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
This Is Jimmy’s London
Excerpts from ‘This is London‘ produced as a guide for servicemen & women in 1944
In these war-time days, when official guide books are not obtainable, a quiet perusal of ‘This is London’ will be of inestimable service to visitors, making a ‘leave in London’ something memorable and, as Jimmy says, well worth keeping a diary of.
“..to the Bank..”
I don’t know anything about London and the sooner I set out to learn the better and the quicker I’ll know it. There’s only one way to learn about any town and that is to walk as much as you can. It’ll knock some of the strangeness out of you. You won’t feel you’re a stranger in the place. You won’t feel as if everyone is looking at you and telling themselves that you are a stranger. Believe me, it’ll help you feel a lot better.
The Green Park
I wanted to walk along the pavements, to watch the people, to visit places whose names were so familiar to everyone in the world. Talk about walking the paths of history, I was tickled pink.
“…Charing Cross Rd as a Free Library…”
Whether you are a reader on no, it is well worth spending a few minutes, few hours for that matter, watching the various types of people who stand, hour after hour, at the bookshops, browsing. I’m firmly convinced that very many Londoners regard Charing Cross Rd as a Free Library, and I’m equally certain that booksellers look benignly on these non-profitable customers.
“…down Wapping Way..”
To find funny little pubs with funny little bars and mix with all kinds of people, I think it’s the wisest thing anyone could do and it’s what I’ve always longed to try. There are no tough spots. Go to the poorest quarter in the East End and you’ll meet with politeness. Go into a pub down by the docks. It may not be luxurious, but you’ll find that everyone is nice there. You’ll hear the occasional ‘damn’ and, if there’s no women in the place, you’ll hear much worse.
Dirty Dick’s I won’t forget in a hurry. A unique place if ever there was one. I think the story of the original landlord who allowed everything to get into such a disgusting state of dirt and cobwebs is more or less fictitious. It’s quite close to Liverpool St Station and, although it, like many other place, received some damage during the blitz, the landlord still carries on, just as do all other Londoners.
In Hyde Park, some of the orators take their job very seriously, others look upon it as a kind of rag, entering into cross-talk with their audiences with such obvious pleasure. I don’t think I would like to be an earnest speaker there for occasionally the heckling is terrific. How these speakers can possibly hope to make themselves heard, speaking as they do one against the other, is more than I can understand.
I went to Covent Garden Market and tried to understand what it was all about, tried to make sense of what the salesmen were saying. They have a jargon all their own while the porters astonished me by throwing enormous weights about with a nonchalance that is truly amazing.
In St James’ Park
Where else but in London could one see the unexpected glimpse of a State trumpeter, his tunic, the scarlet and gold of medieval pageantry, glinting in the sun – and the inscrutable eyes of an aged Chelsea Pensioner who watched him fixedly?
Of course, I’ve read my Pepys and that gives a very fair picture, but while I’m fond of seeing historical buildings, links with the past so to speak, I much prefer the present.
A fellow would have to be dead from the neck up if he couldn’t enjoy the London Zoo. The Zoo is obviously a Londoner’s playground, everyone is eager to see as much as possible and the groups around each cage or enclosure become, for the moment, a band of friends.
The Embankment where artists in chalk ply their trade and pray for fair weather …
… and schoolboys read ‘penny dreadfuls’ in the shadow of mysterious Egypt.
Thankyou London, for all those memories. Thankyou London!
At Clapton Beauty Parlour
Marcia Manning
Marcia believes that Clapton Beauty Parlour, opened by her parents in 1930, is London’s oldest family-run salon and I have no reason to doubt her. For me, it was the perfect excuse to enjoy a trip to the hairdresser and the ideal opportunity to learn more of Hackney’s hidden hairdressing heritage. And Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie came along to capture Clapton’s celebrated coiffeuses.
“Both my grandparents’ families lived in Chatsworth Rd, my mother’s family lived in 104 and my father’s family lived at 83. He had his eye on my mother for a year until he got his opportunity to speak to her when the Prince of Wales visited Hackney. The route took him along Chatsworth Rd, so my father positioned himself behind my mother in the crowd and tapped her on the shoulder and asked to take her to the cinema. My aunt went as a chaperone, that’s what good class people did that in those days. My mother was maybe sixteen or seventeen and they started a courtship, and got married when mother was twenty-one in 1930. She was five months older than my father so, when they took the lease on this salon, it had to be in her name. She was already twenty-one but he was still twenty and they opened at Easter to catch the business.
