Spitalfields Life

Barbara as a pupil of the Central Foundation Grammar School for Girls, Spitalfields

Barbara Jezewska was not born in the East End nor was she of East End parentage, yet she lived her formative years here and it left an indelible impression upon her.“I love the people, the places and the experiences that I have known, and look for every opportunity to go back and visit,” she confessed to me, “I consider myself so rich for having grown up in a time and a place that was quite extraordinary.”

Barbara grew up in Casson St, a modest back street connecting Old Montague St and Chicksand St in Spitalfields. Opposite was Black Lion Yard, known then as the Hatton Garden of the East End because it contained eighteen jewellery shops. Old Montague St had a sleazy reputation in those days – it was a busy thoroughfare crowded with diverse life, filled with slum dwelllings, punctuated by a bomb site and a sugar factory, and lined with small shops and cafes. There, long-established Jewish traders sat alongside coffees bars in which Maltese, Somalis, Caribbeans and others congregated.

While others might consider themselves disadvantaged to grow up in such an environment,  Barbara’s experience was quite the opposite and she recognised a keen sense of loss from the moment her family were rehoused in 1965 as part of the slum clearance programme. Very little of Casson St survives today and the spot where Barbara’s house stood is now a park, yet it is a location that still carries immense significance for her.

“We moved to 1 Casson St in 1957 when I was three years old. We came to London from Paxton, Berwickshire on the border with Scotland where my mother, Elizabeth Carr, had been born. My father was Polish, born in Lublin, and when he was fifteen, he ran away from home and ended up fighting in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. He never talked about it but he had a graze on his arm that he said was from a bullet wound. I believe he met my mother while he was washing dishes at a West End hotel where she also worked. When I was eighteen he left and married again, and I only saw him a few times before he died. We became estranged and, in 1994, we got a phone call to say he had died in Poland.

My father couldn’t speak English when he arrived in this country, but he was very talented in music and he paid for guitar lessons out of his earnings. As a child, I remember him practising and practising and I didn’t appreciate what was going on, yet eventually he ended up teaching at Trinity College, Cambridge.

We shared the house in Casson St with a Greek family, the Hambis. It wasn’t partitioned, they had some rooms and we had the others. There was no bathroom, no heating and no hot running water. We did have an inside toilet but the Hambis had one in the back yard. They had five children and there were the three of us, so there was always somebody to play with and always something going on.

Across the street from us was the Beehive Nougat Factory (‘nugget’ as we used to say it). We rang the bell and asked for an old man we called ‘Uncle Alf’ who worked there, and he gave us sweets, handfuls of broken chocolates and nougat. We used to raid the bins of the textile factories and get cardboard tubes, then we’d stage incredible battles, lining up on either side of the street and hitting each other with the tubes until they broke. There was Mrs Miller who sold toys on Petticoat Lane, when she and my mother met they would talk for hours. One day, a dandelion seed – which we called fairies – floated by and went into Mrs Miller’s mouth while they were talking. She swallowed it and never noticed, so we always remembered ‘the day Mrs Miller swallowed a fairy!’ There was Mrs Isaacs, a widow who lived next door who spent all her time at the upstairs window, watching. If you did anything she didn’t approve of, she’d shout at you. One day, I was going to chalk on the wall and she shouted out, ‘Don’t you make a mess!’ I stuck my tongue out at Mrs Isaacs and she disappeared from the window, so I ran back inside and said to my mother, ‘Mrs Isaacs is coming,’ and she came round and said, ‘Your daughter stuck her tongue out at me!’

We used to play on the bomb sites and I climbed into a basement of a bombed-out house in Old Montague St. I was scared because there was a lot of rubble on top but I found some silver threepenny bits in a bag. We took them to the sweet shop and passed them off as sixpences. I think the shopkeeper realised they were silver and was happy to accept them for sweets. Round the corner in Hopetown St, lived Alfie and his parents who were the first get a television. So, at 4pm, we’d all queue up outside Alfie’s house – half a dozen of us – and ask to watch the Children’s Hour, and we’d sit on the kitchen floor to watch. The only time we went to the seaside was on a Sunday school trip, and they gave us Christmas parties at which we’d all get a present of a second-hand toy.

There were several tramps that I remember. Coco worked for the stallholders and slept in an empty building on the corner of Black Lion Yard, every morning he came out with his bucket of slops and threw it over onto the bomb site. Ivan used to wander up and down Old Montague St, and I think I saw two men trying to kill him once, dropping bricks from the roof as he walked past. Stinky Sheridan had one leg and used to sell matches in Whitechapel Rd. Whenever we saw the tramps, my mother who was a very kind person, taught me to respect them, she’d say, ‘Remember, that’s somebody’s son.’

In 1965, we were moved out as part of slum clearance to Brownlow Rd, off Queensbridge Rd in Haggerston. At the time, I was eleven and  we thought it was very exciting. It was a maisonette with a bathroom, so we thought it was wonderful, but my experience when we moved was I felt lonely and missed the other children in our extended family. It felt strange. But being realistic, it would have been pretty awful staying in Casson St without any privacy or a bathroom.

