Spitalfields Life

After many months of preparation, I am proud to announce that Spitalfields Life Books will be publishing A MODEST LIVING, Memoirs of Cockney Sikh by Suresh Singh in October. You will be able to read excerpts here in the pages of Spitalfields Life over coming weeks.

In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh tells the candid and sometimes surprising story of his family who have lived in their house in Princelet St for nearly seventy years, longer I believe than any other family in Spitalfields. In the book, chapters of biography are alternated with a series of Sikh recipes by Jagir Kaur, Suresh’s wife.

You can support publication by pre-ordering a copy now, which will be signed by Suresh Singh and sent to you on publication.

Click here to order a signed copy of A MODEST LIVING for £20

Suresh Singh and his wife Jagir in Princelet St this summer (Photograph by Patricia Niven)

Excerpt from A MODEST LIVING, Memoirs of a Cockney Sikh by Suresh Singh

I was four years old when I went to the Punjab for the first time. In 1966, Mum took me and my younger sister to the remote village of Nangal Kalan which my father Joginder Singh left in 1949 to come to England. It was a hamlet of no more than a thousand people, including children, where everybody knew each other.

I was born in Mile End Hospital and brought up in Princelet Street, Spitalfields. Sometimes when I first arrived in the Punjab, I felt homesick for playing in the street, eating Heinz beans and drinking Tizer. At home, we closed our front door but in the village nobody even had a door, it was one big playground. I spoke only Punjabi all the time I was there and, when I came back to London, I could no longer speak English.

As my hair grew longer, I became excited to go to the Punjab because I wanted to become a Sikh like Dad. Being there made this feeling even stronger. I met my cousin with a hunched back who was a celibate Sikh priest and wore a ceremonial sword and turban. I loved spending time with him and told Mum I wanted to marry him, which she liked because she wanted me to grow my hair too.

We lived in my grandmother’s house in the heart of the village. It was a small house with a roof of wooden beams, comprising one big room and no running water or sanitation. Mum and the other women took me out into the fields to go to the toilet. I played in the open air all the time. Life was very different from the confinement of Spitalfields which was all I had known. I loved the freedom of being in our village at the foothills of the Himalayas. I became a nice little Sikh boy, although I got boils from the bites of mosquitos. There was a saying that the mosquitos could taste the Robertson’s jam in your blood if you came from England.

By the time I returned, I was more like an Indian kid than one born in London. It was horrible when I started at Christ Church Primary School in Brick Lane. I did not know how to sit on a toilet seat. I squatted on it, my head peeking out over the top of the cubicle. The teacher looked under the door to see if my feet were on the ground. I questioned whether I had been born in England because I had forgotten everything while I was away.

I remember the love of my aunties and cousins in the village. They were always kissing me, holding me and carrying me in their arms or on their shoulders. I also remember Dad’s brothers’ families arguing over their cut of the land he bought off the landowners. They never grasped that he could not have purchased land unless he had come to England and worked to send money back. He did not buy it to become a landowner, but to create a co-operative where everybody could live and work together. It was to be his Utopia. He never said, ‘This is Joginder Singh’s house.’ He told them that the land and the properties were for everybody, for the good of the family and the village.

The house Dad was building was of brick by grandmother’s home was of mud and straw. It was a very dusty environment, not a healthy place for a child. My mosquito bites turned into infected boils that covered my body. Six years later, a doctor at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel told me, ‘Your tuberculosis has been incubating since you were in India at the age of four.’

As a child, the dirt did not matter to me. I remember the love and the joy of the people around me, especially the visiting holy men, beggars and dancing eunuchs. There was a tiny gurdwara (Sikh temple) which was very basic because the village was so poor before Dad and other villagers began sending money from England. Although most people were farmers, Dad came from a family of shoemakers, with a room at the front of the house devoted to cutting soles and repairing shoes. It was quite a small room with rough wooden doors, just enough room for one person to sit with a cutting stone.

Everyone in our quarter of the village was born an Untouchable because they were so poor. In the caste system, the Untouchables are the lowest of the low. If you are an Untouchable, you cannot become a Brahmin in your lifetime. You had to die and, only if you were submissive to the Brahmins, might you hope to be reincarnated into a higher caste. Sikhism rejects all that. This was the reason Dad became so ardent, because it gave him hope and freedom. In Sikhism, there is no caste system.

The shoemakers were Untouchables because they had to skin dead animals for their hides. Dad was a master at it. If there was a dead animal, he would skin it, butcher the carcass, bring the hide back to hang up and dry, and distribute the flesh. Nobody else wanted to do it, especially in the heat. He loved it, saying, ‘I am a chamar,’ a shoemaker like Guru Ravidas Ji.

