian worthies offer a generous welcome to the weary shopper, proving that there is still mileage in the traditional pub when it is as cherished and as handsome as The Champion.
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) gained professional status for nurses and raised hospital standards in the Crimea
Bob Fitzsimmons (1862-1917) The only Englishman to have won three world titles at different weights
Young Tom Morris (1851-1875) won four consecutive Open Championships, first at the age of seventeen
Capt Bertie Dwyer (1872-1967) ‘Flying Bertie Dwyer was one of the early Cresta riders, a President of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club and winner of several trophies
W G Grace (1848-1915) A legendary figure whose all round ability and enthusiasm dominated cricket for over thirty years
Edward Whymper (1840-1911) became a traveller and mountaineer, the first man to climb the Matterhorn and Chimborazo in the Andes
Capt Matthew Webb (1848-1883) was the first to swim the English Channel (thirty-four miles in twenty-one hours) He died swimming across Niagara Falls
David Livingstone (1813-1873) Originally sent to Africa as a missionary, he mapped and explored vast areas of the continent
William Renishaw (1861-1904) Winner of seven singles and seven doubles cups, he with his brother, made Lawn Tennis into a sport
Fred Archer (1857-1886) Possibly the greatest jockey ever, being Champion Jockey for thirteen consecutive years, with twenty-one classic victories
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Paul Pindar’s House In Bishopsgate
House of Sir Paul Pindar by John Wykeham Archer
When William Shakespeare walked along Bishopsgate around 1600, he would have observed the construction of one of the finest of the mansions that formerly lined this ancient thoroughfare, Sir Paul Pindar’s house situated on the west side of the highway beyond the City wall next to the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem.
Paul Pindar was a City merchant who became British Consul to Aleppo and subsequently James I’s Ambassador to Constantinople. Although he returned home from his postings regularly, he did not take permanent residence in his house until 1623 when he was fifty-eight and between 1617-18 it served as the London abode of Pietro Contarini, Venetian Ambassador to the Court of St James.
Who can say what precious gifts from Sultan Mehmet III comprised the inventory of Ottoman treasures that once filled this fine house in Bishopsgate? Pindar’s wealth and loyalty to the monarch was such that he made vast loans to James and Charles I who both dined at his house, as well as contributing ten thousand pounds to the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral. Yet Charles’ overthrow in 1649 meant that Pindar was never repaid and he died with huge debts at the age of eighty-five in 1650. What times he had seen, in a life that stretched from the glory days of Elizabeth I to the decapitation of Charles I.
Remarkably, Paul Pindar’s house survived the Great Fire along with the rest of Bishopsgate which preserved its late-medieval character, lined with shambles and grand mansions, until it was redeveloped in the nineteenth century. His presence was memorialised when the building became a tavern by the name of The Paul Pindar in the eighteenth century.
Reading the correspondence of CR Ashbee from the eighteen-eighties in the archives of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Spital Sq, I was astonished to discover that, after Ashbee’s successfully campaign to save the Trinity Green Almshouses in Whitechapel, he pursued an ultimately fruitless attempt to rescue Paul Pindar’s house from the developers who were expanding Liverpool St Station.
In his poignant letters, arguments which remain familiar in our own time are advanced in the face of the unremitting commercial ambition of the railway magnates. CR Ashbee reminded them of the virtue in retaining an important and attractive building which carried the history of the place, even proposing that – if they could not keep it in its entirety – preserving the facade integrated into their new railway station would prove a popular feature. His words were disregarded but, since Paul Pindar’s house stood where the Bishopsgate entrance to Liverpool St Station is now, I cannot pass through without imagining what might have been and confronting the melancholy recognition that the former glories of Paul Pindar’s house are forever lost in time, as a place we can never visit.
