Spitalfields Life

Kate Cole wrote this account of her ancestors who once lived in Brushfield St. “When I started my family research in the mid-eighties, I quickly discovered the connection to Spitalfields Market,” Kate told me, “And, even though I have visited the redeveloped market, when I think of Spitalfields it is the old market that stays in my mind and which led me to tell the story of my Victorian grocer.”

Kate Cole and her daughter Rose outside the former Cole’s grocery shop in Brushfield St.

I must be amongst a very rare number of twenty-first century Londoners who can visit the East London home of my ancestors and walk in their steps.  Many of my Victorian ancestors lived in Bishopsgate in the City of London and Brushfield St in Spitalfields. Whilst I can no longer visit my ancestors’ substantial Bishopsgate home and factory, as it was compulsory purchased and swept away in the 1880s by the Great Eastern Railway so they could build the mighty Great Eastern Hotel in its place, I can still visit my ‘ancestral’ home in Brushfield St on the edge of Spitalfields Market.

Up until the 1870s, Brushfield St was known as ‘Union St East’.  Halfway down, on the right-hand side – if you are walking from Bishopsgate – is a parade of shops all dating from the eighteenth century.  Many readers may be familiar with the lovely restored Victorian frontage of the food shop A.Gold and the women’s fashion shop next door, Whistles. But have you ever looked above their signage and spotted a small plaque on the wall in between the two? This is from 1871, marking the parish boundary of Christ Church Middlesex and there on the wall, for all of London to see, is the name of my great-great grandfather, R. A. Cole.

In the 1850s, Robert Andrew Cole was a grocer and tea-dealer, living above his shop and trading from the premises which is now Whistles. Robert Andrew, along with his wife, Sarah Elizabeth (née Ollenbuttle) and their five children, William, Sarah, Margaret, Robert and Arthur, all lived in this terrace – first at 23 and then at 25 – for some thirty years from the 1850s until the 1880s, when the market was redeveloped and Robert Andrew Cole retired to Walthamstow. As an aside, I do find it ironic that today’s swanky redeveloped Spitalfields Market is now known as Old Spitalfields Market. In Robert Andrew Cole’s day, it was a brand spanking new, and perhaps an unwanted market with posh new buildings. Its very existence and construction was probably one of the reasons why the Coles gave up their shop and retired to the countryside of Walthamstow.

For many years, Robert Andrew Cole was also a churchwarden of Christ Church, Spitalfields and also the Governor and Director of the Poor of the parish.  So he must have been amongst the wealthiest of this East London parish. In circa 1869-1870, Union St East was renamed Brushfield St, and it is possibly the renaming of this street which lead to the church boundary being marked in the wall in 1871. Hence, churchwarden R. A. Cole’s name was recorded for posterity in the brick-work. He must have been a very proud man when his name was unveiled on the terrace where he lived.

However, despite their standing in the community, the Coles’ time in Brushfield St was not entirely happy. Two of the Cole children, Sarah Elizabeth and William Henry, succumbed to a devastating outbreak of scarletina – then a deadly infectious disease. Both children were buried in Tower Hamlets Cemetery on 2nd August 1857.  William was aged only twenty-two months and Sarah was a month short of her fourth birthday.  One can only imagine the pain and horror experienced by their parents, along with the fear that their only surviving child, Robert, then aged five, might also fall victim to the terrible disease.

It must have been an awful time for this one Victorian family living in the shadows of Christ Church Spitalfields and the Fruit & Vegetable Market. However, their son Robert, did not become another victim (for, if he had, I would not be writing their story, as he is my great-grandfather). Eight months after burying their two children, a new child, Margaret was born, and a further year later, Arthur. Sadly, Margaret also did not survive childhood and once again, in 1869, the Cole family of Union St East buried another one of their own in Tower Hamlets Cemetery.

I have often pondered the fate of this small East End family.  Of the five children, only two survived into adulthood and, of those two, only one had children of his own. Arthur Cole died a bachelor in his fifties and was buried in the second Cole family grave in Tower Hamlets Cemetery alongside his mother, grandparents, great-aunts, and great-uncles – true Londoners who worked, lived and died in the East End of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Robert Andrew Cole, grocer and tea-dealer of Spitalfields Market, was buried in the same grave as his three children who had not survived childhood.  While Robert Cole, the only child of Robert and Sarah Cole who went on to marry and father his own children, married Louisa Parnall, a member of a fantastically successful Welsh family of industrialists and philanthropists who had a substantial clothing factory on Bishopsgate.

When you are next in Brushfield St, stand and look up at the plaque marking the parish boundary of Christ Church, Middlesex. Then look down into the windows of Whistles clothes shop. The funeral processions of the Cole children must have stopped here on their way to Christ Church, before going to Tower Hamlets Cemetery. Imagine the tragedy and triumph that went on between those four walls and the drama of the daily family life of the Victorian grocer and tea-dealer, Robert Andrew and Sarah Elizabeth Cole.

