At 38 Princelet St
Spitalfields Life Books will be publishing A MODEST LIVING, Memoirs of Cockney Sikh by Suresh Singh in October. The book was inspired by the account of Suresh’s father Joginder Singh, which was first published in these pages in 2013. Here is a second instalment and further excerpts will follow over coming weeks.
In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh tells the 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)
Joginder Singh at 38 Princelet St
Dad came with very little. In 1949, he left his village in the north of India, carrying a small satchel with a tin of shoe polish and not much else. Because he was from the shoemaking caste he thought he could shine peoples’ shoes in London and that was what he did at first.
Somebody told Dad that you could sleep in doorways in Spitalfields and quickly find work there. The porters piled up their barrows and it fell on the floor in abundance, so you could easily collect enough fruit and vegetables for a week. He knew people would leave you alone and you could get by. I think something drew him to Spitalfields.
A man called Mama Nanak came to London before my father. He was a friend of the family and a wheeler-dealer, a dodgy guy. No-one ever said much about him but there is a photograph of him in his suit with a big moustache. He was an enterprising, entrepreneurial man. Eventually, he went to work at Heathrow Airport cleaning toilets and moved to Southall. He brought Sikhs over and said to them, ‘You can stay here.’ He was someone who worked his way around things. He and Dad got hold of a house from a Jewish furrier. In those days, you could just buy the keys.
Our house, it was a slum then. Official records state it was vacant at the time. Dad wanted a big house so that he could welcome his mates and soon there were as many as fifty people living in it. You ask any Punjabi from here to Glasgow who arrived in Spitalfields in the fifties and they will tell you they lived at 38 Princelet Street, even if it was for one night. Some people even walked from Heathrow Airport. They were hot-bedding, with one person getting up to go to work and another climbing into the same bed. It was pretty rough but it was a place where people got on. You could mingle in Spitalfields if you had a big overcoat and a hat, tucking yourself into the area with its smell of bonfires, the brewery, and the fruit and vegetable market.
It was a dark place at night but Dad had a sense of direction even though he could not read or write. He found his way by landmarks. Hawksmoor’s tall spire of Christ Church, with its illuminated clock, dominated the neighbourhood. Even when it was dirty, Christ Church was pretty swag, and Dad liked it. Although there were tramps outside and the bustling Spitaltfields market was across the road, he believed you could elevate yourself out of it.
Our house was in the next street and Liverpool Street station was beyond. On Sundays you could pick up stuff for nothing in the flea markets and Dad got most of our furniture there. In the surrounding streets were Maltese families, Irish families, Hassidic and other Jewish families. It was a mishmash of people and Dad was in his element. Spitalfields pulled him in. The Punjab and the East End of London were two different worlds. I think the docks and the river led him to this place, where you could get by even if you had very little.
Dad found it very difficult to get work because he had a beard and long hair wrapped up in a turban. Some Sikhs shaved their heads. He was told there was a guy in Glasgow who would do it with an accompanying ritual. Dad took the coach to Glasgow to the rough part of the tenement blocks. The guy said to my Dad, ‘This is how you get a job in England.’ He took Dad into the yard and removed his turban and shaved his hair and his beard off. They said that day, ‘Joginder Singh wailed at the top of his voice.’ Dad said, ‘Now my Sikhism is from within.’ He realised that he was in a foreign land but he could keep his faith inside. He made that sacrifice to get a job.
Dad worked in Liverpool Street station and Old Broad Street shining shoes on and off for fifteen years. He did not mind it, although others in the house often asked, ‘Why do you want to do that? You’ve come to England, why do you want to get down on your knees and shine shoes?’ Dad answered, ‘That is a lovely thing to do.’
When he came back from Glasgow, he got a job at once on a building site. People in the house thought, ‘Oh well he shaves, he gets a Wilkinson blade from the market and he keeps himself clean-cut.’ Yet Dad always wore the clothes of a Punjabi Sikh in the house, even if outside he wore proper tailored suits with a nice cut from a good Jewish tailor. These were bought down Brick Lane or in Cheshire Street and probably came off a stiff but they were bespoke. His friends always used to laugh, ‘Joginder Singh, the suits are very beautiful – don’t know how you got them?’ He always kept his shoes polished too, that was very important to him. Even today, I always keep my shoes polished.
