William Morris’ East End
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If you spotted someone hauling an old wooden Spitalfields Market orange crate around the East End, that was me undertaking a pilgrimage to some of the places William Morris spoke in the hope he might return for one last oration
William Morris spoke at Speakers’ Corner in Victoria Park on 26th July & 11th October 1885, 8th August 1886, 27th March & 21st May 1888
The presence of William Morris in the East End is almost forgotten today. Yet he took the District Line from his home in Hammersmith regularly to speak here through the last years of his life, despite persistent ill-health. Ultimately disappointed that the production of his own designs had catered only to the rich, Morris dedicated himself increasingly to politics and in 1884 he became editor of The Commonweal, newspaper of the Socialist League, using the coach house at Kelsmcott House in Hammersmith as its headquarters.
As an activist, Morris spoke at the funeral of Alfred Linnell, who was killed by police during a free speech rally in Trafalgar Sq in 1887, on behalf of the Match Girls’ Strike in 1888 and in the Dock Strike of 1889. His final appearance in the East End was on Mile End Waste on 1st November 1890, on which occasion he spoke at a protest against the brutal treatment of Jewish people in Russia.
When William Morris died of tuberculosis in 1896, his doctor said, ‘he died a victim to his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of Socialism.’ Morris deserves to be remembered for his commitment to the people of the East End in those years of political turmoil as for the first time unions struggled to assert the right to seek justice for their workers.
8th April 1884, St Jude’s Church, Commercial St – Morris gave a speech at the opening of the annual art exhibition on behalf of Vicar Samuel Barnett who subsequently founded Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Gallery.
During 1885, volunteers distributed William Morris’ What Socialists Want outside the Salmon & Ball in Bethnal Green
1st September 1885, 103 Mile End Rd
20th September 1885, Dod St, Limehouse – When police launched a violent attack on speakers of the Socialist League who defended the right to free speech at this traditional spot for open air meetings, William Morris spoke on their behalf in court on 22nd September in Stepney.
10th November 1886 & 3rd July 1887, Broadway, London Fields
November 20th 1887, Bow Cemetery – Morris spoke at the burial of Alfred Linnell, a clerk who was killed by police during a free speech rally in Trafalgar Sq. ‘Our friend who lies here has had a hard life and met with a hard death, and if our society had been constituted differently his life might have been a delightful one. We are engaged in a most holy war, trying to prevent our rulers making this great town of London into nothing more than a prison.’
9th April 1889, Toynbee Hall, Commercial St – Morris gave a magic lantern show on the subject of ‘Gothic Architecture’
1st November 1890, Mile End Waste – Morris spoke in protest against the persecution of Jews in Russia
William Morris in the East End
3rd January & 27th April 1884, Tee-To-Tum Coffee House, 166 Bethnal Green Rd
8th April 1884, St Jude’s Church, Commercial St
29th October 1884, Dod St, Limehouse
9th November 1884, 13 Redman’s Row
11th January & 12th April 1885, Hoxton Academy Schools
29th March 24th May 1885, Stepney Socialist League, 110 White Horse St
26th July & 11th October 1885, Victoria Park
8th August 1885, Socialist League Stratford
16th August 1885, Exchange Coffee House, Pitfield St, Hoxton
1st September 1885, Swaby’s Coffee House, 103 Mile End Rd
22nd September 1885, Thames Police court, Stepney (Before Magistrate Sanders)
24th January 1886, Hackney Branch Rooms, 21 Audrey St, Hackney Rd
2nd February 1886, International Working Men’s Educational Club, 40 Berners St
5th June 1886, Socialist League Stratford
11th July 1886, Hoxton Branch of the Socialist League, 2 Crondel St
24th August 1886, Socialist League Mile End Branch, 108 Bridge St
13th October 1886, Congregational Schools, Swanscombe St, Barking Rd
10th November 1886, Broadway, London Fields
6th March 1887, Hoxton Branch of the Socialist League, 2 Crondel St
13th March & 12th June 1887, Hackney Branch Rooms, 21 Audrey St, Hackney Rd
27th March 1887, Borough of Hackney Club, Haggerston
27th March, 21st May, 23rd July, 21st August & 11th September, 1887 Victoria Park
24th April 1887, Morley Coffee Tavern Lecture Hall, Mare St
3rd July 1887, Broadway, London Fields
21st August 1887, Globe Coffee House, High St, Hoxton
25th September 1887, Hoxton Church
27th September 1887, Mile End Waste
18th December 1887, Bow Cemetery, Southern Grove
17th April 1888, Mile End Socialist Hall, 95 Boston St
17th April 1888, Working Men’s Radical Club, 108 Bridge St, Burdett Rd
16th June 1888, International Club, 23 Princes Sq, Cable St
17th June 1888, Victoria Park
30th June 1888, Epping Forest Picnic
22nd September 1888, International Working Men’s Education Club, 40 Berners St
9th April 1889, Toynbee Hall, Commercial St
27th June 1889, New Labour Club, 5 Victoria Park Sq, Bethnal Green
8th June 1889, International Working Men’s Education Club, 40 Berners St
1st November 1890, Mile End Waste
This feature draws upon the research of Rosemary Taylor as published in her article in The Journal of William Morris Studies. Click here to join the William Morris Society
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At Kelmscott House, Hammersmith
I have walked past William Morris’ former house on the river bank in Hammersmith many times and always wondered what it was like inside but, since it is now a private dwelling, I never expected to visit. However, the residents kindly open their doors to members of the William Morris Society once every two years and thus I was permitted the privilege of joining the tour.