Robert Andrew Cole, born 10th February 1819, Anthony St, St George in the East, baptised 7th March 1819 in the parish church of St George in the East.  Married 25th December 1850 St Thomas’ Church, Stepney to Sarah Elizabeth Ollenbuttle. Died March 1895 in Walthamstow. Buried in one of two Cole family graves in Tower Hamlets Cemetery. Grocer and tea-dealer of Spitalfields Market for over thirty years. Churchwarden of Christ Church Spitalfields and Governor and Director of the poor of the parish.

Contributing Writer Gillian Tindall celebrates the career of Leonard Fenton, an East End boy better known as ‘Dr Legg,’ who has recently returned to Eastenders at the fine age of ninety-two years old. Gillian’s books include The House by the Thames and A Tunnel Through Time.

Leonard Fenton as Dr Legg with June Brown as Dot Cotton (reproduced courtesy BBC)

When Dr Legg, the General Practitioner in Eastenders, retired in 1997, there was universal regret among viewers – even though they could see he was already older than any real-life General Practitioner would be. Afterwards, he continued to be referred to as an off-stage presence, like a benign Scarlet Pimpernel, and he made occasional informal reappearances – most notably for the stage-funeral of Mark Fowler in 2004, with whom he had once had ferocious doctorly words about heroin addiction and, in 2010, to counsel Dot Branning about a supposed Romanian foundling.

In real life, Dr Legg is the actor Leonard Fenton. Although his Eastenders‘ role has been the one for which he has been widely celebrated (and even accosted in the street and the Underground by people so convinced of the reality of soaps that they ask for friendly medical advice) he has a life-time of other roles to his credit. One of those actors who was always in work and much esteemed by other professionals, Len has done seasons with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, worked with Orson Welles, with Jonathan Miller and Samuel Beckett – who personally chose him in 1979 to play opposite Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days at the Royal Court.

His last stage roles were the Duke in The Merchant of Venice at Stratford-on-Avon in 2008 and the demanding part of Vincentio in The Taming of the Shrew at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 2009. By then Len was eighty-three years old, but you would never have guessed  it. He went on for several more years specialising  in ‘old rabbis’ and has only now  taken to retirement in the actors’ home at Denville Hall, because his diabetes needs more careful management than he can give it alone.

The kindly Dr Legg in East Enders is obviously Jewish and the early lives of the doctor and the actor paralleled each other. Dr Legg was born in the East End, a bright boy who got a scholarship to a Grammar School and then to medical school, but had preferred to remain close to his roots in the fictional East London district of `Walford’ rather than moving out to a polite suburb.

Similarly, Len Fenton was born during the General Strike of 1926 in a little house in Duckett St, Stepney Green, that his parents and elder sister shared with relatives. When he was eleven, he won a Junior County scholarship to Raines School for Boys in Arbour Sq.  A surviving school report, under the name Leonard Feinstein, describes him as “A quiet intelligent pupil. Gives no trouble and works well.” The same report shows that he was particularly good at drawing, singing and languages, but as he showed an aptitude for maths too, plus ‘satisfactory’ work at Chemistry and Physics, the headmaster urged him towards engineering – a destiny that took Len some years and quite a bit of enterprise to escape.

The heart of the Jewish East End in the twenties and thirties was in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Half a mile away, in Duckett St there was only one other Jewish household besides Len’s family, although Len recalls a big block of flats on Stepney Green itself that was “full of our lot. I would rather liked to have lived there.” Possibly it was the presence of this block that drew Mosleys’ Blackshirts down to Stepney Green for a series of threatening marches that were to culminate in the Battle of Cable Street. As a small boy, Len remembers his mother standing in the upstairs window of their house with a baby – one of Len’s younger sisters – in her arms, watching Mosley giving a speech at the corner about how all Jews had substantial bank balances. At this point, she yelled down at him “Sir Oswald, would you like to see my fucking bank balance?” Her husband worked in the garment trade and, like most people in their position, they lived hand to mouth. Various neighbours, who were inclined to side with Mosley in those uncertain times, hastily cried “No, no, Fanny, we don’t mean you!”

Len’s mother had arrived in London as a baby, circuitously, via New York, at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was working in a box factory when she met her husband. Both sets of grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, mother’s from Riga and father’s from Lithuania, and all that generation spoke Yiddish as their household tongue. The family name was originally, Len thinks, something like Resnik, a  Russian-Yiddish term to do with tailoring, but it just happened that the neighbour who helped Len’s grandfather to register in London when he arrived in the 1890s suggested ‘Feinstein’ as a suitable name and it was accepted. The change to Fenton happened during the Second World War, when Len’s elder sister Sylvie convinced their father that it would be a good idea. However, the cousins living on the ground floor of the same house, including little Arnold who was six months younger than Len and his constant playmate, did not change their name. Arnold Feinstein, another scholarship boy, grew up to be a distinguished academic scientist and the husband of Elaine Feinstein, the poet. There are many routes out of the ghetto, but the Fenton-Feinstein families have always remained close.