I think it is funny but also sad that Dad would do that. Why did he put his pyjamas on and become like a proper Punjabi in the house, but dress in a suit before he went out? I think if he had put a coat over his pyjamas to go out he probably would have got away with it, but he never did. He always valued being in Britain and he worked really hard. I think Spitalfields welcomed him for that.
Dad was always bringing home down-and-outs he met in the street. Often, Dad would invite his vagabond friend Karama but Mum would say, ‘Keep him downstairs,’ because he was infested. So Dad sat him in the yard, shaved his hair off and set it alight, and as they burnt, the fleas would pop like sparklers. I remember Mum being at the end of her tether sometimes because Dad fed these down-and-outs. We still eat the same diet today and, if anybody comes, they eat what we eat. We do not say, ‘We’ve got friends coming, we’ve got to get special food.’ It is what it is, that was how it was and how it is today. It was the same when Mum was here and she passed it on to Jagir, my wife.
Dad became the owner of 38 Princelet Street in 1951, about two years after he arrived in London. I remember the house being full of people, with three gas meters and cookers upstairs and downstairs. My view was of kneecaps and shoes. Mr Ford, the environmental health officer was knocking on the door all the time saying, ‘We’re going to close you down.’ When I was a child we lived on the top floor, which was just an open space with the walls knocked through and the rafters uncovered with two skylights.
Our house was quite broken down and we did not have hot water or central heating. We used to bathe outside in the yard. I remember putting pans on the gas, heating up water. Once it boiled, we tipped it into a bucket and carried it down into the yard then topped it up with cold water. Dad washed in cold water and when he threw it on him, he yelled ‘Wah Hey Guru!’ The joke in the community was that Joginder Singh was a holy man because he kept shouting ‘Wah Hey Guru!’ but really it was the shock of cold water.
Some Sikhs did not want to stay with us, saying, ‘How can you live among Muslims and Jews?’ and he replied, ‘At least they don’t gossip, so you go and I’ll stay here.’ Our house was an open house and for many people it was a safe house – especially when Dad was there.
Joginder Singh in the kitchen at 38 Princelet St – “I think it is funny but also sad that Dad would do that. Why did he put his pyjamas on and become like a proper Punjabi in the house, but dress in a suit before he went out?”
Mama Nanak – “He was an enterprising, entrepreneurial man. Eventually, he went to work at Heathrow Airport cleaning toilets and moved to Southall.”
Joginder Singh
Click here to order a signed copy of A MODEST LIVING for £20
A Strange Storm In Shoreditch
As well as collecting his experiences of life in his diaries, Samuel Pepys collected many other things, including prints of the Cries of London, cheese wrappers and Broadsheet Ballads. Thanks to his foresight, these are all preserved in the Pepys Library at his former college, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
This broadsheet from his collection records something strange and wondrous that happened in Shoreditch on 18th May 1630, when hailstones eight inches in circumference fell from the sky resulting in the near-fatality of a hemp dresser. Connoisseurs of doggerel can enjoy the full story below.
Learn more about the history of this ancient parish at an exhibition of artefacts recently excavated by Museum of London Archaeology, open now at St Leonard’s Church from Tuesday to Sunday each week until 14th October.
Click on this image to enlarge
Image reproduced courtesy Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge
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Peter Turner, Silversmith
I am delighted to publish this post by Julie Price who was a graduate of my blog writing course this spring. Julie’s family were originally from the East End and consequently the capital has always held a fascination for her. Follow Julie’s Price’s View Of London.
We are now taking bookings for this autumn’s course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on November 10th & 11th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Leila’s Cafe, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details
If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.
Peter Turner
One of my relatives, Peter Turner, is a retired silversmith who lives in the village of Great Abington with his wife Ann. It is inspiring for me to have another creative person in the family, so I was keen to find out more about his work.