William Morris was forty-three years old when he came to live here. It was to be his last house in a succession that began with his childhood home in Walthamstow and included the Red House in Bexleyheath, designed for him and Jane as their marital home by Philip Webb, and the sixteenth century Kelmscott Manor by the Thames in Lechlade. The rural idyll which William Morris hoped for at Kelmscott Manor had been sullied by the overbearing presence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose obsession with Jane Morris had led him to take up permanent residence.
“If you could be content to live no nearer London than that, I cannot help thinking we should do very well there and certainly the open river and the garden at the back are a great advantage,” William wrote tactfully to Jane in February 1877. “If the matter lay with me only, I should be setting about taking the house, for already I have become conscious of the difficulty of getting anything decent. As to such localities as Knightsbridge or Kensington Sq, they are quite beyond our means.”
Built in the seventeen-eighties, the house was known as The Retreat and had once been the home of Sir Francis Ronalds, inventor of the electric telegraph, who had filled the long garden, which stretched all the way back to King St then, with buried cables as part of his experiments. When William Morris came here and renamed it Kelmscott House, it had been the home of the novelist George MacDonald for a decade. However – somewhat ominously for Morris – they chose to leave since MacDonald believed that the proximity to the polluted river was responsible for his family’s ill-health. In those days, the riverfront at Hammersmith was heavily industrialised with factories and wharfs.
I realised that, in my imagination, I felt I had already visited Kelmscott House. Long ago, when I read Morris’ novel News From Nowhere, I was seduced by his vision of a homespun Utopia that had turned its back on industrialism. In my memory, as if in the moonlight of a dream, I joined the characters as they departed Kelmscott House and undertook the journey up the Thames from Hammersmith to Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, travelling a hundred years into the future.
When I paid my visit to Kelmscott House, there were compelling details which evoked that faraway world, even if time and change had wiped away almost all of the evidence of Morris’ occupation of the house. “Let us hope that we shall all grow younger there,” he wrote to Jane with forced optimism in October 1878, just before they moved in.
Walking through the narrow passage beside The Dove, you discover the wide expanse of the Thames on the left and Kelmscott House rising up on your right, presenting an implacable frontage to the river. You enter through the area stairs on the left of the house, leading down to the kitchen, and immediately you notice a wall of original trellis wallpaper, designed by Morris with birds drawn by Philip Webb. If no-one told you, you would assume it was a recent reprint since these papers remain in production today. The low-ceilinged basement rooms are now the headquarters of the William Morris Society, where you may admire his Albion Press before climbing stairs again into the former coach house. This long narrow room was employed by Morris as a workshop for knotting carpets, also lectures and meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist League were held here. During his final years at Kelmscott, Morris became increasingly involved with politics and the Socialist cause.
The garden no longer stretches to King St, just as far as M4, yet it is impressively generous for a London garden, with well-kept herbaceous borders and a wide lawn. Most fascinating to me, though, was the strawberry patch – since William Morris’ Strawberry Thief is one of his most celebrated textile designs, inspired by his experiences at Kelmscott Manor where the thrushes raided his soft fruit.
Approaching the house from the rear, it presents quite a different aspect than from the front, with assymetric projections and a bowed turret. The high-ceilinged dining room at the back was especially offensive to Morris with its Adam detailing and Venetian window. This seems a curious prejudice to the modern sensibility. Perhaps our equivalent might be those eighties post-modern buildings which have not aged well. Fortunately, Morris suspended a vast sixteenth century Islamic carpet across one wall and part of the ceiling, drawing the eye from the Georgian elements which he found so hideous.
Emery Walker photographed the interiors, capturing Morris’ personal sense of interior design, employing lush textiles and extravagant antiques, mixed with furniture painted by Philip Webb and fine oriental ceramics. Architecturally, the most impressive space is the first floor drawing room which spans the width of the house, created by George MacDonald by knocking two bedrooms into one. In this south-facing room, the views over Chiswick Reach are breathtaking. Morris lined it with a rich, bluish tapestry of birds in foliage that he designed for this location. A huge settle painted with sunflowers by Philip Webb once sat beside the fireplace, lined with blue and white tiles manufactured by Morris & Co and still in situ.