Dad told me stories of Guru Ravidas Ji. He showed me pictures of scenes from his life, illustrated on colourful posters hung upon the wall in frames bought from Brick Lane market. Guru Ravidas Ji worked miracles. He was humble and did not judge. People found they were healed in his presence because he listened to them and brought them peace. Guru Nanak, the first guru of the Sikhs, collected the tales of Guru Ravidas Ji the shoemaker, gathering them in the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book.

As the first one over, Dad carried the yoke on his shoulders of supporting his family. He was always helping them, giving them money whenever they needed it. He started bringing his family over and making passport applications for them, buying our house in Princelet Street so they could live in it.

They lived in servitude in the village. It was impossible to make a living by renting land and growing food, you could only feed yourself day-to-day. Dad helped them escape that life, and loved it. In England they could write home and say, ‘I have come over here now,’ a powerful statement to the landowners that we chamars were no longer at their mercy.

Yet there is a twist to this story because Dad worked for a man called Baba Phalla, a landowner in our village who was a revolutionary. A member of the Ghadar Party, fighting to free India from British rule, he was sent to Canada by the British to work as a labourer. There he was influenced by Communism, especially the Naxalites and the Maoists.

Dad worked day shifts on Baba Phalla’s land. He noticed Dad’s loyalty and honesty. He would say, ‘This chamar boy is like an ox, he deserves to go to England because he will work and become an asset to the village, sending money home.’ He saw that Dad would lift the village out of poverty by working in England. He knew that Dad’s conscientious nature would ensure he embraced his duty, and Dad committed heart and soul. Right up to his death, Dad lived to serve others. He saw it as an honour. Dad brought the gurus with him and rejected material possessions like a holy man. He never went out and bought a car, sending his earnings over to the village instead, to buy land or help another family come over to England. He was devoted to a modest living and the idea of seva, the Sikh principle of selflessness.

People would ask Dad, ‘What is the matter with you?’ and he would reply, ‘I give everything away.’

Suresh with his mother and little sister in the Punjab

Suresh’s grandmother sitting outside her house with her four sons and the cousin who was the Sikh priest standing. Suresh’s father Joginder Singh sits second from right.

A celebration of Guru Ravidas at the gurdwara in Nangal Kalan

Click here to order a signed copy of A MODEST LIVING for £20

Contributing Writer Gillian Tindall first encountered John Taylor the Waterman-Poet when she was researching her book The House by the Thames a dozen years ago. Here she gives an account of the man behind the legend and the Spitalfields pub that bears his name.

Those who have enjoyed a drink at The Water Poet in Folgate St may have wondered about this unlikely-sounding figure so far from the water. Yet John Taylor (1578 – 1653), the seventeenth century Thames ferry-boat man, was a convivial fellow – unless he was waging a vendetta – who was very much at home in pubs. When not on one of his great walks round Britain, he lived most of his life in Bankside, which had many hostelries alongside the theatres and bear-pits. He also had relations who kept inns in Leicester, Abingdon and Norwich whom he sought out in his travels.

Taylor lived through times far more unnerving than ours. Born in Gloucester in the prosperous later days of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, he came up to London to seek his fortune and was apprenticed to an oar-maker, before a spell in the Navy upon dangerous expeditions against Spain in Flores and Cadiz.

Once back in London, he lived through the increasingly turbulent times of the Stuart era, the Civil War and the social oppression of the Cromwellian period. A royalist yet with a liking for Puritan values, he worked as a waterman in the service of the king and was distressed when Charles I lost his head. Taylor was getting on in years by then, complaining bitterly that the Commonwealth had driven the theatres off the south bank and damaged the watermen’s trade, much of which had traditionally consisted of crossings between the City and Southwark. He died in his seventies before Charles II was restored to the throne.

Part subversive journalist, pamphleteer and satirical ballad-maker, part would-be poet and playwright, Taylor longed to join a literary society into which he had not been born. A ferryman by nature, he lived between two worlds socially. As hands-on oarsmen, watermen were tough, rough fellows of their time, competing vociferously for trade, but they met a remarkable range of customers many of whom valued and cultivated them. This was also an era when the Waterman’s Company was being established (with Taylor’s active involvement), fares were being set, intelligent men like him were becoming fully literate and the era of New Learning would soon dawn.

Taylor was a natural self-publicist, a collector of useful friends, but also a genuinely passionate believer in freedom of expression and the rights of the individual in every class. He became an  advocate for the destitute watermen who had lost their trade during the ferocious winter of 1620-21 when the Thames froze over for six weeks. He soon discovered that, in spite of all his efforts, there was not much money to be made from a literary life – a truth that still holds today – and developed ingenious means of raising cash. When in difficulty, he would take off on long journeys round Britain on foot for which, anticipating the modern way, he would get sponsorship from rich acquaintances. As a stunt, he once rowed down the Thames in a boat made of paper and later made a much publicised trip  – in a rather more solid craft – down the Rhine and the Elbe.