My father’s family were all barbers. They lived above the shop at 83 Chatsworth Rd and the younger four brothers were all taught barbering by the eldest. Originally, the family came over from Russia where they were lumberjacks – none of them were barbers, it started here with the eldest brother. My father began when he left school at twelve and had to go out to work, he was a natural hairdresser. I recall him saying that hairdressing is a young man’s trade, because physically you cannot stand all day after the age of forty or fifty and because it’s the youngsters who dictate fashion.
When they opened this salon, it was ladies’ hairdressing. It was men’s barbering in Chatsworth Rd but when they opened this shop it was ladies only. He switched because he was a very futuristic man and he saw the future was in ladies’ hairdressing. After my parents opened up the salon, they were very often short of money and they would go to my grandmother in Chatsworth Rd who gave them money to keep them going. She would pawn her rings and reclaim them later. They used to worked until midnight. My mother made sandwiches for the girls who were working all day until 10:00 or 11:00pm. I remember them telling me that customers queued up outside from 6.30 or 7:00am to have their hair done before work.
My father was the hairdresser and my mother was very good at beauty and make up. Father took in fancy goods like gloves, handbags and they sold a lot of jewellery. He bought it and she sold it. Father sent her to Revlon and Max Factor to learn to do make up, so she knew all about that, and we sold all Max Factor and Revlon products here and also Leichner theatrical make up.
They lived above the salon at first and used Hackney Baths to wash. In 1936, when they had enough money, they bought a house in Upper Clapton. Father was a very advanced man. He learnt to drive and they were the first amongst their friends to have a fridge and a freezer and a mangle for wringing the washing. I loved using the mangle!
In the thirties, Vidal Sassoon was working in Whitechapel where he did his apprenticeship and then had his salon. He was only seventeen but in those days, you left school earlier – you were a man at fifteen or sixteen. His life was disrupted by the war when his salon was bombed out. The Sassoon family knew my parents and he came to see my father and asked, ‘I’ve got a few customers and I don’t want to lose them, can I work in your salon?’ My father replied, ‘Yes you can, here are the keys.’ Our salon was closed during the war because my father was in the fire service and he was injured and, after he recovered, he was stationed in Victoria Park on the anti-aircaft guns in the Home Guard. So he said to Vidal, ‘Here are the keys. Keep the salon clean. Use any products. Make sure you lock up.’
I first came here in 1974. I was never going into hairdressing. I went to Woodberry Down school in the year it opened and, when we had a careers evening, the headmistress said to my father ‘Well now Mr Manning, we’ve got to discuss Marcia’s future.’ She saw me as a model pupil. Although I had failed the scholarship exam, it was my luck that Woodberry Down opened that year so I became a model pupil and got six O levels and three A levels. Yet my father told her that I would be going into the family business. Well, that was all I needed to hear and I gritted my teeth against it. I went on to become a linguist and I studied at Holborn College of Languages but – low and behold – here I am today.
I’ve never done hairdressing but I’ve been running the place. The fact that I never learnt hairdressing has held me back, so I took myself off to Weller to do some short courses, even though you can’t just ‘do hairdressing,’ it’s a four-to-five year apprenticeship. I did colouring and that gave me a certain respect here among the staff. Before that, it was like running a plumbing business without being a plumber yourself, you can’t do it. Here, I’ve been a secretary with languages trying to keep these girls in order. My brother gave me a pat on the back and said, ‘Mum and dad would be really proud of you.’ I’ve managed to bring the salon into its eighty-fifth year.
About thirty years ago, there was a big thing about sunbeds, so I decided to go the Hair & Beauty Show at Olympia where they were displaying them. I had some empty rooms upstairs and I got a loan from the bank, and – my goodness it took off – I repaid the loan very quickly. You had to wait for an appointment, it was that busy, and I think this is also what my father found when he started, it took off.
We have one customer who is a hundred years old, Mrs Goodman. She is so alert, she comes on Wednesdays and we have lovely chats about the early days. She remembers my father and he has been dead for forty-two years. She must have been coming here for between fifty to sixty years. I have many customers who remember my father doing their hair for their weddings.
From the age of three or four, I was put on the counter and told that I had an important job, to watch. As far as I can remember, I’ve always been here. I love being here because this is where Mother and Father are, I feel the closeness. I just feel a bond with this place – this is my home.”