In 1881, seeing children from the nearby slum known as Little Wapping swinging on his garden gate, Morris recognised, “It was my good luck only of being born respectable and rich, that has put me on this side of the window among delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the other side, in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor shops, the foul and degraded lodgings.”
Overlooking the garden at the back was Jane Morris’ room, somewhat detached from the rest of the house, granting her the independence she required as she withdrew from her marriage during the years at Hammersmith. The two front rooms on the ground floor, overlooking the river, comprised William Morris’ workroom and bedroom. It was in the workroom to the left of the front door that he supervised the creation of the Kelmscott Press, publishing fifty-two titles in five years. In his bedroom to the right, he installed a loom to undertake tapestry through the long hours of the night when he could not sleep. Here he died from tuberculosis on 3rd October 1896, aged just sixty-two, nursed by Emery Walker as his breath failed him. His last words were, “I want to get mumbo jumbo out of the world.”
I walked back along King St to the tube, past the Lyric Sq Market where William Morris once spoke. I thought about him taking the District Line back and forth to visit East London for public speaking, and I decided I should trace his footsteps in the East End next.
Basement stairs with original Morris ‘Trellis’ wallpaper
William Morris’ design for ‘Trellis’ wallpaper with birds drawn by Philip Webb
William Morris’ Albion Press
Hammersmith Socialist League gathering on the back lawn at Kelmscott House, 1885
William Morris’ workroom from which he ran the Kelmscott Press, with stairs leading up to the coach house where Hammersmith Socialist League meetings were held (Photograph by Emery Walker)
Strawberry patch in the garden at Kelmscott
William Morris’ ‘Strawberry Thief’ design
Sixteenth century Islamic carpet displayed by Morris in the dining room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
William Morris’ Islamic carpet was acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum where it is on permanent display (courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum)
‘William Morris’ rose blooms at Kelmscott
The drawing room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
Tapestry designed for the drawing room at Kelmscott
The drawing room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
William Morris spoke here – Lyric Sq Market, Hammersmith
Archive photographs courtesy William Morris Society
The lower floor and coach house of Kelmscott House are open on Thursday and Saturday afternoons. Visit the William Morris Society website for further details
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Dorothy Bishop, Artist & Teacher
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Looking towards the City of London from Morpeth School, 1961
This painting shows the view from the art room at the top of the school in Bethnal Green where Dorothy Bishop taught for twenty years. It was a formative experience that Dorothy treasured and this painting – which her friend Ruth Richardson kindly brought to my attention – is one of only a few pictures of hers that are known to exist. Although she painted throughout her life, she did not consider herself a professional artist.
Born in Brockley, Dorothy lived with her parents, her elder sister and younger brother for most of her life. After training as an Art teacher, she taught at a school in the north west of England for the duration of the war, returning south to live in Harefield, Uxbridge with her parents afterwards. In 1947, Dorothy took a job teaching evening classes Stewart Headlam Recreational Evening Institute in Morpeth St, an employment which was to occupy her until 1968. Recording her memory of these years, Dorothy wrote a diary of her impressions of the people and the place from which we include these excerpts.
“I was there for twenty-one years and it was one of the best things in my life. Now I am old and I must lead a quiet life, I would give much to be back at Stewart Headlam School. I really loved the cockney boys and girls, especially the wit and vitality of the boys. The whole atmosphere was full of life and rough kindness. I loved the wildness of the boys, once it had snowed and they made for me with snowballs and I saw their dark eyes dancing with joy, shining in the lamplight. They did enjoy things. The layabout boys tended to come to Art as in football training you had to do something, whereas in Art you could just sit and exercise your wit on the teacher and thus show off to your friends. The girls then were almost a different tribe and provided me often with members of the class who would work and were also friendly. They always supported me in any trouble with the boys and, on the whole, sex solidarity was more powerful than class solidarity.”
“The class was from 7:30pm to 9:30pm with a quarter of an hour’s break to go to the canteen for a cup of tea. The second half of the class was the most difficult as the boys would become restless, even to throw pencils. Sometimes I was utterly exhausted at the end and thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’ but then I thought, ‘Why should they drive me out?’ also I really loved them and there were some gentle quiet boys and girls who would talk to me. The next week they would be quite different and ask, ‘Did we upset you, Miss? We was only having a bit of a giggle.’”
“I was not approved of by the L.C.C. inspectors. Once they found my class copying Mickey Mouse and painting him in bright colours. I told them I could not change the taste of Bethnal Green for such things, but did not add – as I thought – that it would be impertinent to try to do so. In their report they said I was ‘defeatist’. I got a letter which said, ‘While your qualifications remain at their present level you are not suitable for employment by the L.C.C.” I was devastated. I was not terrific but I had had a full art training. As to drawing Mickey Mouse, the Pop Artists were doing this a few years later.”