The elaborately carved frontage, which concealed a residence much deeper than it was wide, was lopped off when the building was demolished in 1890 after surviving almost three hundred years in Bishopsgate. Once the oak joinery was dis-assembled, it was cleaned of any residual paint according to the curatorial practice of the time and installed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington when it opened in 1909. You can visit this today at the museum, where the intricate dark wooden facade of Paul Pindar’s beautiful house – familiar to James I, Charles I and perhaps to Shakespeare too – sits upon the wall as the enigmatic husk of something extraordinary. It is an exquisite husk, yet a husk nonetheless.
Sir Paul Pindar (1565–1650)
Paul Pindar’s House by F.Shepherd
View of Paul Pindar’s House, 1812
Street view, 1838
The Sir Paul Pindar by Theo Moore, 1890
The Sir Paul Pindar photographed by Henry Dixon, 1890
Paul Pindar’s House as it appeared before demolition by J.Appleton, 1890
Facade of Paul Pindar’s House at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Bracket from Paul Pindar’s House at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Paul Pindar’s Summer House, Half Moon Alley, drawn by John Thomas Smith, c. 1800
Panelled room in Paul Pindar’s House
Bishopsgate entrance to Liverpool St Station
Archive images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Romance of Old Bishopsgate
What Happened To Tadmans
February 2019
April 2019
Although Tadmans in Jubilee St, Whitechapel, was two hundred years old, it was not a listed building or in a Conservation Area which means there was no protection for it in planning law. Originally built as part of the Mercers’ Estate, constructed at the same time as Commercial Rd in the early nineteenth century, this fine Georgian corner building was a landmark for generations of East Enders who knew it first as the Mercers Arms, then as a greengrocer and more recently as the Stepney branch of Tadman’s, a family firm of local undertakers.
Neither the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Preservation Trust nor the East End Preservation Society knew of the plans to demolish Tadmans until after permission had been granted. The unprotected status of the beautiful old building, which Historic England refused to list, meant that no wider consultation was necessary. It was within the scope of planning law for the application to be decided by a case officer in the planning department without any even requirement to go to Tower Hamlets Development Committee.
After NW1 Developments Ltd received permission in May 2018 to demolish Tadmans and replace it with a block of luxury flats (without any ‘affordable’ housing) in generic spread-sheet architecture, they submitted a secondary application for a more ambitious development. It was only at this point that the Spitalfields Trust and the East End Preservation Society found out about the application and submitted objections, after the event. This was also when readers of Spitalfields Life wrote to object, taking advantage of the opportunity to request that Tadmans not be demolished.
At that moment there was an expectation that public opinion might be taken into account and, when the developers then withdrew their second application, there was hope that they had listened and Tadmans would be saved. Yet when the scaffolding went up earlier this month, it became apparent that the developers were going ahead with their original application, for which permission had already been granted, and demolition commenced.
In Hackney, the council planning department circulate monthly summaries of heritage-related planning applications to the relevant public amenity societies such as The Hackney Society. It is a great pity that Tower Hamlets cannot do the same. If the Spitalfields Trust and East End Preservation Society had known about the application to demolish Tadmans before it had been approved, there might have been a chance to save it.
Tadmans and some Regency terraces to the north of Jubilee St are all that remain of the original streetscape before the harsh post-war destruction and imposition of inferior modern buildings upon Stepney in the name of ‘slum clearance.’ If the remaining historic buildings are not in a Conservation Area because of the redevelopment that surrounds them, it does not make them less worthy of protection. Tower Hamlets Council has a statutory duty to protect heritage assets, including those not listed or in Conservation Areas. It was a responsibility that they failed to uphold on this occasion and the East End is a lesser place for it.
Geoffrey Fletcher recognised the distinctive nature of Tadmans when he drew it for his elegaic book, The London Nobody Knows, half a century ago – yet regrettably Tadmans is now consigned to history just as he feared.
The replacement for Tadmans by architects Studio V
Geoffrey Fletcher’s drawing of Tadmans from The London Nobody Knows, 1962
Old Dame Trot & Her Comical Cat
I must confess that I identify with Old Dame Trot – as illustrated in this early nineteenth century chapbook – knowing all too well how it is to share a home with a large feline personality…
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Schrodinger’s First Year In Spitalfields
Schrodinger puts his feet up
Already a whole year has passed since Schrodinger, formerly Shoreditch church cat, came to start a new life with me in Spitalfields. He arrived in April and after spending a couple of weeks sitting in the old wing chair, I let him venture outside for the first time on May Day.