I went to Robert Montefiore Primary School in Hanbury St and, when I left, I remember saying to my mother, tell the headmaster I want to go to the Central Foundation Grammar School in Spital Sq. I’d heard it was the good place to go. We were allowed out to wander around the Spitalfields Market at lunchtime. Every month the girls used to support a different charity there. We’d go down to the market and beg boxes of fruit and sell it at breaktimes and the money would go to charity. The art room overlooked the market and I did a painting of it that won a prize. I joined the choir so I could sing at St Botolph’s in Bishopsgate and get invited back for sandwiches and ice cream by the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers. I thought I was very clever because I went to a Grammar School.

My first job was at Fox’s the Chemist in Broadway Market, from four until six every day after school and all day Saturday for £2.50. At eighteen, I left school and worked for two years in the City at the National Westminster Bank in Threadneedle St. It was easy to get work, you could go to an agency and get a job, and if you didn’t like it you could go back in the afternoon and get a different one.

Then I did teacher training in Tooting. I couldn’t do it at eighteen because my father wouldn’t sign the grant form as he was about to remarry and didn’t want to commit himself, but when the divorce came through my mother signed. I asked to do my teaching practise in the East End and I was placed at Virginia Rd Primary School. I qualified as teacher in 1978, and I worked at Randal Cremer school in Hackney, I was part-time at Redlands School off Sidney St and deputy head at St Luke’s in Old St. I had wanted to be a teacher since the age of five, I think I just wanted a register and a red pen.

At forty-five, I had a son and we moved to Walthamstow and then to Hertfordshire, but I want to be back here – and one day I’ll be back. You can’t explain it to some people, because so many worked so hard to get out. I bring my son Adam to see the street art. I think he’s interested in the East End.”

Barbara keeps the button box from her childhood in Casson St. On the table are swatches from her mother’s dresses bought in Petticoat Lane and a necklace she made out of melon pips at age nine in 1963.

Barbara’s school report from the Central Foundation Grammar School in Spital Sq, July 1968.

Barbara, aged three.

The ‘goal’ where Barbara and her friends played football, photographed in the eighties.

Barbara, aged five.

The furniture factory opposite Barbara’s home in Casson St, photographed in the eighties.

Barbara (second from the left) in the Central Foundation School production of The Mikado.

Casson St under demolition.

Jerzy Jezewska, Barbara’s father was a celebrated guitarist who taught at Cambridge.

Barbara visits Columbia Rd in the eighties.

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Cecile Moss of Old Montague St

Remembering Robert Poole

The Haggerston Nobody Knows

In recent days, the weather in London has been bright so I waited for a suitably occluded sky to set out with my camera in search of Val Perrin’s Brick Lane and below you can see my photographs beneath Val’s shots from 1972, revealing more than forty years of change in Spitalfields

Brick Lane 1972

Brick Lane

Cheshire St 1972

Cheshire St

Cheshire St 1972

Cheshire St

Brick Lane 1972

Brick Lane

Cheshire St 1972

Cheshire St

Brick Lane 1972

Brick Lane

St Matthew’s Row & The Carpenters’ Arms 1972

St Matthew’s Row & The Carpenters’ Arms

St Matthew’s Row 1972

St Matthew’s Row

Sclater St 1972

Sclater St

Corbett Place from Hanbury St 1972

Corbett Place from Hanbury St

Bacon St 1972

Bacon St

Code St & Shoreditch Station 1972

Code St & Shoreditch Station

Pedley St Bridge 1972

Pedley St Bridge

1972 Photographs copyright © Val Perrin

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Val Perrin’s Brick Lane

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Val Perrin’s Empty Brick Lane

When I arrived to meet David Mason in the bar at Wilton’s Music Hall, the only person sitting there was a man who looked so at home I imagined he must be the caretaker, not David. In fact, this was David, who grew up in the flat above Wilton’s when his father was caretaker in the nineteen fifties and – more than half a century after he moved out – he still feels comfortable in the old place.

Although it was known as the Old Mahogany Bar when David’s family moved into four rooms up above in 1951, the building was not a music hall then but a Methodist chapel. “My father knew it had been a music hall,” David explained to me, “The story we were told was that Wilton’s was thought to be a place of debauchery, and one day three Methodists walking past were so shocked they bought tickets and kneeled down in front of the stage and prayed that it would one day be a place of worship – and, lo and behold, eighty years later the Methodists got it!”

Even in this incarnation, the old music hall was a place of wonder for a small child, granted free run of the building. “When I was eight, my father had to spend ten nights away in hospital. He said, ‘You’re the man of the house.’ and I had to go round with a torch in the dark checking all the locks at night. It was scary, I thought every single noise was someone creeping up on me,” David recalled affectionately, as we walked through the atmospheric empty theatre yesterday.