Dorothy Bishop (1913-2005)
Painting copyright © Estate of Dorothy Bishop
(With thanks to Esther North, Dorothy’s niece)
Andy Strowman, Poet
Andy Strowman
Let me introduce Andy Strowman, the poet of Stepney. ‘I’ve kept quiet for long periods of my life,’ Andy confessed to me when I met him. ‘I hope this interview will help people not to be ashamed and feel able to talk about whatever subject they want in life.’ Of modest yet charismatic demeanour, Andy is a born storyteller and I was rapt by his tale, unsentimental yet full of human sympathy too.
‘At Bearsted Maternity Hospital in Stoke Newington, the doctors said to my mother, ‘I’m sorry Mrs Strowman, you’re going to have to have a caesarean.’ But she said, ”Oh no you won’t’ and I gave one push and out you came.’ She showed formidable East End spirit. They brought me back to Milward St, where we lived at the back of the Royal London Hospital, one of the oldest streets in Whitechapel.
Rose, my mother – maiden name Cohen – was a true East Ender born at the Royal London Hospital. Her sister, my Aunty Rae, lived with us. Her brother Jack worked at the Cumberland Hotel where he introduced me to Mohammed Ali. Then there was Barney who was also a formidable, beautiful man. He ended up in Wormwood Scrubs because he was a Conscientious Objector. He was in the army but he had no bad bones in his body and refused to fight.
My mother started work at fourteen years old, her first job was in Whitechapel Rd at the junction with New Rd. She was besotted with wanting to be a milliner. She always stood up for herself and, in another generation, she would have been a Suffragette. In her first job, the governor told her to clean the toilets so she went home and told my grandmother.
My grandmother told the governor, ‘I sent my daughter here to get a training and learn a trade, she’s not here to clean toilets.’ He said, ‘But that’s how I started…’ So my grandmother told him, ‘My daughter’s not going to be working for you any more,’ and took her away. God bless her for fighting for her rights! My mother got another job and went up to the West End, copying designs for hats, then making them at home before taking them into her new work place where the manager was very pleased.
Her mother came from Vilna which was then in Russia, escaping the pogroms, the mass slaughter of Jews. She was fourteen when she came over and seventeen when she married. It was an arranged marriage to my grandfather, who was nineteen. He was from Warsaw, most likely the Vola district, and he was in the garment trade.
Sam, my father, was an American who became a black cab driver in London. His parents were Russian, from the Ukraine, who landed in New York. He came over here as a soldier in the Second World War and my mother met him in a night club in Piccadilly Circus. They got married in Philpot St Synagogue in Whitechapel, where I and my brothers had our Bar Mitzvahs.
It is emotional for me to talk about my childhood, because although there were many happy moments there were also many very sad ones. It still stays with me now and it is why I do everything I can to help other people.
There was an expectation that we would go out and play in the street to give our parents a break and we used to play football. We were often tasked with running errands for old people and my mum used to arrange for me to sit with old people in their houses too.
Next door lived Rosie Botcher. Mum and Betty Gillard used to go round and wash her down after she had cancer. When I was born, she was given a year to live but lived another thirteen years. Also in our street was Byla Kahn who was from Poland, I used to love to sit with her because she told me stories. Since I was always a good boy, I waited for that formidable moment when she pulled open a little drawer and produced a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate for me.
One of the stories she told me was about when she was living with her grandparents. One day, she was washing clothes in the river when a resplendent man came along on a horse. He climbed off and started to talk to her. He was beautifully dressed and had a sabre. When she got home and told her grandmother what had happened, her grandmother was furious. That man was a Cossack and they had a terrible reputation for violence against Jewish people.
I have so many memories of Milward St but, like so many good things, it came to an end. We got a letter and my brother Paul, the journalist, read at it and said, ‘We’re going to have to leave.’ By that time, my mum and dad had split up. My father left when I was fourteen and I did not see or hear from him again for nearly seven years. After he left my mother stayed in bed for year and gave up washing. The letter said the houses were ‘unfit for human habitation.’ I did not understand what it meant but my brother told me, ‘We can’t live here anymore.’
We moved to a maisonette in Wager St off Bow Common Lane but we missed the strong community in Milward St where neighbours helped each other. My uncle told me that on a Friday night, before the war, people would go out into the street and talk until one o’clock in the morning. He said that once the war came, people did not do it anymore and the habit never returned afterwards.
Primary school was an adventure for me. I was always the last one in and the first one out. I think I got it from my mother, she was born with a club foot and did not like school because the children used to make fun of her, so she had to leave school after everyone else had gone home.
However I made a lot of good friends at Robert Montefiore School in Hanbury St. My favourite memory is when I was late and got taken upstairs and put into the class room by my mum. She asked ‘Where’s Mr Martin?’ and one of the children said, ‘He’s gone out.’ So she went to the front and announced, ‘I’m going to take the class now – everybody be quiet.’ As you can imagine, I was embarrassed to the hilt but also secretly proud that my mum with so little education had become a teacher. She asked, ‘Anybody going on holiday this year?’ One by one, they announced where they were going to go. Then Mr Martin returned in an advanced state of intoxication and said, ‘Well done, Mrs Strowman, you’re doing a marvellous job, you’d make a great teacher.’