In those first months he skulked around in wary reserve, observing me to ascertain whether I had any sinister intent or whether his new existence was a temporary state from whence he might get swept away again. Did months of wolfing freshly cooked chicken each Sunday change his mind or did he simply forget his earlier life as he became immersed in this one?
Although my house is much smaller than Shoreditch Church, I think Schrodinger has come to recognise the advantages of carpets and upholstery, and regular fresh food. The appeal of stretching out on the rug before the old iron stove in a stupor of warmth on cold winter nights is not lost on him either.
When my old cat Mr Pussy died, his regular spots – on the window sill and in the squares of light cast upon the carpet by the morning sunshine – were vacant, yet I found I still cast my eyes there in expectation of his presence. Consequently it was a heart-stopping surprise at first to discover Schrodinger sitting in these same spots, gazing back at me entirely unaware of his predecessor.
Schrodinger is his own creature, circumspect and self-absorbed, commonly avoiding eye-contact when his antecedent would always seek it. A cat who already knew who he was before he arrived in Spitalfields, Schrodinger is emotionally self-reliant and less dependent on human affection. Thus it is an unexpected privilege when he seeks contact, leaping nimbly onto my lap as I sit at my desk writing these words, or bounding onto the sofa when he enters the room silently to discover me stretched out and snoozing. His greatest gesture of endearment is to rub his head and neck against me, an action that he characteristically undertakes against my ankles when I am standing in front of the fire.
There are subtle behavioural differences between the newcomer and his forbear. Whereas Mr Pussy always entered through the penultimate pair of railings in the garden gate, depositing a build up of fluff, Schrodinger consistently enters through the last pair of railings without leaving a trace.
No doubt he misses the weekly services and classical music concerts that were a regular feature of his life in Shoreditch. Schrodinger will stop in his tracks if he hears the sound of hymns or orchestral music on the radio, no doubt triggering memories of when he famously pranced up and down the aisle, singing along at the church in his tiny high-pitched voice.
After a year, Schrodinger has laid down patterns of behaviour. If I linger too late on the sofa before going to bed, he sits on the carpet and fixes me with his gaze while waiting patiently for me to leave so that he can spend the night there, lying on his back with limbs distended and stretched out to his full extent.
Like his predecessor, he waits at the top of the stair in the morning so that we can leave the house to greet the day together. He runs ahead to escort me like a vanguard, down the stairs and through his cat door. Then he pauses while I step outside and lock the door, before he leads the way down the path, through the gate and along the alley, only peeling off at the last moment before the busy road and leaving me to venture into the city alone.
Perhaps most heart-warming is Schrodinger’s behaviour upon my return. If he sees me in the street, he will run to accompany me into the house and if he spies me coming from up on the sill, he will stand poised at the head of the stair to welcome me home.
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Schrodinger’s First Winter in Spitalfields
Schrodinger, Shoreditch Church Cat
Alie Touw’s Life In Britain
In the final of three stories published over the holiday, Alie Touw speaks of her life in Britain
Centenarian Alie Touw has lived in this country for over half a century and made Spitalfields her home in recent decades. Yet if circumstances had been different, or if Alie had followed her father’s advice, she never would have left Holland at all – as she confessed to me. ”Please don’t go to England,’ my father said, ‘The people there, they look down on small countries.'”
The story of the Dutch in London is rarely told but just a few minutes walk east from Alie’s home is a street once known as ‘Dutch Tenterground,’ with reference to the community of diamond cutters and cigar makers who came here from the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. And just a hundred yards west from Alie’s home, a Dutch Church has stood in Austin Friars in the City of London since 1550. Today Alie is one of the longest serving of its congregation. It was this church that brought Alie to her current home, when Alie’s husband became caretaker there in the eighties
Such is Alie’s moral stature and seniority within the Dutch community in London, whenever a new ambassador is appointed from the Netherlands, I am told it is an accepted protocol that they invite Alie to dinner at the embassy.