A good talker, Taylor cultivated the society of Bankside actors, advocating their cause against the rising tide of Puritanism. I imagine him as the archetypal cab-driver – “Had Will Shakespeare in the back of my boat the other day…  As my good friend Mr Henslowe said to me…” He fought back with some success against the Uber of his time – namely, the wheeled conveyances for hire that were beginning to appear on London’s cobbled streets and alleys as an alternative to the traditional way of travelling by river.

John Aubrey, diarist and man-about-town who was familiar with some of the cleverest men of his era, described John Taylor as `very facetious and diverting company’ and possessing `a good, quick look’. Thomas Decker, the Jacobean playwright, called him `the ferryman of heaven’, but there may have been a touch of irony in that.

Taylor’s poetry has not survived in the public mind, since perhaps it did not really deserve to, but his cheerful and inventive spirit has lived on to this day. He died in an inn in Covent Garden kept by his second wife, and lies buried somewhere behind St Martins in the Fields, where the graveyard of the old church lay, and where present-day travellers and aspirants to fame gather with their backpacks and their own travellers’ tales.

The Water Poet at the edge of Spitalfields and Norton Folgate is a recent berth for him, although there has been a tavern on the corner where Folgate St meets Blossom St for over two centuries and possibly an ale-house before that. The old name for the muddy pathway that became Folgate St was White Horse Lane, after the brewery situated there since Taylor’s own times. Even longer ago, what became White Horse Lane was formerly the north entrance to the religious house of St Mary Spital.

In the eighteenth century, the street was laid out in stages by a Sir Isaac Tillard, a man of Huguenot descent, who had acquired some of the old Mary Spital land. The earliest evidence of a purpose-built public house appears then and by 1805 it was registered as The Pewter Plate. Those in charge locally have always kept an eye on pubs and publicans, so it is easy to trace the Plate throughout the nineteenth century, the heyday of urban pubs, and into the twentieth. In 1904, when pubs all over the London were being enlarged and made grander, the Plate was rebuilt with the fancy brickwork and the tall, elaborate chimney that you see today.

At some point, probably between the wars, when Spitalfields was becoming ever sootier and more neglected, as its more prosperous citizens took themselves off to greener suburbs, the building was a pub no longer. By the seventies, the erstwhile pub along with two other adjacent properties, became commercial premises owned by`R.Bardigger.’

By and by, the pub was restored to its proper use and the name The Water Poet dates from the current owner’s acquisition in 2003. He undertook the wonderful transformation of the old back yard into a green-leafed garden with fairy lights. It is this area, along with several large rooms created out of a former warehouse, that is threatened by British Land’s scheme to redevelop Norton Folgate behind bogus facades in the teeth of local opposition. For the moment, all is quiet on that front and the planning permission airily bestowed by the previous and unregretted Mayor of London is shortly to expire. John Taylor the water-poet, I believe, would be with us in this struggle. Let us give thanks and continue to hope.

John Taylor the Water Poet

“All sorts of men, work all the means they can,

To make a Thief of every waterman:

And as it were in one consent they join,

To trot by land i’ th’ dirt, and save their coin.

Carroaches, coaches, jades, and Flanders mares,

Do rob us of our shares, our wares, our fares:

Against the ground, we stand and knock our heels,

Whilst all our profit runs away on wheels;

And, whosoever but observes and notes,

The great increase of coaches and of boats,

Shall find their number more than e’er they were,

By half and more, within these thirty years.

Then watermen at sea had service still,

And those that staid at home had work at will:

Then upstart Hell-cart-coaches were to seek,

A man could scarce see twenty in a week;

But now I think a man may daily see,

More than the wherrys on the Thames can be.

When Queen Elizabeth came to the crown,

A coach in England then was scarcely known,

Then ’twas as rare to see one, as to spy

A Tradesman that had never told a lie.”

From An Arrant Thief, 1622

John Taylor’s A Swarm of Sectaries & Schismatiques published 1641

Engraving of John Taylor by Thomas Cockson, 1630

The Water Poet in Folgate St (Photograph by Richard Lansdowne)

You may like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall

At Captain Cook’s House in Mile End

In Stepney, 1963

Stepney’s Lost Mansions

Where The White Chapel Once Stood

The Old South Bank

Leonard Fenton, Actor

In Old Deptford

Lifesaving in Limehouse

From Bedlam To Liverpool St

Smithfield’s Bloody Past

The Tunnel Through Time