Cecile Moss Of Old Montague St
Cecile aged four
Although Cecile Moss lived in Old Montague St for fourteen years, this is the only photograph taken of her in Spitalfields, and it was taken for a precise purpose. A photographer came round to take it in 1955, the year Cecile arrived from Jamaica aged four years old, and the picture was sent back to her family in the Caribbean as evidence that she was attending a proper Catholic school with a smart uniform and therefore all was well in London. Yet in contrast to the image of middle class respectability which Cecile’s mother strove to maintain, the family lived together in one room in a tenement and the reason there are no other photographs is because they had no money for a camera.
Almost no trace survives today of the Old Montague St that Cecile knew – 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 dodgy coffees bars in which Maltese, Somalis, Caribbeans and others congregated to do illicit business. In fact, Old Montague St offered a rich and stimulating playground to a young child filled with wonder and curiosity, as Cecile was.
The novel presence of black people proved a challenge to many East Enders at that time. “Sometimes, they knotted their handkerchiefs when they saw me,” recalled Cecile with mixed emotion, “and they’d say, ‘If you see a black person that’s good luck.'” Fortunately, Cecile’s mother’s professional status as a teacher proved to be an unexpected boost to Cecile in this new society and later Cecile became a teacher herself, an occupation that she pursues today from her home in New Cross Gate where she lives with her children and grandchildren. “Since the new overground train, I’ve spent a lot more time in the East End and I still have a lot of friends there.” she admitted to me when I visited her, “As you grow older, you tend to want to go back to your home.”
“We came to England from Jamaica in 1955, me, my sister Clorine and my mother, Marlene Moss, to Old Montague St in Spitalfields. She left my father and came over to live with her sister, Daisy. I was four years old and I didn’t know I was coming to England, I was traumatised. But I remember what I was wearing, I wore a double-breasted coat with a velvet Peter Pan collar and lace-up shoes. My mother was a teacher in Jamaica and she didn’t want us to look like refugees arriving in England. The voyage lasted ten days and we were met by my uncle at Southampton. It was very confined on the boat so that when I got off, I kept on running around.
We lived in a building where the Spitalfields health centre is today. We were 9b, above a shop where two elderly Jewish sisters lived. My mother cried for days because we had to share one toilet with three other floors, so it was really quite disgusting. I was told that I had come to get a doll. But it was an ugly chalky-skinned blond doll, and I was so angry and upset that I threw it away and smashed it, which made my aunt think I was a very ungrateful little girl. My mother,my sister and I all lived in one room. My sister was eleven and she remained silent, whereas my mum and I just cried a lot. I missed my family in Jamaica.
Because we were Catholics, we went to St Anne’s Catholic church and mother got talking to the priest. He told her she could teach in St Gregory, a Secondary Modern in Wood Close, doing supply work. When she started at the school she was shocked. One of the pupils was absent from the register and they said, ‘He’s gone down for GBH.’ My mother came back and asked my aunt, ‘What is this GBH?’ She said she was going introduce Shakespeare to the school but they said,’We don’t want you bringing any of your kind of rubbish here!’
I went to St Patrick’s school around the back of St Anne’s and my sister, because she had already passed the eleven-plus, went to Our Lady’s convent in Stamford Hill. Yet I only lasted two weeks at St Patrick’s because the kids hit me and pushed me over. I can’t remember if they called me racist names, but I know I was terribly unhappy. My mother took me away and sent me to Stamford Hill too. I was five years old, and she put me on the 653 bus and told the conductor where to let me off. The people on the bus would look after me and I never missed my stop. I felt safe. So we lived in the East End but we went to school in North London. That was unusual but, because my mother was a teacher, we were middle class, even though we lived in Old Montague St which was a slum. Old Montague St had quite a reputation for drugs. There were dark tenements with dark passages with dark dealings.
When my mum got a permanent job at St Agnes’ school in Bow, she took me away from Our Lady’s at seven years old. So I never went back to school in Spitalfields but I used to play out on the street a lot. Most of the children I played with were second generation Irish with names like Touhy, O’Shea, Latimer and Daley – that’s who I grew up with. There was an older Irish boy who looked out for me, he said I was part of the gang. He told us we mustn’t speak to the people on Brick Lane because they were Jewish. He was looked after by his grandmother. She was a character. Every Saturday night, she went to the pub on the corner of Chicksand St and filled a jug with port or whatever and stumbled back singing, ‘Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do.’ And my mother cried and said, ‘Look what we have come down to.’ One day, the old lady, she tied a skipping rope across the street to stop the traffic so that we could play. When the police came along, she said, ‘ The children have got nowhere to play.’ And we were all shocked, but later they opened a playground on the corner of Old Montague St and Vallance Rd.