Grandparents and uncles were important too. Len’s mother’s mother, who had been widowed in New York with the baby, come to London and remarried, lived at Bow. Neighbours of theirs organised a synagogue in their front room where the family foregathered on Saturdays. It was from here that an uncle took Len, then aged ten or eleven, on a trip to Watford to hear Thomas Beecham conducting Bizet’s First Symphony in C – for Len, a revelatory experience about what music could be. But, sadly, this thoughtful relative later became known to Len and his sisters as ‘bad uncle’ because he tried to convince Len that he could neither draw and paint, nor sing well enough to envisage it as a career – both of which no-doubt-well-intentioned judgements were untrue.

Len was thirteen in 1939, at the point when the whole Jewish East End began to be swept away, first by war and then by the social changes that war brought. Raines School was evacuated to various places near the south coast: hardly the ideal location in view of the threat of invasion, but such a hasty relocation was common in those times. By the time Len returned to battered and blitzed Stepney towards the end of the war, he was a tall and handsome seventeen-year-old – and his feisty mother, with whom he had not lived since he was a child, was suffering with tuberculosis and possibly diabetes as well. There was no NHS yet but, even if there had been, not a great deal could have been done for her. She died in 1945 and it was the eldest sister Sylvie who took on the maternal role for their father, for Len, his younger brother Cyril (who also died young) and the two pretty and ambitious younger sisters, Corinne and Annie.

National Service loomed at eighteen for all young men of Len’s generation yet, instead of joining the Army as a squaddie, Len was sent, on his head-master’s recommendation and Government approval, to do a two-year degree in Engineering at Kings’ College. He did not relish it at all, but it meant that, when the Army finally claimed him at age twenty, he was given a commission in the Royal Engineers – a new world for him. “I really enjoyed myself,” he recalled, “As an officer I could just oversee things and sign off the paper, while the NCOs did all the work!”

Len’s Army experience led him to five years in a civil engineering job in Westminster. This was still unsatisfying for Len, even though the firm in question seems to have been extraordinarily tolerant of their amiable but undevoted employee. Len found that he could take long, dreamy lunch hours walking round the London parks. By then he was living in Clapton and discovered, while changing from tube to bus at Aldgate on his evening commute, that Toynbee Hall ran courses in art and music. He started spending his evenings there, as many other aspirant East Enders had done before him – and a new life began. A starring role singing in a Christmas performance led to the offer of a place at the Webber-Douglas theatrel school, and the boy from Stepney was re-born as an actor and never  looked back.

“I was older than most people at drama school,” he explained, “That was useful and I soon learnt to age myself up – I loved making-up.” A Spotlight award in his final year set Len off on a career playing character roles – fulfilling even if he never achieved a minor ambition to take the part of Baron Hard-Up in pantomime. “Trouble is, people don’t associate Dr Legg with slapstick,” he confessed.

Did becoming a celebrity in such a long-running soap affect his chances of other roles? Len feels that it may have kept him out of the theatre, but one would hardly think so given the stage successes of his last years in the profession. Oddly, Dr Legg is almost the only role in Len’s career which was not a character part. “The character wasn’t written to any great depth,”says Len, “so inevitably what came over on TV was a lot of me. I sometimes used to slip in words of my own that weren’t in the script! I think they should have given me a proper wife, though, not just a dead one.” Mrs Legg was supposed to have been a nurse, killed long ago by a land-mine.

In real life Len married, aged almost forty, to a professional cellist, Madeline Thorner, considerably younger than him. Three sons and a daughter arrived in quick time, in their house in Hampstead Garden Suburb that was a far cry from Duckett St. Although the marriage eventually foundered, Len and Madeline remain friends and it was she who managed to get him into Denville Hall.

Any regrets? “Well, if I’d know how well my voice would last,” he admitted, “I’d have been a singer.” Len does still sing beautifully, even in his ninth decade, and possesses an extraordinary ability to imitate dogs and cats well enough to fool the animals themselves. His ability to paint and aptitude for drawing that his headmaster and uncle dismissed long ago came to the fore during Len’s years as Dr Legg, and he continues to paint. The aura of cheerful interest in life, that stood him in such good stead as a small boy in Stepney, still surrounds Len today.

Leonard Fenton

Leonard’s mother and father with his elder sister Sylvie as a baby

Leonard and his sister Sylvie with their Uncle

Leonard Fenton’s publicity shot as a young actor

Leonard playing older than his years in the seventies

Leonard’s publicity shot in the eighties

Leonard in the West End

Leonard’s sketch of Samuel Beckett, done while rehearsing Happy Days at the Royal Court in 1979

You may also like to read about

Harry Landis, Actor

Morris Goldstein, the Lost Whitechapel Boy

Charlie Chaplin in the East End

Bud Flanagan in Spitalfields

David Garrick at Goodman’s Fields Theatre

At the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel