Ninety-Nine Years At Syd’s Coffee Stall
This is Jane Tothill pictured outside her grandfather’s coffee stall which opened in the spring of 1919
This is Sydney Edward Tothill pictured in 1920, proprietor of the Coffee Stall that still operates, open for business five days a week at the corner of Calvert Avenue and Shoreditch High St, where this photo survives, screwed to the counter of the East End landmark that carries his name. “Ev’rybody knows Syd’s. Git a bus dahn Shoreditch Church and you can’t miss it. Sticks aht like a sixpence in a sweep’s ear,” reported the Evening Telegraph in 1959.
This is a story that began in the trenches of World War I when Syd was gassed. On his return to civilian life in 1919, Syd used his invalidity pension to pay £117 for the construction of a top quality mahogany tea stall with fine etched glass and gleaming brass fittings. And the rest is history, because it was of such sturdy manufacture that it remains in service ninety-nine years later.
Jane Tothill, Syd’s granddaughter who upholds the proud family tradition today, told me that Syd’s Coffee Stall was the first to have mains electricity, when in 1922 it was hooked up to the adjoining lamppost. Even though the lamppost in question has been supplanted by a modern replacement, it still stands beside the stall to provide the power supply. Similarly, as the century progressed, mains water replaced the old churn that once stood at the rear of the stall and mains gas replaced the brazier of coals. In the nineteen sixties, when Calvert Avenue was resurfaced, Syd’s stall could not be moved on account of his mains connections and so kerbstones were placed around it instead. As a consequence, if you look underneath the stall today, the cobbles are still there.
Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a widespread culture of Coffee Stalls in London, but, in spite of the name – which was considered a classy description for a barrow serving refreshments – they mostly sold tea and cocoa, and in Syd’s case “Bovex”, the “poor man’s Bovril.” The most popular snack was Saveloy, a sausage supplied by Wilsons’ the German butchers in Hoxton, as promoted by the widespread exhortation to “A Sav and a Slice at Syd’s.” Even Prince Edward stopped by for a cup of tea from Syd’s while on his frequent nocturnal escapades in the East End.
With his wife May, Syd ran an empire of seven coffee stalls and two cafes in Rivington St and Worship St. The apogee of this early period of the history of Syd’s Coffee Stall arrived when it featured in a silent film Ebb Tide, shot in 1931, starring the glamorous Chili Bouchier and praised for its realistic portrayal of life in East London. The stall was transported to Elstree for the filming, the only time it has ever moved from its site. While Chili acted up a storm in the foreground, as a fallen woman in tormented emotion upon the floor, you can just see Syd discharging his cameo as the proprietor of an East End Coffee Stall with impressive authenticity, in the background of the still photograph below.
In spite of Syd’s success, Jane revealed that her grandfather was “a bit of a drinker and gambler” who gambled away both his cafes and all his stalls, except the one at the corner of Calvert Avenue. When Syd junior, Jane’s father was born, finances were rocky, and he recalled moving from a big house in Palmer’s Green to a room over a laundry, the very next week. May carried Syd junior while she was serving at the stall and it was pre-ordained that he would continue the family business, which he joined in 1935.
In World War II, Syd’s Coffee Stall served the ambulance and fire services during the London blitz. Syd and May never closed, they simply ran to take shelter in the vaults of Barclays Bank next door whenever the air raid sounded. When a flying bomb detonated in Calvert Avenue, Syd’s stall might have been destroyed, if a couple of buses had not been parked beside it, fortuitously sheltering the stall from the explosion. In the blast, poor May was injured by shrapnel and Syd suffered a mental breakdown, leaving their young daughter Peggy struggling to keep the stall open.
The resultant crisis at Syd’s Coffee Stall was of such magnitude that the Mayor of Shoreditch and other leading dignitaries appealed to the War Office to have Syd junior brought home from a secret mission he was undertaking for the RAF in the Middle East, in order to run the stall for the ARP wardens. It was a remarkable moment that revealed the essential nature of the service provided by Syd’s Coffee Stall to the war effort on the home front in East London, and I can only admire the Mayor’s clear-sighted sense of priority in using his authority to demand the return of Syd from a secret mission because he was required to serve tea in Shoreditch. As he wrote to May in January 1945, “I do sincerely hope that you are recovering from your injuries and that your son will remain with you for a long time.”