I loved going to Petticoat Lane. Every Friday, my aunt would go and get a chicken – you could choose one and they would kill it for you. There were street entertainers, an organ grinder and man who lay on a bed of hot coals. Walking up Wentworth St, there were all Jewish shops with barrels of pickles and olives outside. I was fascinated but my mother said, ‘That’s not our food.’ A lot of the stallholders were quite friendly to me and my mother because they thought we were the next wave of immigrants. There was a cafe I walked past with my mum, it was full of black-skinned men but I couldn’t understand what they were saying even though they were like us. They were Somalis. The men outside, they’d give me sixpence and put me on their knee. They liked to see me because they were away from their own children. I think we were some of the first West Indians here, there were no other black kids.
I spent a lot of time in the fleapit cinema on Brick Lane on Saturdays. But by the time I turned seven, my mum stopped me playing out. She forbade me, so my wanderings around Spitalfields stopped and I don’t mix with the kids on the street anymore. Instead I became more friendly with the kids I was at school with in Bow.
My aunt Daisy went back to Jamaica and my sister returned when she was eighteen. So it was just me and my mum in the end. We shared a bedroom and we had a sitting room, with the kitchen in the hallway. I was very embarrassed about where I lived and I didn’t bring friends home because it was a slum. All this time, my mother was not divorced, she was still married and it really held her back. She even had to ask a friend to his name down for her to be able to buy a television.
There was a hardware shop and other shops run by Jewish people, where they got on well with my mother. There was a bit of snobbishness because she was a teacher. It used to cushion me too, I was Mrs Moss’ daughter. When she complained, they used to say to her, ‘Never mind, we had it, now it’s your turn.’ Referring the racial prejudice, they meant it was something you put up with, then it would pass. And by the time I left Spitalfields, it was the Bengalis coming in, so it was quite profound what they said – it was a rite of passage at that time.
When I was eighteen, we moved out. Looking back on it, I’ve got to say it was a happy time. I knew when I’d forgotten Jamaica and made my transition to England. I played a lot on the stairs and I pretended to have a ‘post office’ there. One day my mother was there too, washing some clothes on the landing and she corrected my speech. ‘It’s not ‘spag-ETTEE,” she said, ‘It’s ‘spaghetti” And, I realised then, that was because I’d left Jamaica behind and I spoke Cockney.
Today I often teach immigrants, children for whom English is their second language, and I can say to them, ‘I know what you are going through.'”
Old Montague St 1965 by Geoffrey Fletcher
Cecile Moss
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The Map Of Shoreditch In Dreams
Adam Dant is giving two illustrated lectures in the next week in celebration of the publication of his magnum opus MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND. You can catch him in at the Wanstead Tap in Forest Gate on Thursday and Stanfords in Covent Garden next Tuesday, and he has two exhibitions forthcoming too.
THURSDAY 21st JUNE 7:30pm: Lecture at THE WANSTEAD TAP, 352 Winchelsea Rd, E7. Click here to book
TUESDAY 26th JUNE 6:30pm: Lecture at STANFORDS, 12-14 Long Acre, WC2. Click here to book
29th JUNE – 14th JULY: Exhibition of Maps of London at THE MAP HOUSE, 54 Beauchamp Place, SW3. Opening Thursday 28th June 6 – 8:30pm
5th – 22nd JULY: Exhibition of Maps of the East End at THE TOWN HOUSE, 5 Fournier St, E1. Opening Thursday 5th July 6 – 8.30pm
(Click to enlarge)
This is the first map Adam drew of his chosen neighbourhood of Shoreditch back in 1998.
“I’d been thinking about how Shoreditch existed in people’s imaginations and subconscious and how I could render that visually,” explained Adam, “So I went to a lecture at the Jungian Society in Hampstead on the subject of ‘Collective Dreaming.’ It turned out to be a circle of people sitting in a room with a ‘dominatrix’ holding a clipboard – bobbed hair, German spectacles and pencil skirt – and she asked people to describe their dreams, with a view to explore common themes that might point to a collective unconscious. It was very embarrassing because people were revealing things about themselves that if they were aware of the language of psychoanalysis they would have kept mum.” He added later in qualification, “I wasn’t using ‘mum’ in a Freudian sense.”
Taking his cue from the Jungian Society Lecture, Adam set out to collect the dreams of his neighbours and other residents through surveys and in conversation. Then he portrayed them all on the map you see above as a means to illustrate the heaving and teeming collective unconscious of Shoreditch. I was astounded when Adam showed me his huge drawing done directly in ink onto a piece of paper that is a metre square, without any single mistake or even an inkblot that might open itself to interpretation – almost obsessive compulsive in its neatness, you might say.
As we commenced our cartographic analysis, Adam explained that his orientation was looking to the West with a rat-infested Shoreditch High St crossing the map laterally. In the bottom left of the map, he pointed out the tiger prowling the streets continously and, further up to the right, the facades of the Boundary Estate propped up by wood, and then, over in Hoxton Square, the giant Teddy Bear at its centre. Images pregnant with meaning yet resisting simple interpretation. Most fascinating to me were the elements of premonition within the map – the giant pizza outside the Tea Building on the corner of the Bethnal Green Rd exactly on the site of the new pizza restaurant which opened more than a decade later and the bendy bus in the centre right of the map, drawn years before these strange vehicles became actuality and then became defunct.