We all had to take the 11-plus exam before we went to a grammar school or a secondary school but we never told our mums. Four of us – Colin McGraw, Keith Britten, Stephen Jones and me – made this pact to sit near each other and fail the exam, so we would all end up in the same school. But, although they failed and stuck together, I got a place at a grammar school, Davenant School in Whitechapel.
There began the tumult of my life. If I had one wish, it would be to have left school at eleven. In the first week, I was completely sabotaged by what was going on. I could not cope or keep up, moving classrooms, and doing homework.
The Chemistry teacher had a formidable stance and a bellowing voice like a ship’s captain. I was beginning to shake in fear and he noticed that – he picked up on my anxiety. He dragged me along the floor by my jacket until we reached the blackboard, where he smashed me to the ground. I could not believe what was going on. He pulled me up and dragged me all the way back. The lesson continued. We were performing our first experiment, a test for hydrogen with a lighted splint. We were all working from textbooks and I was the only one to take it with me at the end of the class. He swore at me and smashed me against the wall with his fist. I was crying on the floor and my head was swollen. No charge was ever made against this man but I later discovered that he was well known for this kind of behaviour. The climate was fully acceptable for violence in that school.
The next day the headteacher pulled me out of class, took me to his office and said, ‘Strowman, you’ve got to learn to take the rough with the smooth. Now get back to class.’ From that moment onwards, my life was hell. Boys made fun of me and I was frightened most of the time, getting beatings off the other kids – sometimes four or five times a week. I had nobody to tell.
I asked to my brother, ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ He told me, ‘They are all bad in there.’ He told me he was lining up outside the Art room once before class and heard this noise inside, so one of the boys opened the door to discover the headmaster and the Art teacher on the floor, punching each other.
The Geography teacher tried to make it kinder for me. He encouraged me to look beyond. ‘Look out the window and think of the real world,’ he said to me once.
Our English teacher gave the books out quickly and put his feet up on the desk. He would learn back in his chair, while a pupil read ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ and drink a half bottle of whisky right down at three o’clock in the afternoon. I got endeared to him quite quickly. On my way back to school after lunch at home, I would see him come out of the Blackboard pub and steer him across Valance Rd and back into school.
Eventually, I was put in a separate class with eight others – two of whom were known to the police – and we did not have to do homework. School was very damaging for me. I received an apology from the deputy headteacher, forty-eight years later.
The sun only began to come out when writing came into my life – it happened for two reasons. I had a teacher who encouraged me to write poetry and my brother Paul became a journalist, he was an inspiration to me. When I came back from school after the beatings and the taunts at fourteen years old, I found reading poetry was a great release – I wanted to change my name to W B Yeats! He was my hero, also Dylan Thomas, John Keats, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg – also the Yiddish writers. These people inspired me. Without money coming in, like a lot of East End boys, I lived on my wits – so I used to dodge my fare to buy books.
After I had left school, when I was sixteen and a half, I met Becky who was from California at Liverpool St Station, where I used to go in the evenings as write my poetry. I wrote her a poem.
To this day, when I write, I cannot believe it is me. It was a passion. It was the way out for me. Suddenly I learnt I could express myself. For around a year and a half, I was wandering around trying to get someone to take on my poetry. I visited publishers but got nowhere.
In the end somebody said to me, ‘Why don’t you try Chris Searle?’ He was the Stepney English teacher whose pupils went on strike after he was sacked. So went to a phone box in Aldgate by Gardiner’s Corner to call him and he said, ‘Why don’t you come round this evening?’ He became like a surrogate father to me. He recognised my work and helped publish STORY OF A STEPNEY BOY. He opened this magic door and I could go through it.
Poetry elevated my spirit and helped me to see myself more objectively. It took the thorns out of my soul.’
Andy, aged seven
Andy with his mother at the seaside
Andy aged eleven, with his parents
Uncle Davey
Uncle Jack once introduced Andy to Mohammed Ali
Andy’s father with Uncles, Davey and Jack
After Andy’s brother Howard’s Bar Mitzvah – Andy sits front left
Andy’s maternal grandmother
Aunty Rae
The wedding of Andy’s maternal grandparents
Copies of STORY OF A STEPNEY BOY may be obtained direct from Andy Strowman by emailing andy.strowman1@gmail.com
Harry The Pencil’s Sketchbook
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When I visited Harry the Pencil in Mile End once, he showed me this modest little sketchbook that he filled when he was working in Great Sutton St, Clerkenwell, undertaking a single half hour drawing each lunch hour – most are nearby his office but you will spot a few further afield in Soho, Kings Cross, Hatton Garden & Spitalfields.