Syd junior was determined to show he was more responsible than his father and, after the war, he bravely expanded the business into catering weddings and events along with this wife Iris, adopting the name “Hillary Caterers” as a patriotic tribute to Sir Edmund Hillary who scaled Everest at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II. No doubt you will agree that as a caterer for a weddings, “Hillary Caterers” sounds preferable to “Syd’s Coffee Stall.” In fact, Syd junior’s ambition led him to become the youngest ever president of the Hotel & Caterer’s Federation and the only caterer ever to cater on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, topping it off by becoming a Freeman of the City of London.
Jane Tothill began working at the stall in 1987 with her brothers Stephen and Edward, and the redoubtable Clarrie who came for a week “to see if she liked it” and stayed thirty -two years. Jane manages the stall today with the loyal assistance of Francis, who has been serving behind the counter these last twenty years. Nowadays the challenges are parking restrictions that make it problematic for customers to stop, hit and run drivers who frequently cause damage which requires costly repair to the mahogany structure and graffiti artists whose tags have to be constantly erased from the venerable stall. Yet after ninety-nine years and three generations of Tothills, during which Syd’s Coffee Stall has survived against the odds to serve the working people of Shoreditch without interruption, it has become a symbol of the enduring human spirit of the populace here.
Syd’s Coffee Stall is a piece of our social history that does not draw attention to itself, yet deserves to be celebrated. Syd senior might not have survived the trenches in 1919, or he might have gambled away this stall as he did the others, or the bomb might have fallen differently in 1944. Any number of permutations of fate could have led to Syd’s Coffee Stall not being here today. Yet by a miracle of fortune, and thanks to the hard work of the Tothill family we can enjoy London’s oldest Coffee Stall here in our neighbourhood. We must cherish it now, because the story of Syd’s Coffee Stall teaches us that there is a point at which serving a humble cup of tea transcends catering and approaches heroism.
May Tothill, Syd’s wife, behind the counter in the nineteen thirties
Jane Tothill, Syd and May’s granddaughter, behind the counter (photograph by Sarah Ainslie)
Syd junior and his mother May, behind the counter in the nineteen fifties
A still from the silent film “Ebb Tide” starring Chili Bouchier with Syd in a cameo as himself
In 1937 with electricity hooked up to the lamppost
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Stories Of Clerkenwell Old & New
Each Saturday, we shall be featuring one of Adam Dant’s MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND from the forthcoming book of his extraordinary cartography to published by Spitalfields Life Books & Batsford on June 7th.
Please support this ambitious venture by pre-ordering a copy, which will be signed by Adam Dant with an individual drawing on the flyleaf and sent to you on publication. CLICK TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND BY ADAM DANT
1. 1390. The annual Clerkenwell Mystery Play “Matter from the Creation of the World” is performed by parish clercs whose well can be be seen at 14 Farringdon Lane.
2. 1246. The Knights Templars of St John’s Priory return from the Crusades to present Henry III with a crystalline vase containing “blood of the saviour.”
3. 1290. Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt is killed in Smithfield by Mayor William Walworth whose sword can be found at the Fishmongers’ Hall and on the City of London flag.
4. 1381. In the reign of Edward I, the water from the Fleet river is already so impure and containing such noxious exhalations and miasma that it kills many hooded brethren.
5. 1527. Sir Thomas Docwra, the last grand prior of the English Knights’ Hospitallers and architect of St John’s Gate is buried in the prior church.
6. 1123. Rayer, Henry I’s jester founded St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
7. Through the ages, great crowds have arrived at Smithfield for the St Bartholomew Fair, tournaments and for public burnings, such as Queen Mary’s two hundred and twenty-seven victims.
8. 1613. Some of the earliest female performers appear on stage at the Red Bull Theatre, Woodbridge St.
9. Nearby Bagnigge Wells House, home of Nell Gwyne, a black woman called Woolaston sells spring water from a fountain known as “Black Mary’s Hole.”
10. 1617. Seventeen bowling alleys at Bowling Green Lane are licenced by James I.
11. Charles I stops to enjoy a Dorset delicacy, “the pickled egg,” at Crawford’s Passage or “Pickled Egg Walk.”
12. Jack Adams, “The Clerkenwell Green Simpleton,” is regularly mentioned in pamphlets during Charles II’s reign.
13. 1747. The last tree on the North side of Clerkenwell Green is blown down during a storm.
14. The level of Cloth Fair remains much higher, even today, due to the accumulation of rubbish, dust and ashes.
15. 1610. Hick’s Hall, in the middle of St John’s St, was the last purpose-built sessions house, the point from where all distances from London were calculated and where criminals were dissected.