You will note that this map was drawn and published under the name of Donald Parsnips – Adam Dant’s creative alter-ego – and it is the image of Donald Parsnips in his tall hat that dominates the centre of the chart, produced when Adam was also publishing “Donald Parsnips’ Daily Journal” distributed in a daily edition of one hundred copies free to the people of Shoreditch. Subsequently, Adam produced maps of Shoreditch under his own name, but whether we can infer some kind of reconciliation of the ego and super-ego as a result of his work in cartographic interpretation of Shoreditch in Dreams, I leave you to decide for yourself.
Or, to quote a speech bubble from the map, “The finer points we’ll leave to the discretion of the silly folk!”
Adam Dant’s limited edition prints are available to purchase through TAG Fine Arts.
.CLICK TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND BY ADAM DANT
On Missing Mr Pussy In Summer
With your help, I am collecting the stories of my old cat Mr Pussy who died last year into a book entitled THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A Memoir Of A Favourite Cat to be published by Spitalfields Life Books on 20th September.
There are two ways you can help publish the book.
1. I am seeking readers who are willing to invest £1000 in THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY. In return, we will publish your name in the book and invite you to a celebratory dinner hosted by yours truly. If you would like to know more, please drop me an email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
2. Preorder a copy of THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY and you will receive a signed and inscribed copy in September when the book is published. Click here to preorder your copy
Below you can read an excerpt and in coming days I will publishing more of these stories.
Extract from THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A Memoir Of A Favourite Cat
While Londoners luxuriate in the warmth of summer, I miss Mr Pussy who endured the hindrance of a fur coat, spending his languorous days stretched out upon the floor in a heat-induced stupor. As the sun reached its zenith, his activity declined and he sought the deep shadow, the cooling breeze and the bare wooden floor to stretch out and fall into a deep trance that could transport him far away to the loss of his physical being. Mr Pussy’s refined nature was such that even these testing conditions provided an opportunity for him to show grace, transcending dreamy resignation to explore an area of meditation of which he was the supreme proponent.
In the early morning and late afternoon, you would see him on the first floor window sill here in Spitalfields, taking advantage of the draught of air through the house. With his aristocratic attitude, Mr Pussy took amusement in watching the passersby from his high vantage point on the street frontage and enjoyed lapping water from his dish on the kitchen window sill at the back of the house, where in the evenings he also liked to look down upon the foxes gambolling in the yard.
Whereas in winter it was Mr Pussy’s custom to curl up in a ball to exclude drafts, in these balmy days he preferred to stretch out to maximize the air flow around his body. There was a familiar sequence to his actions, as particular as stages in yoga. Finding a sympathetic location with the advantage of cross currents and shade from direct light, at first Mr Pussy sat to consider the suitability of the circumstance before rolling onto his side and releasing the muscles in his limbs, revealing that he was irrevocably set upon the path of total relaxation.
Delighting in the sensuous moment, Mr Pussy stretched out to his maximum length of over three feet long, curling his spine and splaying his legs at angles, creating an impression of the frozen moment of a leap, just like those wooden horses on fairground rides. Extending every muscle and toe, his glinting claws unsheathed and his eyes widened gleaming gold, until the stretch reached it full extent and subsided in the manner of a wave upon the ocean, as Mr Pussy slackened his limbs to lie peacefully with heavy lids descending.
In this position that resembled a carcass on the floor, Mr Pussy could undertake his journey into dreams, apparent by his twitching eyelids and limbs as he ran through the dark forest of his feline unconscious where prey were to be found in abundance. Vulnerable as an infant, sometimes Mr Pussy cried to himself in his dream, an internal murmur of indeterminate emotion, evoking a mysterious fantasy that I could never be party to. It was somewhere beyond thought or language. I could only wonder if his arcadia was like that in Paolo Uccello’s “Hunt in the Forest” or whether Mr Pussy’s dreamscape resembled the watermeadows of the River Exe, the location of his youthful safaris.
There was another stage, beyond dreams, signalled when Mr Pussy rolled onto his back with his front paws distended like a child in the womb, almost in prayer. His back legs splayed to either side, his head tilted back, his jaw loosened and his mouth opened a little, just sufficient to release his shallow breath – and Mr Pussy was gone. Silent and inanimate, he looked like a baby and yet very old at the same time. The heat relaxed Mr Pussy’s connection to the world and he fell, he let himself go far away on a spiritual odyssey. It was somewhere deep and somewhere cool, he was out of his body, released from the fur coat at last.
Startled upon awakening from his trance, like a deep-sea diver ascending too quickly, Mr Pussy squinted at me as he recovered recognition, giving his brains a good shake, once the heat of the day had subsided. Lolloping down the stairs, still loose-limbed, he strolled out of the house into the garden and took a dust bath under a tree, spending the next hour washing it out and thereby cleansing the sticky perspiration from his fur.