While visiting, I was amused to hear villagers refer to him as ‘Hatton Garden Pete.’ When I asked to see his workshop, he caught my eye with a cheeky glint as he declared, “I work in a studio darling, I’m ‘Fine Art’!”.
Peter said he had always been interested in artistic subjects at school but there was no career guidance available and boys were simply told to take a form to the Labour Exchange. He said, “I always knew I wanted to do something with my hands and the Labour Exchange gave me a form for an apprentice engraver. The apprenticeship was for four years, which was lucky because it could have been up to seven years.”
Peter was offered the apprenticeship and started work at fifteen years old at H J Greenwood & Son, a father-and-son firm in Stratford High St. Mr Greenwood, was a silversmith who was known to be one of the best at lettering. Peter remembers his strict Victorian attitude but feels lucky that he was taught by such a talented man.
Peter reminisced about Stratford sixty years ago, “I remember there being a leather shop downstairs, Woolworths was opposite and it was close to Yardleys in the Mile End Rd, with beautiful tiles depicting a lavender seller. Next to Yardleys was a knacker’s yard where they boiled bones for glue and – when they opened the vats – it stank. I used to put a hanky over my mouth!”.
“I worked on simple things there, initials on signet rings, cufflinks and bracelets,” Peter recalled. After his apprenticeship, he left to work for Gill & Stevenson in Hatton Garden. The interview was at 8:00am on a Saturday morning and he was told to bring his own tools. “The guv’nor, Ernie Stevenson was the only person there so I laid my tools out on the work bench,” Peter explained. Ernie left him some work and said, “Do what you think you can do and I will be back.” Peter did all of it with an hour and a half to spare, so he did some other things that he noticed on the shelf. When the ‘guv’nor’ came back, he asked Peter, “When can you start?!”. He was chuffed because he was given £36 for the work although his weekly wage was only £11. He was only nineteen years old at the time but proudly remembers Ernie telling the other employees “This is Peter and he set his tools up himself!”.
Peter worked at Gill & Stevenson for twelve years, commuting from the village of Over in North Cambridge. He remembers, “I worked next to an old boy called Harold Fuller who was the tops in heraldry” and added, “I’ve been lucky to have had two excellent masters.”
In Hatton Garden, Peter met a gentleman who had lots of connections with major silver and antique dealers in London. This connection led to enough extra work that he could become self-employed.
While he was self-employed Peter worked for many clients in Bond St, Hatton Garden and the silver vaults in Chancery Lane. He also did work for the royal family. “Prince Charles brought his Mum a silver thimble and asked me to engrave it with ER II,” he recalls, “I think it was her Christmas or birthday present.” He engraved for the Queen too. “While she was at Sandringham,’ he explained, “she brought me a sheep’s dog whistle and I engraved it with ER II.” At this time, Joe Bugner won the European & Commonwealth Boxing Championship and Peter was asked to engrave his name onto the championship belt. Peter laughed as he confesses, “My two sons were running around the house wearing Joe Bugner’s belt on their shoulders and blowing the Queen’s sheep dog whistle at the same time!”.
I asked Peter what he was most proud of and he told me how a Jewish New York dealer had asked him to re-engrave two Paul Storr sauceboats. When I asked who Paul Storr was, he revealed, “He used to be a silversmith – one at the top of his game. A Huguenot who came over from France or Holland with a lot of silk weavers and set up shop in East London, he is rated to be the top English silversmith ever.”
Once Peter was asked by a dealer to erase a crest and coronet from a pair of Paul Storr silver sauceboats, but the engraving was so beautiful he took a print before removing it. This was silver that Lord Lucan had sold to pay off gambling debts. Later, the Lucan family asked Peter to erase the new engraving and replace it with the original crest. Fortunately, having taken a print of the Lucan crest, he was able to do it quickly. Peter admitted to me, “The family said it was so beautiful, they could not tell the difference from the original.”