16. 1600-12. Shakespeare’s revels are rehearsed in the Great Hall at St John’s.
17. 1636. Henry Welby, the Hermit of Grub St, unseen by any human for forty years dies having bought, read, and mostly rejected all new books published.
18. 1641. Fleet Prison is reserved for debtors. 1726. Hogarth immortalises, in his engraving, the ghastly disclosures of witnesses, “fettering, spunging, damp and stench.”
19. 1709. Christopher Preston, bear gardens proprietor, is attacked and almost devoured by one of his own bears.
20. 1743. Henry Carey, for some time considered author of “God Save the King,” pens “Sally in our Alley” in Great Warner St.
21. Thomas Britton, “the musical smallcoal man,” whose musical club hosts Handel concerts is scared to death by a ventriloquist’s trick premonition.
22. 1737-41. Dr Johnson toils for Edward Cave’s “Gentleman’s Magazine” in St John’s Gate, where Garrick makes his London theatrical debut in Fielding’s “Mock Doctor.”
23. 1740. “Scratching Fanny,” the celebrated “Cock Lane Ghost” promises to manifest itself to Dr Johnson and friends at St John’s church.
24. Popular pamphleteer, Daniel Defoe is pelted with flowers rather than the usual household waste when put in the pillory for publishing ” The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.”
25. 1812. Once occupied by Colonel Magniac, maker of automaton-clocks for the Emperor of China, the birthplace of John Wilkes is pulled down.
26. 1908. The vast roof of the GPO sorting office is used as a rifle club shooting range.
27. 1820. Thistlewood and the Cato St conspirators are kept at Coldbath Fields Prison, home of the first treadmill.
28. 1903. Lenin meets a young Stalin at the Crown & Anchor pub (The Crown.)
29. Clerkenwell’s Italian community erect a life size “presepe” nativity scene every Christmas at St Peter’s Italian church.
30. TV presenter Graham Norton collects the empties at pioneering “gastro-pub” The Eagle.
31. 1917-19. Zeppelin raids destroy buildings in Passing Alley and St John’s Lane.
32. 2006. Rock star Pete Doherty is banned from The Malmaison after trashing a room at a cost of four thousand pounds to the Charterhouse Sq Hotel.
CLICK TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND BY ADAM DANT
Adam Dant’s MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND is a mighty monograph collecting together all your favourite works by Spitalfields Life‘s cartographer extraordinaire in a beautiful big hardback book.
Including a map of London riots, the locations of early coffee houses and a colourful depiction of slang through the centuries, Adam Dant’s vision of city life and our prevailing obsessions with money, power and the pursuit of pleasure may genuinely be described as ‘Hogarthian.’
Unparalleled in his draughtsmanship and inventiveness, Adam Dant explores the byways of English cultural history in his ingenious drawings, annotated with erudite commentary and offering hours of fascination for the curious.
The book includes an extensive interview with Adam Dant by The Gentle Author.
The Weathervanes Of London
There is no more magical sight to glimpse in a London street on a bright spring morning than that of a gilded weathervane, glinting in sunlight high above the rooftops. At once – in spite of all the changes that time has wrought – you know you are sharing in a visual delight enjoyed by three centuries of Londoners before you and it makes your heart leap.
Consequently, I am grateful to Angelo Hornak who photographed this gallery of magnificent golden weathervanes for his book AFTER THE FIRE, London Churches in the Age of Wren, Hawksmoor & Gibbs published by Pimpernel Press.
Spire of St Mary-Le-Bow, Cheapside, by Christopher Wren
Dragon upon St Mary-Le-Bow, representing the City of London
Arrow & pennant on St Augustine, Watling St
Spire of St Bride’s Fleet St by Christopher Wren
Gridiron on St Lawrence Jewry, symbol of the martyrdom of St Lawrence
Weathervane on St Magnus the Martyr by Christopher Wren
Weathervane on St Michael Paternoster Royal, College St
Galleon on St Nicholas Cole Abbey, moved from St Michael Queenhithe after demolition
Weathervane on St James Garlickhythe
Crown on St Edmund King & Martyr, Lombard St
Key on the Tower of St Peter Cornhill
Cockerell on St Dunstan-in-the-East by Christopher Wren
Comet on St Mary-Le-Strand
Spire of St Martin in the Fields by James Gibbs
Square-rigged ship on St Olave Old Jewry
Flaming red-eyed dragon on St Luke, Old St, described as a flea in popular lore
Weathervane on St Stephen Walbrook by Nicholas Hawksmoor
‘Flame’ on the top of the Monument by Christopher Wren
Photographs copyright © Angelo Hornak
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Ron McCormick’s Whitechapel
Ron McCormick photographed Whitechapel & Spitalfields in the early seventies and these pictures were exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1973. They are included in the new book Whitechapel Boy by Chris Searle, commemorating the centenary of the death of Isaac Rosenberg which is launched with an illustrated lecture at 6.30pm today, Thursday 5th April at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives. All are welcome.