Regrettably the climatic conditions that subdued Mr Pussy by day, also enlivened him by night. At first light, when the dawn chorus commenced, he stood on the floor at my bedside, scratched a little and called to me. I woke to discover two golden eyes filling my field of vision. I rolled over at my peril, because this provoked Mr Pussy to walk to the end of the bed and scratch my toes sticking out under the sheet, causing me to wake again with a cry of pain. I miss having no choice but to rise, accepting his forceful invitation to appreciate the manifold joys of early morning in summer in Spitalfields, because it was not an entirely unwelcome obligation.
CLICK HERE TO PREORDER A COPY OF THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY
The Life & Times Of Mr Pussy
Over the past nine years of publishing daily in the pages of Spitalfields Life, some of the most popular and best loved stories have been those about my old cat Mr Pussy who died last summer. So, with your help, I am collecting them into a book entitled THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A Memoir Of A Favourite Cat to be published by Spitalfields Life Books on 20th September.
There are two ways you can help me publish the book.
1. I am seeking readers who are willing to invest £1000 in THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY. In return, we will publish your name in the book and invite you to a celebratory dinner hosted by yours truly. If you would like to know more, please drop me an email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
2. Preorder a copy of THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY and you will receive a signed and inscribed copy in September when the book is published. Click here to preorder your copy
Below you can read the opening pages and in coming days I will be publishing further excerpts.
THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A Memoir Of A Favourite Cat
I was always disparaging of those who doted over their pets, as if this apparent sentimentality were an indicator of some character flaw. That changed when I bought a cat, just a couple of weeks after the death of my father. My mother was inconsolable and sat immobile for days. So I bought her a tiny black kitten in Mile End in the East End of London – no bigger than my hand – and I took him on the train to Devon, arriving late at night and giving him into her care.
At that moment, she transformed from a woman with a bereavement problem to a woman with a cat problem. Looking back on it, I attribute Mr Pussy’s placid intelligent nature to those first impressionable months of his life with her. Time passed and six years later, after she died, he returned to live out his days with me in Spitalfields.
I understand now how pets become receptacles of memory and emotion, and I have learnt that this is why people can lavish such affection upon animals. Mr Pussy’s age measured the time since I lost my father and, as he grew into maturity, my father’s memory lived through him, while his distinctive personality reflected my mother’s own nature. I held him in trust for her and in memory and love of them both.
* * *
I think back to when I woke one night and decided to get a cat. It was just a few weeks after my father died and I had been lying thinking of ways to console my mother. The funeral was over but we both were still enveloped by the crisis. I decided a cat was the answer, so I set out to find one that day and take it with me on the train to Devon, as a gift for her. Yet I hit a blank at once when I rang a pet shop and discovered that cats cannot be bought. I spoke to cat charities and they could not help me either. They told me they required an inspection of the prospective owner’s house before they could even consider offering me a cat.
As a child, I owned a beloved grey tabby that I acquired when I began primary school and which died when I left home to go to college. The creature’s existence spanned an era in the life of our family and, at the time, my mother said that she would never replace it with another because its death caused her too much sadness. Yet I always wondered if this was, in fact, her response to my own departure, as her only child.
Now my father was dead, she was alone in a large house with a long garden ending in an orchard. It was an ideal home for a cat, she had experience with cats, so I knew that at this moment of bereavement, she needed a cat to bring fresh life into her world. I called her and discussed it, hypothetically. She told me she wanted a female.
I rang veterinary surgeries asking if they knew of anyone giving kittens away, without any luck. Working systematically, I rang every pet shop in the London directory, asking if they knew anyone wanting to dispose of kittens. Eventually, a pet shop offered to help me, as long as I could be discreet, they said. They had rescued a litter of kittens just a few weeks old, prematurely separated from their mother and abandoned on the street, and they needed to find homes for them urgently. Naturally, they could not sell me one because that would be illegal, but maybe – they said – I could give them something to cover the costs of taking care of the others?
So I went to the pet shop in question, in a quiet street around the back of Mile End tube station. It was mid-afternoon and the light was fading. I was planning to go to Paddington directly afterward and catch the train to Exeter. As I approached the shop, my heart was beating fast and I recognised my own emotionalism, channelling my sense of loss into this strange pursuit. I entered the shop and there on the right was a cage of kittens, all tangled up playing together. Instantly, one left the litter and walked over to the grille, studying me. This was the moment. This was the cat. A mutual decision had been made.
I asked the owner if I could have the black one that was now clawing at the mesh to hold my attention. The shopkeeper assured me the cat was female and, after a short negotiation, I gave the owner forty pounds. Becoming distressed when it was time for me to leave, “You will take care of it won’t you?” he implored me, tears dripping from his eyes.