I wanted to learn the basic principles of engraving and asked Peter to give me a lesson. This is what he said, “Wipe your fingers on your forehead or chin, to get a grease deposit, then rub it onto the silver. Then take a tin of powdered chalk and rub some onto the metal with cotton wool. Mark guide lines in the chalk with something that doesn’t scratch but just leaves a mark on the chalk – I used old knitting needles. Then you look at it, ask yourself, ‘Is that right?’ When you are happy, use rules and a pair of compasses to mark the size of the lettering. Scratch through the chalk with a sharp point so marks of the letters are left, then wipe off the chalk and start, using a small chisel.”
Since retiring, Peter has now taken up wood carving and wants to make handles for gentleman’s canes. He is currently working on his first, which will be in the shape of an elephant’s head. He wants to carve another in the shape of “an heraldic dolphin, the type you would see wrapped around embankment lampposts.” I cannot wait to visit Hatton Garden Pete and his wife again to see how the cane handles are progressing.
Peter’s design for a Dutch marriage box
Peter’s design for a crest
Examples of fonts engraved by Peter
Examples of romantic keepsakes that Peter makes for his wife each Valentine’s Day
Photographs copyright © Julie Price
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On Top Of Britannic House With Lew Tassell
Detective Constable Tassell of the City of London Police Serious Fraud Squad magically escorts us thirty-five years back in time and onto the roof of Britannic House in Ropemaker St to enjoy the view
“In the summer of 1983, I was part of the City of London Serious Fraud Squad, operating from Wood St Police Station. A friend and ex-colleague of mine became head of security at British Petroleum in Britannic House, Ropemaker St and he invited me to photograph the views of London from the rooftop, so I took the opportunity. I went along one June morning and took my pictures.
Britannic House was the first building in the City of London to be taller than St Paul’s Cathedral and remained the tallest until the NatWest Tower was built in 1976. It is now known as City Point – since BP moved out some years ago – and has been refurbished with extra storeys, so it is even taller.” – Lew Tassell
Looking towards Christ Church, Spitalfields
Looking northeast towards the Bishopsgate Goodsyard with Bethnal Green beyond
Looking east to Old Broad St and Liverpool St Station with Spitalfields beyond.
Car park at Old Broad St Station where the Broadgate Estate is today
Looking east along Liverpool St towards Bishopgate and Dewhurst’s Butchers
Looking southeast to Finsbury Circus and the City of London
Looking southeast across the City of London towards Tower Bridge
Looking southwest along London Wall with St Paul’s Cathedral
The dome of St Paul’s with Westminster and Big Ben
Looking west towards Old Bailey and Trafalgar Sq
Looking northwest towards the Post Office Tower with the Barbican to the right
Looking northwest across Clerkenwell with St Pancras Station in the distance
Looking north to Whitecross St Market
Looking down onto the Barbican
St Giles Cripplegate
Looking down from the top of Britannic House
Looking down on Silk St
City of London mounted police in Fore St
Photographs copyright © Lew Tassell
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Angie Lewin & Emily Sutton’s Nature Table
At the end of this glorious long summer, as we reach the season of flower shows and harvest festivals, St Jude’s returns to Townhouse in Fournier St to present NATURE TABLE, an exhibition of lyrical works on rural themes by two favourite artists, Angie Lewin & Emily Sutton. Open daily from Wednesday 19th until Sunday 30th September.
Gardener’s Arms, linocut by Angie Lewin
Preparation for Gardener’s Arms
Portrait of Angie Lewin by Allun Callender
Cottage Garden, watercolour by Emily Sutton
Sea Holly, Walberswick
Dunwich Beach
Summer Sweet Peas
Portrait of Emily Sutton by Allun Callender
Linocut copyright © Angie Lewin
Watercolours copyright © Emily Sutton
Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, Pleater
Kyri demonstrates a pattern for a circular pleat
In a remote corner of Tottenham, in the midst of an industrial estate, sandwiched between a kosher butcher and a panel beater, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I found Rosamanda Pleaters. We dipped our heads and stepped through a low door to enter a crowded factory. As our eyes accustomed to the gloom, we peered into the depths where lines of machines filled the space, appearing to recede into the infinite distance. We expected a horde of ghostly workers shrouded in cobwebs, but on closer examination the machines were all idle.