Hessel St
Royal Oak, Whitechapel Rd
Old Montague St
Blooms, Whitechapel High St
Old Montague St
Old Montague St
Princelet St
Black Lion Yard
Fournier St
Brick Lane
Club Row
Brick Lane
Settle St, Whitechapel
Great Eastern Buildings, Quaker St
Woodseer St
Great Eastern Buildings, Quaker St
Sandys Row
Brick Lane Market
Christ Church School
Settle St, Whitechapel
Photographs copyright © Ron McCormick
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Philip Marriage’s Spitalfields
Isaac Rosenberg, Poet & Painter
This week marks the centenary of the death of Isaac Rosenberg, remembered as one of the finest of First World War poets alongside Rupert Brooke, Wilfired Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas. Rosenberg passed his formative years in the East End, as Chris Searle outlines in these extracts from his new book Whitechapel Boy which is launched with an illustrated lecture at 6.30pm this Thursday 5th April at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives. All are welcome.
Portrait of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) courtesy of Imperial War Museum
Even his name is enough for many English readers to doubt his Englishness. The son of Lithuanian Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression, Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890. His family moved in 1897 to Cable St in the East End, where he began primary school at St Paul’s, Wellclose Sq, and continued his studies at Baker St School from 1899 to 1904.
His headteacher, Mr Usherwood, noticed his talent for Art and arranged for him to attend special afternoon classes at Stepney Green Art School. It sounds like an ordinary enough East London schooling for a talented Jewish working class boy who, on leaving school, became an apprentice for a Fleet St engraver’s and was, as he puts it in his early poem Fleet St fully exposed to the ‘shrieking vortex’ of the City of London.
His working class origins circumscribed his experience as an artist and poet. He hated his work in engraving which made his mind ‘so cramped and dulled and fevered’ and complained, ‘I am bound, chained to this fiendish mangling-machine, without hope and almost desire of deliverance, and the days of youth go by’.
His education at the Slade School of Art was due to the patronage of three wealthy Jewish women that he had accidentally met, and he depended upon the Jewish Educational Aid Society to help with his Slade expenses, trips to the south coast and the cost of his return sea passage to stay with his sister in Cape Town, where he maintained that the climate would help his quasi-consumptive lungs gain strength. Yet he rarely wrote directly of the urban East London world of Stepney and Whitechapel where he spent his most formative years.
His early poems evoked pastoral and pre-Raphaelite images of the countryside that in his real, day-to-day life he rarely imbibed, unless it was walks among the trees of Victoria Park, or Hampstead where he lived for a while or as far east as Epping Forest, where he would sometimes go to paint. ‘So shut in are our lives’, he wrote in The Poet, yet explicit images of brick, concrete and tenements were not common in his poetry, and only rarely did he write about the darkness of East London or the struggles of its people. An exception is A Ballad of Whitechapel, telling of an encounter with a young prostitute, her parents sick and ‘grim hovering in her home’ and ‘her wasting brother in a cold bleak room’.
Three years after his family arrived in East London and moved into 47 Cable St in St George-in-the-East in 1897, the ex-Indian Army officer and founder of the proto-fascist British Brothers’ League, Major William Evans-Gordon, was elected as the new Member of Parliament for Stepney. ‘There is hardly an Englishman in this room who does not live under the constant danger of being driven from his home’, he declared at a public meeting, ‘pushed out into the streets, not by the natural increase of our own population, but by the off-scum of Europe’.