At one hundred years old, Alie remains in robust spirits and reassures me when – in order to arrange a photographer to take her portrait – I enquire of her future plans. ‘Don’t worry,’ she jokes, ‘I am not going to die.’ Mystified by her longevity, Alie is regretful that she has outlived all her siblings, her husband and her eldest son.
Yet she is fascinated and engaged with the lives of the young women who visit as carers, permitting her to live independently. Most are immigrants who are overqualified but accept menial work as a necessary sacrifice towards building a new life in Britain. Alie appreciates their fortitude because theirs is a struggle that she understands keenly.
“I came over from Holland with my husband and two sons in 1956.
My brother-in-law had a factor in Arnhem, manufacturing car radiators, which was destroyed in the war. Opposite was a school where the English were treating their wounded, so he went across to talk with the officers who were staying there. ‘What are you missing?’ he asked, ‘Do you need anything?’ They replied, ‘We would love to have a bath,’ so he said, ‘You can come over to my house and have a bath.’ He made friends with the English officers and they said, ‘Why don’t you start again in England?’ He left in 1947. He took some of his employees and started up his business again in the Midlands and he did very well.
When he came back to visit us after a couple of years, he said, ‘You’re still struggling.’ If you lose everything, it takes so long to recover. If you have children, they always come first. I could sleep on the floor but I wanted a bed for my child. I had lost my sewing machine which I used to make all the clothes for my family. He said, ‘Why don’t you come to England as well?’ He talked us into it.
My husband was a chocolatier and came to London to look for a job and, eventually, he found one at a factory in Finsbury Park. In Holland, there was no chocolate and he had been working in a bakery. We were still struggling in 1956, so we left for England with our two little boys. My younger son had been born in July 1945.
England had suffered as well, but they had more than we had. We shared a house with the manager of the chocolate factory and his wife, they lived downstairs and we lived upstairs. While we were there my sons went to the local school. I said, ‘If you make a friend, you can always bring him home.’ My younger son brought home a black boy who was his friend. The wife of the factory manager saw him come into the house. I thought it was normal, I never taught my children that you could not do that – all are welcome. He was a nice boy and I went to meet his mother who lived alone, supporting herself with her sewing machine.
A couple of days later, I had a knock at my door and the manager’s wife said, ‘Your son brought a black boy here.’ I said, ‘Yeah, so what?’ I did not see anything wrong in it. She said, ‘You cannot do that, it brings the whole neighbourhood down.’ Some time later, my husband said, ‘I have to leave.’ He got the sack from the chocolate factory and had to find another job.
He found a job in Winchester and we bought a house because there was nowhere available to rent. The factory belonged to an English woman whose husband was Dutch but after a couple of years they had a row and she said, ‘Out you go, and all the Dutch go too!’ My husband was out of a job again until he found one making chocolate in a big hotel at Marylebone, but then he had to stay in lodgings. I had a third baby by then and he came home on Friday night and left again on Sunday.
My brother-in-law said, ‘This is no good, I am going to look for a shop so you can all be together,’ and he found one with a three bedroom council flat above for us in Redditch, near Birmingham. It was a confectionery shop and we sold sweets, bread and cakes. It was in a run of ten shops and we spent twenty years working there from eight until six, Monday until Saturday. We worked so hard and we did survive, but then my husband had enough of it.
We heard that they were looking for a caretaker for the Dutch Church in the City of London. So my husband said, ‘I’m going to pack in, we’re going to sell this shop.’
We had several bakers working for us and about fifteen reps coming to the shop from different factories, and we had to buy stock and pay for it every month. We always needed the bank to help us out. We did well but the shop did not. Sainsburys opened and some of the other ten shops lost everything. I asked my husband, ‘Tell me exactly what you owe,’ and I sold the shop. I was not going to go and live in London if we still owed money to people in Redditch. We had to pay our debts off and then we could leave – and that was what we did.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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