Drawings copyright © Estate of Harry Harrison
Firefighter Artists Of The Blitz
The crowdfund for our Hackney Mosaic Project book closes on May 17th
Dinah Winch uncovers the ‘Firemen Artists’ of the Second World War
Resting at a Fire by Reginald Mills
London Fire Brigade has a collection of paintings by the ‘Firemen Artists’ – including some women – who witnessed the terror and turmoil of the Blitz, and documented it in an extraordinary body of work..
In March 1941 the Firemen Artists Organising Committee held the first of six exhibitions in London of over 100 paintings. More than 30,000 people visited in three weeks. Further exhibitions were held at the Royal Academy and other London galleries, then in 1941 paintings were sent on a touring exhibition of the United States as part of the government’s efforts to encourage the Americans to join the war.
Yet this is a story which has been largely forgotten, despite examples of paintings by firefighter artists in the collections of the Imperial War Museum and several local museums, as well as London Fire Brigade.
While the LFB Museum is closed for redevelopment and the collections are in storage, the Museum has taken the opportunity to contribute to this year’s commemoration of the anniversary of the death of Sir Christopher Wren by exhibiting from our collection in a number of Wren churches. We are showing paintings and drawings by firefighter artists alongside photographs from London Fire Brigade’s archive, many of which are probably more familiar to the wider public than the paintings.
As the political climate intensified in Europe in the late thirties, plans were drawn up to form an Auxiliary Fire Service drawn from volunteers. Over 28,000 were recruited to supplement London Fire Brigade’s 2500 officers and firefighters, including many men who were too young or too old to join the armed services. It was the first time that women joined the London Fire Brigade and among the new recruits to the AFS were a number of artists. Some already had established careers as painters, graphic artists and illustrators, while others were amateurs.
The Blitz started on 7th September 1940, and this first night of bombing was the first experience of firefighting for many of the AFS volunteers.
Portrait of an AFS Messenger, by Bernard Hailstone. Messengers could be as young as sixteen
Artist Reginald Mills, who painted Blitz Scene, East End, 7th September 1940 recorded this incident in The Fireman describing the white heat of the huge fire in the distance ‘where the glare in the sky brought back daylight’. However, you can also see a smaller fire to the left of the painting; ‘people in the crowds were calling us to stop and tackle fires nearby, [which] made such a deep impression on my mind that I decided then and there to record it in paint.’
Blitz Scene, East End, 7th September 1940
‘I was riding on a heavy pump at the time, just at the back of the scene I have painted, and next day I made some sketches which I kept by me. The first chance I had of working on the painting was this year during the lull but even though it happened years ago, I can remember the sight that night as if it were but yesterday.’
The docks were a target and the large numbers of warehouses were a particular concern. The anonymous author of The Bells Go Down: The Diary of a London A.F.S. Man recorded his first visit in September 1939. ‘This morning I took a trailer pump all round the East End and the Docks. If this place catches fire all the LFB and the AFS won’t be able to put it out’.
Reginald Mills specialised in painting firefighters in action but there are notable examples of other artists capturing the experience of being at the scene from a different perspective.
Driving by Moonlight by Mary Pitcairn
Mary Pitcairn’s romantically title Driving by Moonlight depicts the extraordinary bravery of AFS Firewoman Gillian ‘Bobbie’ Tanner driving a truck from Dockhead in Bermondsey to deliver supplies of petrol to her AFS colleagues fighting Blitz fires with trailer pumps. Her courage earned her a George Medal and the citation stated, ‘Auxiliary G.K.Tanner volunteered to drive a 30 cwt lorry loaded with 150 gallons of petrol. Six serious fires were in progress and for three hours Miss Tanner drove through intense bombing to the points at which the petrol was needed, showing coolness and courage throughout’. Pitcairn was also instrumental to the success and impact of the firefighter artists as exhibition organiser for the committee.
Bells Down by Julia Lowenthal
Women joined the fire service for the first time through the AFS and, though they were not trained as frontline firefighters, they worked in a variety of roles from control operators to motorbike despatch riders, as well as more conventional female roles in the canteens that provided relief to exhausted firefighters on the incident ground.
While many firefighter artists’ paintings have the intensity of being at the scene even though they were painted later, some give an insight behind the scenes. Julia Lowenthal was based at Kilburn Fire Station and drew her fellow firefighters, at rest or on their way into action.
Cannon Street by Paul Dessau
In the background of Paul Dessau’s Cannon Street is St Paul’s Cathedral, symbol of resilience to Londoners and the Nation, and in the foreground, a trailer pump, providing the water for the firefighters. Trailer pumps were easier to move in bomb-damaged areas that were inaccessible to fire engines, and were a critical piece of equipment featuring in many paintings including Mills’ Resting at a Fire.
Red Sunday, 29th December 1940 by W S Haines
W S Haines’ dramatic Red Sunday shows the skyline of the city with St Pauls and several church spires through the distinctive silhouette of Tower Bridge. Haines had an unusual perspective amongst the artists as a firefighter with the London River Service, which gave him a wider view of the City. The night of 29th December 1940 was one of the worst nights of the Blitz and sometimes known as the Second Fire of London.