As for St. George-in-the-East, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had written that it was the poorest and ‘most desolate’ district of the East End and it had ‘stagnated with a squalor peculiar to itself ’. In March 1901, the Eastern Post described how a Jewish family new to the area, with a cart full of furniture, arrived in nearby Cornwall St, ready to move into a vacant house. The street-dwellers charged at the van, overturned it and smashed to pieces all the furniture it was carrying. They also broke the windows of the house that the family had arranged to occupy while terrified, its members ran from the scene with their screaming never-to-be neighbours in hot pursuit, eventually managing to escape minus virtually all their possessions. Such events were not uncommon in the neighbourhood where the Rosenbergs found their first London home.
If such racism was rampant enough in the civilian streets of East London, Rosenberg found that in the midst of the British Army, that he had voluntarily joined, it was allied to a class hatred that made it even more loathsome, sometimes launched by young and hostile officers. In a letter to the novelist Sydney Schiff in December 1915 during his training at Bury St. Edmunds, he wrote: ‘we have pups for officers – at least one – who seems to dislike me – and you know his position gives him power to make me feel it without me being able to resist’.
To his longstanding friend, Winifreda Seaton, he wrote, almost desperately and futilely in Spring 1916: ‘How ridiculous, idiotic and meaningless the Army is, and its dreadful bullyisms, and what puny minds control it.’ And in his final letters of March 1918, he told how he had applied for a transfer to the Jewish Battalion of the British Army fighting in Mesopotamia. He was killed before he received an answer.
Yet despite, and perhaps partly provoked by this entanglement of hostility of race and class, not only were Rosenberg’s finest poems created and crafted in the most dire of conditions, but whole generations of Jewish intellectual and cultural genius in East London were conceived and developed from East London streets in profoundly unpromising circumstances. There was Joseph Leftwich, poet, diarist, scholar, translator and anthologist of Yiddish literature – David Bomberg and Mark Gertler, painters – John Rodker and Stephen Winsten, poets. With Rosenberg, poet and painter, these were the Whitechapel Boys, called so because their study and discussion venue and daily rendezvous was the oasis of Whitechapel Library, where during opening hours they could meet until the library doors closed.
After that, there was only one thing to do. ‘We walked the streets until one or two every morning,’ Leftwich told me in 1975. ‘Talking in the darkness or under the gaslight, talking all the time down to Aldgate and back again to Stepney Green.’
These writers, artists, political activists and street intellectuals marked a profound moment in their people’s history and gave birth to a Jewish renaissance in East London which was to spill into the next half-century, through 1936 and the resistance to British fascism, the successful pre-war rent strikes against slum landlords and the election in 1945 of the Jewish communist Phil Paratin as MP for Mile End. Such was the context of the blooming of East London Jewish dramatists like Bernard Kops and Arnold Wesker in the first two decades after the Second World War, and the Whitechapel Boys had been at the birth of all this ferment.
A Ballad Of Whitechapel
God’s mercy shines;
And our full hearts must make record of this,
For grief that burst from out its dark confines
Into strange sunlit bliss.
I stood where glowed
The merry glare of golden whirring lights
Above the monstrous mass that seethed and flowed
Through one of London’s nights.
I watched the gleams
Of jagged warm lights on shrunk faces pale:
I heard mad laughter as one hears in dreams
Or Hell’s harsh lurid tale.
The traffic rolled,
A gliding chaos populous of din,
A steaming wail at doom the Lord had scrawled
For perilous loads of sin.
And my soul thought:
‘What fearful land have my steps wandered to ?
God’s love is everywhere, but here is naught
Save love His anger slew.’
And as I stood
Lost in promiscuous bewilderment,
Which to my ‘mazed soul was wonder-food,
A girl in garments rent
Peered ‘neath lids shamed
And spoke to me and murmured to my blood.
My soul stopped dead, and all my horror
Named At her forgot of God.
Her hungered eyes,
Craving and yet so sadly spiritual,
Shone like the unsmirched corner of a jewel
Where else foul blemish lies.
I walked with her
Because my heart thought, ‘Here the soul is clean,
The fragrance of the frankincense and myrrh
Is lost in odours mean.’
She told me how
The shadow of black death had newly come
And touched her father, mother, even now
Grim-hovering in her home,
Where fevered lay
Her wasting brother in a cold, bleak room,
Which theirs would be no longer than a day,
And then-the streets and doom.
Lord! Lord! Dear Lord
I knew that life was bitter, but my soul
Recoiled, as anguish-smitten by sharp sword,
Grieving such body’s dole.
Then grief gave place
To a strange pulsing rapture as she spoke;
For I could catch the glimpses of God’s grace,
And a desire awoke
To take this trust
And warm and gladden it with love’s new fires,
Burning the past to ashes and to dust
Through purified desires.