Yet, in a pool of bright light, one man worked alone, wrestling cloth, cardboard, sticks and string, subjecting them to his will with expert control. This was the legendary pleater Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, universally known as Kyri. He removed a piece of silk from between a pair of cardboard patterns that were folded into an intricate design which they imparted to the cloth, as delicate as a butterfly wing and as richly coloured as the plumage of an exotic bird. We were entranced.
The magic of pleating is to take diaphanous fabric and give it volume and structure through a geometric series of creases. These pleats move, amplifying the gesture and motion of the wearer in unexpected and sensuous ways. This is the spell that pleating can impart to clothes. Kyri is the grand master of it.
He has contrived hundreds of unique designs for pleats, spending months conjuring his intricate notions. Pleating is his imaginative world. ‘This one is stars on one side and squares on the other,’ he explained unrolling an elaborately folded piece of cardboard that quivered as if it had a life of its own. ‘I call it ‘Crown Pleat,” he confided to me in a proud conspiratorial whisper. ‘I have never used it yet.’ Kyri finds inspiration for new designs in pantiles, scallop shells and hieroglyphics.
All day the phone rings and breathless fashion assistants arrive from London’s top designers – Christopher Kane, Alexander McQueen, Jasper Conran, among others so fancy we are not permitted to mention – bringing lengths of cloth for Kyri to work his transformative wizardry upon.
A tall slim man with pale grey hair and straggling white moustache set off by his mediterranean colouring, Kyri cuts a handsome figure. Of philosophical nature, he is untroubled by the endless to and fro, delighting in the attention and maintaining a confident equanimity throughout. He may serve the capricious world of fashion, but his is the realm of geometry and chemistry. Cardboard, sticks and string are his tools, and steam is the alchemical essence that enables him to work his sorcery upon the cloth, subjecting it to his desire.
“As a pleater, you are always learning. Even after forty-three years of pleating, I am learning. It is not just a question of mastering three or five styles, you have to use your imagination. You have know engineering and about how machines work, you have to know geometry to understand how the patterns function, you have to know chemistry to predict how the material will react.
There’s a lot of things you have to know to be a pleater. It’s a talent. I create new things everyday. I design my own patterns. If I see something I like, I work how it is done and I design my own version. At the beginning, I used to come in every Saturday just to experiment with styles. I tried different ways to use the machines to find new styles. I have two hundred different designs of my own.
Hand pleating is done by placing the cloth between two paper patterns, known as ‘pleating crafts.’ They are made of a special paper that is water resistant and does not get wet. You open the craft, stretch the two papers and lay down the material, sandwiched between the two papers. Then you tie them tight and put them in the steam.
The easiest fabric for pleating is polyester. It holds the pleats well, you can even put it in a washing machine. In hand-pleating, you use only steam but in machine-pleating you use the heat of the machine and steam too, so it is more powerful and will resist washing. I have all these machines. One can do fifteen hundred different styles, another is a fancy one that do a couple of thousand different styles.
I don’t need to advertise, people come and find me, and they keep coming back. I tell them,’If you need me, you find me!’ If I make something, it has to be of the standard that I would like to buy – which means it is good to give to a customer.
My work is perfect pleating. It is rare. There are some patterns, I am the only person in England who can do them. Other pleaters do standard pleats and they think that’s everything but it is not. It can take six months to design a pattern. I might start work on it at Christmas and finish in June. I did not know how to do it, but slowly I work it out. I enjoy pleating because I am always creating things. When I started, I didn’t know anything about this.
I have an Msc in Agriculture. I finished my studies in Athens in 1975 and, because of the war in which Turkey invaded Cyprus, I came to England as a refugee. I married my wife Eleni and in the beginning I worked in a knitting factory, Sharon Fabrics in Holloway. After they closed down, I worked at a water plant, analysing water in Crews Hill in Enfield for bacteria. But somebody told me to push a wheelbarrow and I didn’t like it so I left.