Once Marcia had told her story and given me a tour of the premises, from the former basement kitchen to the water tank in the roof, it was time for a word with Dawn Hammond, Marcia’s protégé and proud successor.
“It was my Saturday day job and I am the owner now. I took over seven years ago but Marcia still comes in two days a week and helps out. I lived just across the road when I was fifteen or sixteen and I saw there was a Saturday girl wanted. My mum used to do our neighbours’ hair and her own hair at home, she wanted to be a hairdresser but became a machinist. It was convenient for me, I didn’t have to fork out for bus fares and then Marcia took me on as an apprentice. I wanted to be an architect, but I haven’t got the brains for that. In architecture, you have to draw lines but in hair you have to draw angles, 180 and 360 degrees. If you hold the hair up, you just get a short back and side but, if you do an inverted bob. It’s all to do with angles.
Customers are different today. They see these models in the papers with black hair one week and blonde the next, they might be wigs. They say, ‘I want my hair like this’ – they have got black hair and they want it blonde, it ain’t gonna happen! When customers come in we turn into psychologists and, once we get to know them, they tell us their problems. I’ve got a customer who used to live near Victoria Park and now she has moved to Hove, but she still comes back to get her hair done. I ask her about her children and she asks about mine. With customers that we have been doing for years, we have a strong bond.”
Dawn Hammond
Marcia enjoys a blow dry
The shrine to Clapton Beauty Parlour’s history
Marcia in the seventies
Marcia stands on the left and her mother sits in the centre at the salon in the eighties
Customers and coiffeuses in Clapton
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Transcript by Simon Scott
Book your appointment at CLAPTON BEAUTY PARLOUR, 21 Lower Clapton Rd, Hackney, E5 0NS
You may also like to read about
Aaron Biber, London’s Oldest Barber
14 Short Whitechapel Bell Foundry Poems
Dan Thompson wrote these fourteen short poems about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and its bells, as part of his project to write hundred poems about hundred places in England.
These are published for the first time here today and complemented with photographs of the foundry by Charlotte Dew. Below you can also find details of how you can help save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry by writing a letter of objection to the bell-themed boutique proposal to Tower Hamlets Council.
The Whitechapel Sound
I
The clapper strikes the place-bell’s rim,
a 1930s tune by Mears and Stainbank.
Down in a spireless church on the coast –
Captain Sophie Littlechild leads the band
in a Kent Treble Bob Major,
ringing a Kentish rag.
The changes are heard up in the Cinque Port.
Eight still bells hold the peace
they’ve kept since before the Great War:
but the bells of St Clements sound,
‘Oranges and lemons, oranges and lemons.’
II
In the Arundel Tower at Canterbury.
Dunstan’s Bell sounds the hour
for pilgrims at the site of the martyr.
Thomas gave his will
to find freedom in the will of god.
He has been killed for his faith:
so we mourn –
he has been elevated to the company of saints:
so we rejoice.
He has been killed:
the bells will be silent for a year.
‘It is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason’.
III
An old signalling-station,
a tower that flies the White Ensign,
the Prime Minister sung in the choir
as the bells brought by boat,
floated down the Estuary,
pealed over war graves
and Bones’ fields.
IV
Along the Estuary, on the hour,
promenaders at Herne Bay,
and pleasure-trippers boarding Thanet wherries,
ghost figures on a ghost pier,
set their watches by the bell in
Mrs Thwaytes’ Clock Tower.
The hour drifts on the tides
to sea forts, pirate radio stations,
across the windfarms.
V
On the line between English and Danish,
Christopher Wren built a church,
German thunderbolts destroyed it –
the spire burning like a candle-
the Royal Air Force restored it.
Sign and countersign, fall and rise –
‘They held out their arms for you to pass under’
The man who burnt
Hamburg and Dresden
stands outside.
‘Lord, do you want us to
call fire down from heaven
to destroy them?’
VI
Two Sticks and Apple,
Ring the Bells at Whitechapple
When I am Rich,
Ring the Bells at Fleetditch
We were made in this place
Ring the Bells at Boniface.
VII
Big Ben in
The Elizabeth Tower,
St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey –
London rings.
The bells in Wren’s
St Mary-le-Bow
would have been heard
six miles to the east,
five miles to the north,
three miles to the south,
four miles to the west.
In St Andrew by the Wardrobe,
the bell rings by itself
when the vicar in Avenbury dies.