Startled by his outburst, I walked away quickly and got onto the tube just as the rush hour began. The tiny creature in the box screamed insistently, drawing the attention of the entire carriage. It screamed all the way to Devon and that night I lay in bed clutching the animal to my chest, as the only way I could find to lull it enough to sleep. My mother christened it “Rosemary” and the cat grew calm under her influence, as she sat by the fireside reading novels through the long winter months.
The next summer, I moved back to live with my mother in the house where I grew up – when it became clear she could no longer live alone – and I discovered the new cat had fallen into all the same paths and patterns of behaviour as my childhood tabby. But when we sent the cat to the vet for neutering, there was a surprise – they rang to inform us it was a tom cat, not a female as we had believed. The name ‘Rosemary’ was abandoned, instead we called him ‘Mr Pussy’ in recognition of this early gender confusion.
I cared for my mother until she died five years later and I had to keep Mr Pussy away from her room eventually, because the presence of a cat became too threatening for her in her paralysis. Mr Pussy skulked around in disappointment and revealed an independent spirit, running wild, chasing moorhens through the water meadows of the River Exe. But then one day, I picked Mr Pussy up and sat with him on my lap in the cabin of a removal truck as we made the return journey to London for good.
.
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Julius Mendes Price’s London Types
It is my greatest delight to show these examples of London Types, designed and written by the celebrated war artist Julius Mendes Price and issued with Carreras Black Cat Cigarettes in 1919. After months of searching, these are the latest acquisition in my ever-growing collection of London Street Cries down through the ages. Some of these images – such as the cats’ meat man – are barely changed from earlier centuries, yet others – such as the telephone girl – are undeniably part of the modern world.
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
At Minto Place, Bethnal Green
Billy Reading sent me this memoir by his great aunt Joyce Ellis, recalling her childhood visits to Minto Place, Bethnal Greet, home of her beloved grandfather James Ward (born 1861) and aunt Mary Ward (born 1888)
Joyce Ellis
During the thirties, Mum and I used to visit my grandfather James Ward nearly every week in Bethnal Green, travelling by tram and bus from our home in Leyton. He lived at 5 Minto Place which was part of a terrace of houses whose front door opened straight onto the pavement. It was a rented house and the front upstairs bedroom was sub-let to Mr & Mrs Shave whom we never met.
Steep linoleum-clad stairs led directly up to grandfather’s tiny workroom at the back of the house. His trade was making hand-sewn ballet shoes, made from lovely soft leather, black, red and white, which when finished would dangle streamer-like on hooks from their long laces around the wall. He also made light-soled shoes and I can see him now, using hob and last, cutting, fixing the sole and hammering the tacks into place.
My grandfather sewed ballet shoes with waxed thread using two needles simultaneously which were curved at the ends, one held in each hand. He always wore a well-worn coarse apron, deeply marked with grease and dirt, and his hands bore the evidence of years of hard work. A fire burned in the grate in his work room in winter and it was stifling hot in summer, even when the sash window overlooking the yard and the adjoining grimy rooftops was thrown open wide. Frequently, he stopped for a rolled fag of good British Oak tobacco, which was lit by a homemade bullet-shaped lighter with a huge uncontrollable flame that had to be carefully manoeuvred to avoid singeing his moustache. And he supped large mugs of tea, in which he left the spoon whilst he drank.
Meanwhile, downstairs in the tiny scullery, Aunt Mary managed all the household duties in a quiet detached fashion. There was a coal-burning copper for clothes washing in one corner, with a deep sink and scrubbed wooden drainer attached, beside a small table and a cooker. Everything was spotlessly clean but very basic. When needed, odd slip mats were placed on the linoleum covered floor. Obviously, times were hard yet my Aunt was a wonderful manager, making the best of what was available.
Refreshments with my Aunt were taken in the dark front room. Bread, butter and jam, and quite often soda bread was provided, plus a good solid dripping cake with a handful of dried fruit. The fireplace had an over-mantle with ornaments and framed sepia photographs and, in winter, a coal fire flickered (excellent for making toast) and shone on the china cupboard with its coloured glass and decorated plates. The gas mantle over the fireplace was lit when dusk descended but not before in an effort to keep costs to a minimum. A fire would only be lit in a bedroom if the inhabitant was seriously ill – this was the only exception!
The scullery door led out into a small, walled backyard. It contained the lavatory with its scrubbed wooden seat and newspaper, carefully cut and hung on a string. The communal tap of the house was also in the yard alongside the tin bath hung from a nail on the wall. Jim, the terrier dog, had his kennel in the corner beside the mangle with large wooden rollers.
My grandfather had a disfiguring lump in his back. Apparently, he broke a bone years earlier while climbing a ladder at home but he scorned doctors and paid no attention to it at the time. In later years however, it gave forth an unpleasant discharge, although he never made any fuss about it. A very tough man, as those of his time and circumstances were, he had to survive and any show of weakness was scorned and belittled. His personal remedy for his ailment was ‘a good dose of liquorice powder,’ a tonic which he also administered to his dog.