We walked our way,
One way hewn for us from the birth of Time;
For we had wandered into Love’s strange clime
Through ways sin waits to slay.
Love’s euphony,
In Love’s own temple that is our glad hearts,
Makes now long music wild deliciously;
Now Grief bath used his darts.
Love infinite,
Chastened by sorrow, hallowed by pure Name-
Not all the singing world can compass it.
Love-Love-0 tremulous name!
God’s mercy shines;
And my full heart bath made record of this,
Of grief that burst from out its dark confines
Into strange sunlit bliss.
Fleet St
From north and south, from east and west,
Here in one shrieking vortex meet
These streams of life, made manifest
Along the shaking quivering street.
Its pulse and heart that throbs and glows
As if strife were its repose.
I shut my ear to such rude sounds
As reach a harsh discordant note,
Till, melting into what surrounds,
My soul doth with the current float;
And from the turmoil and the strife
Wakes all the melody of life.
The stony buildings blindly stare
Unconscious of the crime within,
While man returns his fellow’s glare
The secrets of his soul to win.
And each man passes from his place,
None heed. A shadow leaves such trace.
Self portrait by Isaac Rosenberg, 1916
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At Verdi’s
Anna & Mimi Orsi
Along the Mile End Rd between the City and Bow, there is only one Italian restaurant of distinction. It is Verdi’s, a fine establishment offering a generous welcome and authentic northern Italian food at highly reasonable prices. Early in the week, a two course meal can be had for a tenner, yet everything – including the pasta – is prepared on the premises from fresh ingredients and the bread is baked daily.
Set in an old terrace between Stepney Green tube and Mile End Place, this restaurant is run with scrupulous devotion and panache by sisters Anna & Mimi Orsi who are continuing a family culinary tradition which extends back a century in the East End. Old photographs on the walls attest to this Orsi legacy, complemented by elegant drawings by local artist Dorothy Rendell whom I interviewed last year.
Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I enjoyed the privilege of visiting on St Giuseppe’s Day recently to savour the traditional cuisine and discover the story behind this cherished family restaurant. We learnt it was a significant day in recognition of Giuseppe Verdi but – more importantly – celebrating ‘Giuseppe’ as the name adopted by generations of men in the Orsi family, just as Anna & Mimi have been the chosen names for the women as long as anyone can remember. Yet I must confess we were most excited about the customary St Giuseppe’s Day dish of calves’ liver with spinach, prepared in the time-honoured fashion.
While Patricia Niven disappeared into the kitchen to photograph chef Marcio Polezia preparing his St Giuseppe’s Day speciality, I settled down hungrily to enjoy a dish of home made tortellini in brodo as the first course of this special meal.
Soon enough, the calves’ liver served with spinach, mashed potato and red onions arrived. As one accustomed to eating leathery calves’ liver that is almost dry, this was a succulent treat – still pink inside – complemented by tangy spinach that was cooked just sufficiently to retain its delicious texture.
After such a memorable lunch, I had the pleasure of Mimi & Anna Orsi joining me at the table and telling me the extraordinary story behind their wonderful restaurant. It was only my first visit to Verdi’s but I already knew it would be first of many.
Anna – The story of our family in London begins in Clerkenwell.
Mimi – Our nonno [grandfather] Giuseppe, he came here more than hundred years ago and lived in Warner St, Back Hill at the back of the Italian church. He walked from Parma where we come from and he made his way to Paris, where he stopped and worked there for a year, then he moved over to London.
Anna – He walked to London and – as all Italians did – he knocked on the kitchen door of the Savoy and said ‘I’m Italian’ and they said ‘Come in and start working.”
Mimi – After a while he became a chef and, once made some money, he sold his half of the family house in Parma to his brother. With the money – he had a hundred pounds – he bought his first cafe in Robin Hood Lane, Poplar while he was living in Back Hill. It was called ‘The Grand Cafe.’
Anna – Italians aren’t very adventurous with their names for cafes. You have probably seen those around Liverpool St Station called ‘Savoy,’ that’s because they used to work at the Savoy. My nonno, he called his ‘The Grand Cafe’ because the most expensive and most beautiful one was The Grand Cafe.
Mimi – When the Second World War broke out, he was going to be an Italian in London and he had trouble.