Nearly all of Wren’s great churches in the City, built after the first conflagration of 1666, suffered damage in the Blitz and many were completely destroyed. The direct hit from an incendiary bomb which destroyed the church of St Clement Danes was captured by Reginald Mills in his painting Fire on the Strand.
Fire on the Strand by Reginald Mills
Other paintings are considerably more than documentary, exploring the psychological terror of the experience. Paul Dessau’s quartet of paintings Menace were conceived as the movements of a symphony, charting the terrible escalation of the demon fire and its eventual defeat.
Menace No.4, Diminuendo, by Paul Dessau
Self Portrait, 1941, by Paul Dessau
When AFS firefighters first joined the service they experienced resistance and disdain with regular firefighters and civilians alike thinking they were ‘army dodgers’. Their bravery and dogged hard work in the Blitz led Churchill to hail them as ‘heroes with grimy faces’. The artists amongst them contributed to this change in fortunes through their paintings which created a shared visual culture of the London Blitz.
A Shaggy Dog Tale
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On the day after the 80th anniversary of VE Day, it is my pleasure to introduce this piece of short fiction set in the Blitz specially written for Spitalfields Life by Kate Griffin author of Kitty Peck & the Music Hall Murders
First things first: my grandfather Michael Kelly was always known as Timo. His six children and all of his eighteen grandchildren called him that too. I have a vague recollection of sitting on his knee once while he slurped tea from a saucer (he liked to do that as it made it cool down more quickly) and him asking me why I didn’t call him grandpa. Quite reasonably I replied that grandpa clearly wasn’t his name, so why should I call him anything different.
The matter ended there.
As a very small child I spent a lot of time with Timo. I was ‘quite a handful’ according to my mum and I think it was something of a relief for her to drop me off at her parents’ house in deepest Islington while she took the occasional break.
Fortunately, I could do no wrong as far as Timo was concerned. As the first child of his beloved first daughter (my mum arrived after four sons), I was always assured of a special place in the family tree and my appearance occurred at around the same time Timo officially retired so he had plenty of time on his hands to keep me entertained.
On good days we went out and about, sometimes riding London buses for miles just for the thrill of sitting in the front seat on the top deck. On grey days we sat in the basement kitchen together in front of an old-fashioned range. On these occasions, Timo would roll his own cigarettes (allowing me to pretend smoke my own curl of Rizla paper), sip tea from a saucer and tell me a story.
He had a vast repository of tales – some from his childhood in the East End, some from his days as a soldier in the Great War, some from the docks where he worked and some about the characters he met ‘up west’ when he was doing one of his other mysterious jobs. The concept of portfolio working is nothing new. For all the time I knew him – and I wish there had been more – Timo was always nipping off ‘to see a man about a dog’.
And that brings me to this story – a shaggy-dog tale for Christmas and my favourite of all the yarns that Timo used to spin.
“Do you want to hear the story about a ghost and the bravest girl in London?” he’d say.
And, of course, I did – because that girl was my mum.
* * * *
Saturday, May 10th 1941, was famously the worst night of the London Blitz. Less famously it was also my mum’s sixth birthday. It came at the end of a week of ferocious raids, according to Timo, and although they’d tried to make the day a special occasion, they all wondered what the night would bring.
By 10pm that evening all the younger Kellys and my Nan were bedded down together in the Anderson shelter dug out behind the chicken coop at the end of the garden. Timo went back into the house to ‘check on’ with a few last things. (That actually meant a final smoke and a furtive pint of Guinness, his favourite tipple.)
My grandparents’ house was in a street off New North Road and down towards the City. Including the attic rooms and the basement, it was a five-storey Georgian affair with a delicate fanlight over the front door, a gracious hallway and tall elegant windows. These days it would probably be worth a small fortune, admired for its ‘wonderful’ original features and ‘patina’ of age. But back in 1941 thousands of Londoners lived in gloomy brown houses packed with gloomy brown furniture that were just like it. For them, what we might regard as period charm was actually the inconvenience of impecunity.
No one spoke about the ghost at number 72, although everyone knew the house seemed to have an extra occupant. Things would go missing and appear days later in the most unlikely places. Sometimes mysterious sounds would be heard from a room overhead when everyone knew that there was no one up there. However, the Kellys were a live-and-let-live (or perhaps that should be a live-and-let-die?) sort of family and if there was a ghost they certainly weren’t going to start poking into its business.
So, when Timo stood in the little-used ‘best’ room on the first floor that ominous May evening and stared out at the deserted street before pulling down the black-out blinds, he wasn’t surprised to hear a noise behind him.