VIII
Be not afeard,
the isle is full of the
noise of bells –
Work No 1197:
All The Bells.
The wide bell
rings low and so loud,
nine hundred million people
can hear it.
IX
Before each service,
the tenor rings seventeen times,
once for each of the Lewes martyrs:
one ring more than
the years of protestant
Thomasina Wood’s life.
X
Target 53.
The Kampfgruppe dropped marker flares
at the corners of the city.
From 20,000 feet, a cathedral looks like a factory.
St Michael’s burned, a magnesium flame
melting lead, catching in the oak roof.
The water ran dry before midnight.
Churchill stood on the
Air Ministry roof, waiting
for bombs that never fell on London.
The old Pack & Chapman bells,
‘each bell of good, bold and pleasing tone,
a very fine peal of ten’, recast,
rang as the bombs fell.
XI
Habemus vicarium at Granchester –
‘we have a vicar, we have a vicar’
XII
Wind the handle,
a turn for each day of the year,
and Great Tom will mark the hour.
Cover the fire.
Two bells call the curfew,
one hundred and one rings.
Cover the fire.
Cover the fire.
XIII
The edge, the Borders,
St Andrew’s in Penrith,
where Kathleen Raine
sat out the war.
‘Write
me a piece about the
grave, James Joyce’.
Ken Twentyman will
show you the Fire Bell,
the Market Bell,
the Curfew Bell –
the Morta Bell for death.
XIV
After each round of bells
is a moment of silence,
change, before the bells
ring round again. In the
peace after and before
you can hear Whitechapel.
___________
Footnotes
I St Mary’s, Walmer, Kent: St Peter’s, Sandwich, Kent (where the bells last rung in 1913), St Clement’s
II Quote from TS Eliot Murder In The Cathedral.
III St Peters in Thanet, Broadstairs: the local farmer is Mr Bones.
IV Herne Bay Clocktower
V St Clement Danes, the RAF church. Quote from George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four and Luke 9:54.
IX St Thomas, Lewes
Dan Thompson, Peace Poet
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. 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
You may also like to read about
Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
My East End Vernacular Lecture
I shall giving an illustrated lecture on EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists Who Painted London’s East End Streets in the 20th Century, including all the artists whose works are below, at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, E3 2SJ next Thursday March at 7pm. Click here for tickets
Click here to order a copy of EAST END END VERNACULAR for £25
John Allin – Spitalfields Market, 1972
S.R Badmin – Wapping Pier Head, 1935
Pearl Binder – Aldgate, 1932 (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
Dorothy Bishop – Looking towards the City of London from Morpeth School, 1961
James Boswell – Petticoat Lane (Courtesy of David Buckman)
Roland Collins – Brushfield St, Spitalfields, 1951-60 (Courtesy of Museum of London)
Alfred Daniels – Gramophone Man on Wentworth St
Anthony Eyton , Christ Church Spitalfields, 1980
Doreen Fletcher – Turner’s Rd, 1998
Geoffrey Fletcher – D.Bliss, Alderney Rd 1979 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Barnett Freedman– Street Scene. 1933-39 (Courtesy of Tate Gallery)
Noel Gibson – Hessel St (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Charles Ginner – Bethnal Green Allotment, 1947 (Courtesy of Manchester City Art Gallery)
Lawrence Gowing – Mare St, 1937
Harry T. Harmer – St Botolph’s Without Aldgate, 1963 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Elwin Hawthorne – Trinity Green Almshouses, 1935
Rose Henriques – Coronation Celebrations in Challis Court, 1937 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Nathaniel Kornbluth – Butcher’s Row, Aldgate 1934 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Dan Jones – Brick Lane, 1977
Leon Kossoff – Christ Church Spitalfields, 1987
James Mackinnon – Twilight at London Fields
Cyril Mann – Christ Church seen over bombsites from Redchurch St, 1946 (Courtesy of Piano Nobile Gallery)
Jock McFadyen – Aldgate East
Ronald Morgan – Salvation Army Band Bow, 1978 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Grace Oscroft – Old Houses in Bow, 1934
Peri Parkes – House in the East, 1980-81
Henry Silk – Snow, Rounton Rd, Bow
Harold Steggles – Old Ford Rd c.1932
Walter Steggles – Old Houses, Bethnal Green 1929
Albert Turpin, Columbia Market, Bethnal Green
Take a look at some of the artists featured in East End Vernacular