Anna – Mostly – my dad said – they came from Canning Town and they wanted to smash the cafe up. The police came along they would not stop them, so the Irish publican from the next street climbed over the back fence. He said, ‘Joe, get the kids and everybody out,’ so they all went over the fence to the pub. Then the Irish publican and my father stood outside the cafe to face the men who were gathered there.
Mimi – The police stood back and said to the people, ‘You’ve got five minutes to do what you want,’ stealing cigarettes and food.
Anna – It wasn’t that they hated them or had any bad feelings towards Italians personally, it was just an opportunity to grab.
Mimi – It was the war and Italy was the enemy.
Anna – My nonno said to them, ‘There’s more of you than us – there’s only two of us – but the first man that comes near my cafe I will kill.’ So they never came near it! After that, he put up the photograph in the cafe of my uncle in uniform fighting for Britain to stop them doing it again.
Mimi – He hid his wife and children down at Leigh on Sea with his mother.
Anna – She was meant to be interned, so every time a policeman came around they used to push her into the bushes to hide.
Mimi – If she had been caught, she would have been interned and possibly sent on the Andorra Star that sank.
Anna – The layout of our restaurant today is identical to The Grand Cafe
Mimi – When many Italians came over to London, it was their first port of call and they’d work for him for two or three months, washing up or peeling potatoes, and they’d sleep upstairs until they got accommodation.
Anna – After the war, they employed Mimi – a lovely lady.
Mimi – During the war, she had been in Italy. Our family were partisans, helping the British and Americans get over to Switzerland. She had two cellars under where she kept the cows and she hid a British and an American officer when the Germans came. She tripped the German up on purpose to distract his attention, so he got his gun and held it to her head. He was about to shoot her, but she said, ‘No I tripped!’ and pointed to her toe that she had cut working on the farm that morning. There was still blood on it.
Anna – And the British and American soldiers got away! After the war, they used to come to nonno’s cafe to see Mimi because if it weren’t for her, they’d all be dead.
Mimi – She was a nanny and she brought my father up and then she married into the Biffa family, famous for their dustcarts.
Anna – The cafe ran until 1964 when my nonno died…
Mimi – … but my nonna [grandmother] carried it on until the late seventies, though she couldn’t do it on her own.
Anna – We used to love it!
Mimi – We used to run and see our nonna, she always had chocolates to give us and she used to say, ‘Go downstairs to the restaurant and behind the bar.’
Anna – She used to let us take boxes of Blue Ribbon chocolates home.
Mimi – And bottles of Coca Cola.
Anna – We didn’t have sweets at home! Our parents grew up in the war.
Mimi – We wanted so much! We just used to go down and open bottles of Coca Cola. My mother used to go mad.
Anna – We had never had bottles of Coca Cola, we were only allowed lemonade on our birthdays.
Mimi – Nonna always bought us the most amazing Christmas presents, I got Tiny Tears!
Anna – We used to go the cafe and sit down as a family for Christmas dinner and eat really beautiful food.
Mimi – Going my nonna’s room was a bit scary, it was through a side door and full of old things, my father’s and his brothers and sisters’ old toys. It was dark and there was the smell of mothballs.
Anna – There was no bathroom, it was in the back yard. They used to get paid to keep the elephant from the circus in the back yard when it was in town.
Mimi – She used to make the most wonderful tortellini in brodo, which you had today.
Anna – We were always warned against opening a restaurant. Nonna said, ‘No!’
Mimi – Nonna used to pull up her dress to show two little bowed legs with varicose veins. ‘If you want legs like this, go into a restaurant,’ she warned us. She said, ‘It killed your nonno and it’s killing me.’
Anna – But we thought it would be different today.
Mimi – They cooked, they served and they cleaned.
Anna – We used to drive past this place which was once a pub, and had such a beautiful interior and high ceiling. We said, ‘Somebody should do something really amazing with it.’
Mimi – We used to go back to Italy just to eat true home Parma food and in the end we said, ‘There’s nowhere where you can get proper Italian food between Aldgate East and Bow.’ So we opened this place, and nonna was right – it’s killing us!
Anna – We grew up around restaurants and it is in our blood.
Mimi – I love the mornings! I am the early morning person and she’s the late nighter.
Anna – You take care of the cooks.
Mimi – I make sure the deliveries are in and the cleaning is done, and she does front of house. I’m domesticated, she’s not!
Anna – It’s true.
Mimi – We live across the road from each other, round the corner in Mile End. We were always close as children.