After that, I was asked to work for a pleater in Hackney and that was how I started. In 1980, me and two other people, we opened a knitting factory in Clerkenwell near Smithfield Market. My wife worked in Holborn as a bookkeeper then. She asked me, ‘How much does it cost to set up a pleating factory? I told her, ‘Maybe two or three thousand pounds.’ So that’s what we did, we started in business together and we employed two boys. Eighteen months later, we had a fire and all the others left but I carried on.
I have been here in this workshop in Tottenham for twenty-six years. I had a pleater who passed away before my wife eighteen months ago, so I am on my own. There’s just me now but in the past I used to have seven pleaters working for me. All these machines I have are from factories that closed and nobody else wants them There is no business any more for volume. All the High St shops manufacture in the Far East, my business is just with designers now.
I used to work on Sundays, I arrived at eight o’clock every morning and worked until seven. Now I arrive at nine o’clock and work until five, just weekdays. I will carry on as long as I can. I said to my children, ‘I am not going to retire because – for me – if somebody retires they are waiting for death.’ It’s true! If you put your car outside for six months and don’t use it, the tyres and battery go flat. The human being is like that I think.”
Kyri lays a pattern on the table
Kyri has over two hundred patterns for pleating that he has designed
Kyri shows off a favourite pleating pattern
‘I call this ‘Crown Pleat”
‘Craft pleats’ ready for use
Kyri places weights upon the patterns to make sure the fabric is tightly sandwiched
Kyri removes the weights once the pattern is compressed
Kyri rolls the patterns to squeeze the fabric into the form of the patterns
Kyri places the patterns between two splints
Kyri ties the splints together
Kyri concertinas the patterns as tight as possible between the splints
The completed ‘pleating craft’ is ready for the steam oven
Kyri’s steam ovens where the pleats are baked
Kyri shows off his pleating machine
Last minute maintenance to the steamer
A pleated silk shirt ready to be steamed flat
Kyri the pleater
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Public Practice
On Tuesday 18th September at 7:30pm, Finn Williams will be giving a talk at Leila’s Cafe hosted by the EAST END PRESERVATION SOCIETY, discussing the controversial role of council planners in shaping the urban environment in the East End and beyond.
Finn Williams is co-founder and CEO of PUBLIC PRACTICE, an initiative dedicated to inspiring a new generation of planners in local government, making places for the common good and improving the public sector’s capacity to deliver homes by sharing skills and knowledge between authorities.
Click here to book your free ticket
The Boudary Estate was Britain’s first eouncil estate, built in 1900 by London County Council
THE BUREAUCRAT & THE ACTIVIST, Finn Williams introduces Public Practice
“East London’s pioneering social housing, public parks, town halls, hospitals and public baths are memorials to an extraordinary history of municipal vision. The public sector has been behind many of the buildings and places that make the East End worth preserving.
But today, in debates over how London should change in the future, local government has found itself playing the role of the villain. Campaigns and headlines in response to the Grenfell tragedy, Haringey Development Vehicle, or Heygate Estate regeneration have placed the blame on the doorsteps of local boroughs.
At a wider scale, the former Prime Minister labelled “town hall officials who take forever with those planning decisions” as “enemies of enterprise.” Being a bureaucrat has become synonymous with being a boxticker, clockwatcher or jobsworth. ‘Top down’ local democracy is pitched against ‘bottom-up’ community activism.
Why have public servants become public enemies? And how can we rethink the relationship between councils and communities to place a new value on working in the public interest?
Localism promised a bigger society by making a smaller state. But as the effects of nearly a decade of cuts play out through our cities, it has become increasingly obvious that a healthy and inclusive civic society relies on healthy and outward-looking local government.”
Chrisp St Market by Fredrerick Gibberd was built as part of Lansbury Estate in 1951
Cranbrook Estate designed by Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey & Berthold Lubetkin in 1963
Lister House, Whitechapel, designed by Ralph Smorczewski, 1956
Keeling House by Denys Lansdun in Bethnal Green, 1957
Sulkin House by Denys Lansdun, designed 1952/3 and built 1955/8 in Globetown
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