Aunt Mary dutifully moved into Minto Place to care for my grandfather during his middle to later years. Missionary work in the East End of London was her life’s work and calling. Quite often accommodation went with the job and finally she became a caretaker and companion to a couple at a Jewish Mission close by Bethnal Green station. She always thought of the welfare of others with complete disregard for herself.
My grandfather was an Air Raid Warden during the Blitz and ruled Minto Place and its inhabitants with authority. His ‘local’ was the Lord Canrobert, just around the the corner in Canrobert St, to which made his way with clockwork regularity for a pint of beer. Cribbage was played and I seem to remember money being paid in weekly for various Thrift Clubs, a means of ensuring money was available, however little, when needed. Sometimes an unattended pram would be seen outside with a couple of young children in it, whilst the parents were imbibing, but mostly pubs were male-dominated while the women stayed at home.
Wolverly St playground and the dark satanic school with its high walls faced Minto Place. Neighbours often gathered at their hearthstone doorways, some sitting on chairs in sociable groups, for this was the place to exchange views or just watch life pass by. A cool breeze could be created by leaving the front and back doors wide open the filter air through the house. If you were lucky enough to scrounge an orange box from the market, add a set of old pram wheels, you were much sought after by companions. Home made scooters, were also popular, as well as hoops, tops and whips.
One method of washing was the Bag Wash. Clothes were boiled in vast coppers and taken home, after they had been mangled, to drape over what was available to dry, and irons were permanently kept by the fire to be heated when necessary.
This was the hey-day of the Pawn Broker with three brass balls hanging outside the shop. People in need of money urgently to pay off a debt, usually the rent, pledged whatever they thought might bring forward some ready cash – a suit of clothes, a watch perhaps – in the vain hope that they could pay back the Broker to redeem the items at a later date.
Most streets had a corner shop where such essentials as firewood at a penny a bundle could be bought. Paraffin and Carbolic Acid for drains were dispensed to your own tin or bottle, and Vinegar was stored in wooden casks – everything was sold loose. There were biscuits displayed in tins from which you made your own choice – pick ‘n’ mix – and broken biscuits were much sought after because they were cheaper. Household soap was sold as a long bar, cut to size as required, and stored for a while to harden in order to last longer.
Groups of musicians begged in the streets, frequently ex-service First World War veterans who were quite often limbless or blind and ever hopeful of a penny thrown their way. Unfortunately, most passersby were just as hard up themselves and could not afford to contribute.
East End Sunday mornings were never complete without a visit to crowded Petticoat Lane in Aldgate for shopping and meeting friends. The choice of goods and produce was vast, ranging from home made toffee and cough candies to fruit, flowers and vegetables. Herrings were sold straight out of deep barrels and live eels wriggled in trays until they came under the thud of the cleaver to be chopped into small pieces for the waiting customer. They did not come fresher than that! I shall leave the smell that pervaded the air to your imagination.
Hawkers sold bottles of medicine which they said would cure all your ailments. I well remember one who had the answer to the elimination of worms, which were quite prevalent in those days – I suppose through lack of general hygiene. He would have the offending worms on display, preserved in glass bottles, to support his claims. One had to be careful of bag-snatchers and pick-pockets in such crowds.
Nearby, Club Row was for the sale of livestock – puppies, barely old enough to leave their mothers, chicks to be reared in back yards for much-needed eggs, goldfish to be carried away triumphant in a jam jar. More or less anything could be bought or sold there.
Horse-drawn carts and wagons, both commercial and domestic – including the baker and the milkman – were still the main form of transport. While the carters were in pubs and cafes at lunchtime, horses were given their nosebags containing chaff, usually leaving great drifts of the stuff in the road where they had thrown up their heads to eat the reminder of the bag and spilt the contents. Great long stone drinking troughs were located at busy street corners for their consumption. Someone was always on the look out, ready to rush out armed with a bucket and shovel to sweep up the resultant manure for sale to the few who may have had a postage stamp-sized garden. I think the going rate was a penny a bucket.
My grandfather’s pride and joy was a very heavy bicycle on which he travelled everywhere, lit by a huge acetylene lamp. He had a black cape and sou’wester for wet days. When we lived in Leyton, Chingford and later Ilford, he regularly visited us on Sundays ‘on the bike’ up until his late seventies. His first encounter with a roundabout on the Woodford Avenue completely flummoxed him and he said he went round it the wrong way. Rene & I always received sixpence pocket money on these welcome visits. When we lived at 20 Flempton Rd, Leyton E10, my dad and grandad rented an allotment nearby. They shared the cost of seed, the work and the produce. Grandad cycled his share back to Bethnal Green in a hessian sack tied around his body. Dad built a nice shed with seats on three sides and hooks to keep the tools. A well was sunk and protected with a creosoted wooden lid.