Anna – We opened on our nonna’s birthday which was 26th July four years ago.
Mimi – I think my nonna would be so proud of us …
Anna – And especially my nonno!
Mimi – … that we carried the business on.
Tortellini in Brodo
Marcio Polezia fries the calves’ liver on St Giuseppe’s Day
Calves’ liver with red onions and sage, mashed potato and spinach is the St Giuseppe’s Day dish
Marcio Polezia, Chef & Andrea Furia, Sous Chef
Giuseppe Orsi is the boy (second from the left with the neckerchief, behind the gentleman with the big moustache) among other chefs when he worked at the Savoy in 1912
The Grand Cafe with Giuseppe Orsi standing in the long coat accompanied by the Irish landlord of the neighbouring pub in the thirties
Giuseppe Orsi (senior) shows Giuseppe Orsi (junior) how to pour a cup of tea in the early fifties
Giuseppe (junior), Anna & Mimi’s father, took over from Giuseppe (senior)
Mimi Orsi
Anna Orsi
Verdis was formerly The Three Crowns which opened before 1719 and closed in 2010
Colour photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
VERDI’S, 237 Mile End Rd, Stepney, E1 4AA
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Viscountess Boudica At Easter
On Easter Monday, we celebrate our dearly beloved Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green who once entertained us with her seasonal frolics and capers but is now exiled to Uttoxeter
She may be no Spring chicken but that never stopped the indefatigable Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green from dressing up as an Easter chick!
As is her custom at each of the festivals which mark our passage through the year, she embraced the spirit of the occasion wholeheartedly – festooning her tiny flat with seasonal decor and contriving a special outfit for herself that suited the tenor of the day. “Easter’s about renewal – birth, life and death – the end of one thing and the beginning of another,” she assured me when I arrived, getting right to the heart of it at once with characteristic forthrightness.
I felt like a child visiting a beloved grandmother or favourite aunt whenever I call round to see Viscountess Boudica because, although I never knew what treats lie in store, I was never disappointed. Even as I walked in the door, I knew that days of preparation preceded my visit. Naturally for Easter there were a great many fluffy creatures in evidence, ducks and rabbits recalling her rural childhood. “When my uncle had his farm, I used to put the little chicks in my pocket and carry them round with me,” she confided with a nostalgic grin, as she led me over to admire the wonder of her Easter garden where yellow creatures of varying sizes were gathering upon a small mat of greengrocer’s grass, around a tree hung with glass eggs, as if in expectation of a sacred ritual.
I cast my eyes around at the plethora of Easter cards, testifying to the popularity of the Viscountess, and her Easter bunting and Easter fairy lights that adorned the walls. There could be no question that the festival was anything other than Easter in this place. “As a child, I used to get a twig and spray it with paint and hang eggs from it,” she explained, recalling the modest origin of the current extravaganza and adding, “I hope this will inspire others to decorate their homes.”
“Cadbury’s Dairy Milk is my favourite,” she confessed to me, chuckling in excited anticipation and patting her waistline warily, “I probably will eat a lot of chocolate on Easter Monday – once I start eating chocolate, I can’t stop.” And then, just like that beloved grandmother or favourite aunt, Viscountess Boudica kindly slipped a chocolate egg into my hands, as I said my farewell and carried it off under my arm back to Spitalfields as a proud trophy of the day.
Viscountess Boudica writes her Easter cards
“yellow creatures of varying sizes were gathering upon a small mat of greengrocer’s grass, around a tree hung with glass eggs, as if in expectation of a sacred ritual”
Viscountess Boudica turns Weather Girl to present the forecast for the Easter Bank Holiday – “I predict a dull start with a few patches of sunshine and some isolated showers. In the West Country, it will be nice all day with temperatures between sixty and eighty degrees Farenheit. There will be a small breeze on the coast and sea temperature of around fifty-nine degrees Farenheit.”
Easter blessings to you from Viscountess Boudica!
Viscountess Boudica and her fluffy friends
Be sure to follow Viscountess Boudica’s blog There’s More To Life Than Heaven & Earth
Take a look at
The Departure of Viscountess Boudica
Viscountess Boudica’s Domestic Appliances
Viscountess Boudica’s Halloween
Viscountess Boudica’s Christmas
Viscountess Boudica’s Valentine’s Day
Viscountess Boudica’s St Patrick’s Day
Read my original profile of Mark Petty, Trendsetter
and take a look at Mark Petty’s Multicoloured Coats