In 1951 when David was three, his younger brother and sister, John and Jean, were born unexpectedly as twins and the family could no longer live in two rooms in the Peabody Buildings in John Fisher St. His father, Harry, was offered number three Grace’s Alley by Mr Willis the minister in return for care-taking duties, stoking and lighting the boiler, laying out tables and chairs for prayer meeting and some occasional do it yourself, which included knocking up the little wooden cross for the altar. “My parents were married here in the Old Mahogany Bar,” David told me, gesturing around the empty bar where we sat, “He worked for the Port of London Authority as a docker in St Katherine’s Dock and his nan’s  family were sugar bakers, they came from Ship Alley in Wellclose Sq – and my mother’s family came from Backchurch Lane.”

David went to St Paul’s opposite the music hall, a Church of England school presided over by Father Joe Williamson known as ‘Holy Joe.’ “He could walk into a fight in Cable St and kneel down and pray and they would stop brawling,” David assured me. The difference between the Methodism at the chapel and the Church of England practices at school was a source of bewilderment to David at an early age. “I was deeply confused, they covered their cross sometimes but we never did, and ours didn’t have a Jesus on it while theirs did. I asked one of the Methodist sisters why our cross did not have Jesus and she said, ‘We believe Jesus rose from the cross,’ but I think the real reason was that my dad made the cross and he couldn’t carve.”

In those days, the London Docks were still active and Wapping was scattered with bombsites where, as a child, David was free to wander. He remembers ships chandlers and mapmakers in the surrounding streets that were inhabited by a closely-knit community including significant numbers of Greek, Maltese and Turkish people. Before the slum clearance programme, Wellclose Sq and Swedenborg Sq stood lined with shambolic old houses and connected by a warren of alleys, in which was Roy’s sweet shop that David remembers as the last place he spent a farthing.

“My dad said that before the war they used to have a book appreciation club and I remember going with him to a Jewish-owned record shop in Aldgate where he reminisced about the record appreciation society. They had a Boys’ Brigade, Scouts, Magic Lantern Shows and there were Methodist Union meetings where ministers from other religions came to explain their beliefs. When we moved in, there was a still a youth club and there were always old ladies sitting knitting and chatting, but during the fifties they had fewer and fewer prayer meetings and my dad had to open up less and less, until it died.”

“In 1959, we were given fourteen days notice to leave by the Methodists and nobody was willing to help.” David confessed to me, “My dad wasn’t a bible bashing type, he wasn’t overtly religious even, but he went to church all his life and he carried the soldier’s prayer in the pocket of his battledress jacket. So I think it hurt him after all this time to feel we were being thrown out. The upshoot was we ended up in three rooms belonging to the Port of London Authority near the Woolwich Ferry and that was the end of our contact with this place.”

At fourteen years old, David came back to get his eyes tested at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel and took a stroll alone down to Wapping to see what was going on at his former home, now owned by the GLC. “I rang the bell that said ‘Ring for caretaker’ but no-one answered so I turned to walk away and a gruff voice called, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I explained that I used to live there and I knew how many steps there were up to the flat, and he let me in, saying, ‘You really did live here, didn’t you?'” Since David left, the building had become a warehouse for rags, guarded by fierce dogs that were described to him by a friend as “all-stations.”

Returning to witness the re-opening of Wilton’s Music Hall and visit the space he once knew intimately has been an equivocal experience for David, as he confided to me, ” The first time I came back there was a lot of strings being pulled in my heart. I never thought I’d stand in the Old Mahogany Bar in the Methodist chapel and have a glass of wine to drink!” .

“I have only got happy memories here, we laughed all the time – but when I lived here there didn’t seem to be as much love for the place as there is now,” he concluded, “When I come back now it isn’t like the place I grew up in, it’s a foreign country. It wasn’t the best of places then, yet it did have something – you could call it soul.”

Wilton’s Music Hall was known as the Old Mahogany Bar when David grew up here in the fifties.

Davis’s parents, Anne & Harry Mason, were married in the Old Mahogany Bar at Wilton’s.

St Paul’s School Wellclose Sq where David went to school.

St Paul’s School viewed from the living room window at Wilton’s.

The infants class at St Paul’s photographed on the lawn outside Wilton’s – Miss Webb and Father Joe Williamson (known as Holy Joe) officiate. David sits in the front row directly to the right of the sign.

David’s mother and younger brother John on the roof of Wilton’s where they grew tomatoes and flowers.

David with his mother and the twins in the living room at Wilton’s.

David with his nan and the twins. “Her name was Elizer Wiegle and she was of German extraction, and used to attend the Lutheran Church in Alie St.”

David sits on the big staircase at Wilton’s.

Methodist activities at Wilton’s in the fifties.

David recalls reading the theatre’s foundation stone by torchlight with his father as a child.

John Claridge’s portrait of the caretaker at Wilton’s, 1964, after the theatre became a rag store.

Caretaker portrait copyright © John Claridge