Grandfather died in his mid-eighties after a short illness. Aunt Mary brought us the news – few people had telephones – and I can still remember the shock and emptiness that his death brought me. No more to hear the eagerly-awaited bell ring out on his bike to herald his arrival. No more to hear the latest news of Minto Place and its environs. He was a much-loved hardworking Victorian man, full of character and strength.
Minto Place was patched up many times after bomb attacks and was eventually pulled down for redevelopment. Aunt Mary was temporarily rehoused in a flat in the Guinness Buildings, Victoria Park, Bethnal Green, which was a dreadful depressing old building, long overdue for demolition. It was so dark that the light had permanently to be kept switched on. Lines of washing, secured from the balconies, stretched across courtyards until it was dry. Conversations seemed to echo from every level and the smell and feel of poverty was all around.
Thankfully, she was transferred to a block of flats know as Peabody Buildings in the Cambridge Heath Rd district of Bethnal Green, where she lived for a while, before finally moving as part of a London County Council scheme to relocate people out of London into the countryside at the edge of the Green Belt at Chigwell Row in Essex. It was retired person’s flat but it was not long before she found part-time work, helping the family with housekeeping. I hope they appreciated her fully and thought themselves fortunate to have her services, as there never was a more conscientious or hardworking person. She lived entirely for other people – Church, family and work were her priorities.
Aunt Mary visited us at Babbacombe Gardens, Ilford, once a month, travelling by bus to Gants Hill and changing. When my brother Martin was born in 1953, she took over from my mother at the time of his birth and stayed a couple of weeks to undertake all the household duties to the last detail.
Although she never had much money to spend, Aunt Mary had the magic touch with cookery and was always able to turn basic ingredients into an appetising meal. Her needlework was also born out of making something out of nothing. Invariably, second hand material was used and her stitches were so tiny they could hardly be seen.
BBC Radio Four was her constant companion, enabling her to keep abreast of current affairs, and reading widely was a great joy. The bible was the source of her knowledge, direction and peace of mind yet she was never sanctimonious or forced her faith upon us. Poetry was of particular interest to her and she would sometimes borrow my books to share and read aloud with her friends. I remember the Welsh poet W.H. Davies being one of her many favourites. Perhaps his early days as a tramp appealed to her?
Aunt Mary died aged seventy-six and is buried in Chigwell Row churchyard. Only upon reflection as an adult do I fully realise and appreciate her sterling, selfless qualities and sensitivity which endured unwaiveringly. I feel privileged to have such a dear aunt as my mentor.
James Ward enjoys a trip to the beach dressed in a three piece suit
A family group during the Second World War with James Ward second from right
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At The Reform Club
Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I visited the Reform Club in Pall Mall one quiet morning recently before the members arrived to take the portraits of those who work to keep this august institution running flawlessly within its palatial clubhouse of 1841, designed by Sir Charles Barry architect of the Houses of Parliament. Perhaps most famous as the fictional rendezvous for Phileas Fogg and his friends in Around the World in Eighty Days, the Reform Club originated among Members of Parliament who pledged support for the Great Reform Act of 1832, initiating the parliamentary campaign for universal suffrage that met its resolution in the last century.
Mohammed Anzaoui, Club Steward
“I started at the Reform Club on 4th November 1991. I came as a student from Morocco via Gibraltar. I used to work in the Royal Overseas League until a friend of mine who worked here as a Chamberlain told me I would like it, so I thought I would give it it a try. I had an interview with Robin Forrest the Secretary on 2nd November 1991 and straightaway he asked me when I would like to start, so I started the next Monday. Coming to the Reform Club was a big step up. I worked as a Assistant-Chamberlain from 1991 until 1999 and then I moved to banqueting, supervising and setting up the function room for lunches and dinners.
When I first came here, I lived in the building and it was strange. I had nothing else in my life and I could not invite friends to visit because I was living in a private building. It was a lowly life. The first two years were tough but then I got used to it. After three years, I met my wife and got married and moved out to Elephant & Castle. It was a new life!
In 2008, I could have gone to work somewhere else but I really loved it in the Club. It was my home from home, and James Coldrick, the Club Steward was about to retire, so the members encouraged me to apply for the position. I asked the Secretary and he said, ‘If you like the job, you can have it any time.’ As Club Steward, I greet the members. It is a hard job, it is not just standing at the top of the stairs and smiling. You are here Monday to Friday and you have to give it 100%. You leave all your problems outside, you do not take them to work. As Club Steward, I am the face of the Club.
People come here who have been working all day and at six o’clock they want to relax and have a drink, so I make sure we are ready for them and they are looked after. Each day you stand for four hours and then you have an hour’s break and you stand for another four hours. The only other people that do this are the Royal Horseguards! I keep myself fit because as long as I am fit I will be able to do it. By November, I will complete twenty-seven years at the Reform Club.”