He didn’t even turn round. Instead he rolled himself another cigarette, lit it and had a quiet smoke. As he stood there ‘contemplating’ he felt something brush against his leg. He looked down, expecting to see Trouncer the family boxer dog (named after the warship on which the eldest of the Kelly boys was currently serving), but there was nothing there.
Odd, he thought, returning to his roll-up. Then the feeling came again – something was tugging at his trouser turn-ups, just above the ankle. In fact, it pulled so hard that he almost lost his footing. He turned around now and saw that the door to the hall was wide open. He was sure he’d shut it behind him. My Nan didn’t know precisely where he kept his Guinness and he liked to keep it that way.
Timo stubbed out his roll-up. It was time to go back to the shelter. Somehow the thought of being tucked up with the rest of the family, four foot down in that damp fox hole behind the chicken coop didn’t seem quite so bad now.
He stepped out of the ‘best’ room and took the first set of stairs down to the hallway at street level. There was a door in the back sitting room on this floor leading to steps to the garden. Timo headed down the passage towards the back room, but was stopped in his tracks by something that brushed against his leg. Then the tugging came again, this time it was insistent.
It was dark now and he was definitely rattled. Every step he took towards the back room made the peculiar sensation stronger. He told me it felt as if something didn’t want him to go there.
“Right!” he thought. “If you won’t let me out this way, I’ll use the other door.”
Down in the basement there was a second way out to the garden. Just before the kitchen there was a steep flight of stone steps that led to a little-used door leading out to a small yard behind the outside privy.
He turned and went down the hall pausing at the top of the winding set of stairs to the basement.
Nothing happened. Whatever it was, it didn’t mind him being here. He took the first flight and stopped again. Now there was something – a gentle nudging at his calves. It wanted him to go down, he was certain of it. Was that a good thing?
He didn’t have time to consider the question. The sudden wail of the air-raid sirens prompted him to cross the little landing and turn right to the stone steps leading out to the yard, and to the rest of the family in the garden shelter.
Something white moved down there, a little body was huddled against the door.
Timo flew down those ten stone steps and gathered my mum into his arms. A gash ran from her split top lip and up across her left cheek. She was bleeding profusely over her nightgown.
“Sorry, Timo,” she whispered, rubbing blood and tears from her face. “It was the game. I was practising while everyone was asleep, but I fell.”
He knew immediately what ‘game’ she meant.
Despite being warned not to, the younger Kelly boys (my uncles) insisted on challenging each other to take part in a potentially lethal jumping contest on the stone steps leading to the yard door. The winner was the person who dared to jump from the highest stair.
My tom-boy mum desperately wanted to beat her older brothers. Seizing the opportunity, she had sneaked out of the Anderson shelter and into the house to perfect her jumping skills while they were all asleep. But in the dark she had misjudged the leap and crashed against the door, ripping her face on the hooked metal latch.
The tear across her face was raw and deep. There was blood everywhere.
They went up to the kitchen and Timo tried to stop the flow with rags, but it kept coming. My mum obviously needed stitches and he was worried about concussion too. As he stood there beside the sink dabbing uselessly at her face the drone of the first bomber planes thrummed overhead.
It was at this point that my Nan appeared. She’d woken in the shelter and, finding both Timo and my mum missing, had gone in search of them. She burst into tears when she saw the state of my mum’s face, but that was nothing compared to the howling that came next when Timo bundled his daughter into her school coat and said the only thing to do was to get her to a hospital.
* * * *
And so it was that on the worst night of the London Blitz, Timo and my mum walked together through the bombarded streets to The Royal Northern Hospital at Holloway. Fires burned in the east and all around them they could hear the steady crumping thud of the bombs that changed the face of the capital for ever.
Timo had to carry my mum part of the way. “But she never cried and she never once said she was frightened. She was the bravest little girl in London,” he told me. (I always loved that part of the story).
He, on the other hand, was terrified. And so was the doctor at the hospital – a young, softly spoken Polish refugee. He agreed immediately that Timo had done the right thing, but as he carefully staunched the blood and repaired my mum’s torn face the sound of constant bombing rocked the hospital walls and made the implements on his metal tray clatter about. In fact, the doctor’s hands shook so much as he sewed twenty-five stitches into my mum’s lip and cheek that he kept apologising for his ‘poor workmanship’.
As he finished the task, the first of the real casualties of that night began to arrive. Timo and my mum were taken to a nearby shelter and they spent the rest of a sleepless night there while the streets of London – the East End in particular – became an inferno.
When they finally walked home the next morning through eerily deserted and sometimes devastated streets, Timo was silent, desperately willing the rest of his family to be safe and alive. My mum was quiet too, until they turned the corner into their gloriously untouched road.
Then she squeezed his hand and spoke in a muffled voice because of the stitches in her lip. “I hope the dog is safe too?”
“What dog?” he asked, confused.
“The little one that came with us from home last night. He followed us all the way. Didn’t you see him, Timo?”
Dog Portrait courtesy of Libby Hall Collection at the Bishopsgate Institute