Sheron Easter, Subscriptions & IT
“This is my twenty-sixth year at the Reform Club. I was born in Bethnal Green but I live in Hornchurch now, although my dad – who is ninety-three – still lives there and I still go to Pelliccis now and then. After my second child, I wanted a part-time job and I saw this in the Evening Standard in July 1992 and applied because the hours suited me. There are two parts to my job, membership and subscriptions – collecting the subs and maintaining the database – and IT administration.
This is a very unusual place to work. I came here from a large firm of solicitors and it was a culture shock at first. On my first day, I put all my letters in the post box here, thinking they would get taken to the post room to be stamped or franked and delivered to the post office, but in fact I was supposed to stick stamps on them myself. People tend to stay here forever and we all feel connected to each other, so we become almost like a family. This is not a corporate organisation, it is gentlemanly and polite. The proportion of women members has risen steadily. When I joined it was about 15% but we are up to around 19% now. It is growing slowly but I think we need more.”
Nestor Castro, Barman
“I have been here for fifteen years. I was working at the Criterion in Piccadilly Circus as Waiter when a friend asked me if I would like to work at the Reform Club, so I came here and talked to the Restaurant Manager but he said they did not have any vacancy for a Waiter but they were looking for a Barman. ‘If you want the job, you can have it,’ he said. I love working here, especially as it is only Monday to Friday so I can spend weekends with my family. I started working in a hotel doing breakfasts and then in a cinema before spending fifteen years at Santori, a Japanese restaurant in St James St. I work from ten o’clock until three o’clock and then back at five o’clock until ten o’clock. I do not leave the building, I relax in the staff TV room during my break. I have been working in catering since I came to this country from the Philippines in 1986, my wife had already been here since 1975 – eleven years we were separated before we were reunited.”
Paul Austin, General Office & Events
“I just do the menial admin really, and also the box office. I graduated in 1993 from the University of Westminster and it was a recession, so I was on the dole for a bit and desperate for a job. I found an advert in the Evening Standard for a job here as a Porter. I did that for a couple of years and then this job came up in July 1995, which I was invited to apply for, and I have been in the office ever since. I have been here twenty-five years and it has always been a great place to work, they treat the staff very well which makes it a happy place to be.
When I started in the office in 1995, we did not have an email address, we were still using fax machines and I had a manual typewriter. At the end of the nineties, we got our first email address. It was reform_club@msn.com and I used to log on to msn and check it at the end of each day to see if anyone had sent us an email. That was state of the art then.
Nowadays, members do not have to wear a tie anymore – that was voted through a year ago. Also members are permitted to use their mobile phones and tablets in the club but not to make calls. They can check emails and texts, and read a book on their ipad or kindle as long as the device is silent. That is how we have evolved to reflect the modern world. Things are changing apace and sometimes the club struggles but we are getting there.
Because I have been here so long, the members often pop into my office for a chat. This week will be a significant week because it is the first test match at Lords so a number of members will come in to discuss the cricket. People ring me up if they do not know who to ask a question of and they ask me.
When the club was created in the eighteen-thirties, it was tied up with electoral reform and had its own remit. Today it is virtually impossible to describe a member of the Reform Club, we have members from all professions. There is no political aspect and we have no longer have any Members of Parliament since the last election. The last Prime Minister that was member of the Reform Club was Lloyd George a hundred years ago.”
Hugh Wynter, Banqueting
“I came to work at the Reform Club in 1996. It was through a friend who was a member, she mentioned there were some positions going here. I had two interviews and got the job straightaway. I started in catering in 1977 and I have been in it ever since, working in hotels, banqueting places and restaurants. My last job before I came was with Freemasons and they were very difficult people to look after, they wanted everything for nothing.
Coming here was quite different. I knew it was a private members club but I had not met the members. The first lunch I had to organise was for Stella Rimington, Head of MI5, but then I began to organise lunches in the library which can seat up to one hundred and seventy comfortably, or three to four hundred at a standing reception. I have personally served Mikhail Gorbachev when he came with his wife.
I tell my staff who, what and where, so they serve the right meal to whosoever. We have a new boss and a new chairman and we did our first livery dinner recently and it went without a hitch. The staff were perfect from start to finish and I was well chuffed. I really like doing functions here and looking after the members and their guests. That is why I have been here so long. Now I am organising my own sixtieth birthday party here with here with two hundred guests, about thirty of whom are members.”
Anna Kwiatek, Facilities
“I came to London from Poland in 2002 as a student studying English, but at home I had been studying Dermatology. I first came to Reform Club in 2003, working for an agency, as a Waitress serving in the restaurant. In 2005, they asked me to join the permanent staff and I accepted, and that was my beginning in the Reform Club. I was very impressed by the place when I first came here. The work was good and the members were friendly. Since 2016, I have worked as an Administrator in Facilities & Maintenance although this does not quite describe my work – Sometimes it feels like I’ve done every job in the Club!! I do all the ordering and deal with the invoices for the Club, and manage the building works as well. My office is in the basement but I go all over the building checking the maintenance and renovations. I like working here because I love this beautiful building.”
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
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