Charles Jones, Photographer
Garden scene with photographer’s cloth backdrop c.1900
These beautiful photographs are all that exist to speak of the life of Charles Jones. Very little is known of the events and tenor of his existence, and even the survival of these pictures was left to chance, but now they ensure him posthumous status as one of the great plant photographers. When he died in Lincolnshire in 1959, aged 92, without claiming his pension for many years and in a house without running water or electricity, almost no-one was aware that he was a photographer. And he would be completely forgotten now, if not for the fortuitous discovery made twenty-two years later at Bermondsey Market, of a box of hundreds of his golden-toned gelatin silver prints made from glass plate negatives.
Born in 1866 in Wolverhampton, Jones was an exceptionally gifted professional gardener who worked upon several private estates, most notably Ote Hall near Burgess Hill in Sussex, where his talent received the attention of The Gardener’s Chronicle of 20th September 1905.
“The present gardener, Charles Jones, has had a large share in the modelling of the gardens as they now appear, for on all sides can be seen evidence of his work in the making of flowerbeds and borders and in the planting of fruit trees. Mr Jones is quite an enthusiastic fruit grower and his delight in his well-trained trees was readily apparent…. The lack of extensive glasshouses is no deterrent to Mr Jones in producing supplies of choice fruit and flowers… By the help of wind screens, he has converted warm nooks into suitable places for the growing of tender subjects and with the aid of a few unheated frames produces a goodly supply. Thus is the resourcefulness of the ingenious gardener who has not an unlimited supply of the best appurtenances seen.”
The mystery is how Jones produced such a huge body of photography and developed his distinctive aesthetic in complete isolation. The quality of the prints and notation suggests that he regarded himself as a serious photographer although there is no evidence that he ever published or exhibited his work. A sole advert in Popular Gardening exists offering to photograph people’s gardens for half a crown, suggesting wider ambitions, yet whether anyone took him up on the offer we do not know. Jones’ grandchildren recall that, in old age, he used his own glass plates as cloches to protect his seedlings against frost – which may explain why no negatives have survived.
There is a spare quality and an uncluttered aesthetic in Jones’ images that permits them to appear contemporary a hundred years after they were taken, while the intense focus upon the minutiae of these specimens reveals both Jones’ close knowledge of his own produce and his pride as a gardener in recording his creations. Charles Jones’ sensibility, delighting in the bounty of nature and the beauty of plant forms, and fascinated with variance in growth, is one that any gardener or cook will appreciate.
Swede Green Top
Bean Runner
Stokesia Cyanea
Turnip Green Globe
Bean Longpod
Potato Midlothian Early
Pea Rival
Onion Brown Globe
Cucumber Ridge
Mangold Yellow Globe
Bean (Dwarf) Ne Plus Ultra
Mangold Red Tankard
Seedpods on the head of a Standard Rose
Ornamental Gourd
Bean Runner
Apple Gateshead Codlin
Captain Hayward
Larry’s Perfection
Pear Beurré Diel
Melon Sutton’s Superlative
Mangold Green Top
Charles Harry Jones (1866-1959) c. 1904
The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones by Sean Sexton & Robert Flynn Johnson is published by Thames & Hudson
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The Secret Gardens of Spitalfields
Thomas Fairchild, Gardener of Hoxton
Buying Vegetables for Leila’s Shop
High Days & Holidays Of Old London
With another Bank Holiday imminent, it is time for us to consider high days & holidays of old London
Boys lining up at The Oval, c.1930
School is out. Work is out. All of London is on the lam. Everyone is on the streets. Everyone is in the parks. What is going on? Is it a jamboree? Is it a wingding? Is it a shindig? Is it a bevy? Is it a bash?
These are the high days and holidays of old London, as recorded on glass slides by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society and once used for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute.
No doubt these lectures had an educational purpose, elucidating the remote origins of London’s quaint old ceremonies. No doubt they had a patriotic purpose to encourage wonder and sentiment at the marvel of royal pageantry. Yet the simple truth is that Londoners – in common with the rest of humanity – are always eager for novelty, entertainment and spectacle, always seeking any excuse to have fun. And London is a city ripe with all kinds of opportunities for amusement, as illustrated by these magnificent photographs of its citizens at play.
Are you ready? Are you togged up? Did you brush your hair? Did you polish your shoes? There is no time to lose. We need the make the most of our high days and holidays. And we need to get there before the parade passes by.
At Hampstead Heath, c.1910.
Walls Ice Cream vendor, c.1920.
At Hampstead Heath, c.1910.
At Hampstead Heath, c.1910.
Balloon ascent at Crystal Palace, Sydenham, c.1930.
At the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, 1896.
Christ’s Hospital Procession across bridge on St Matthews Day, 1936.
A cycle excursion to The Spotted Dog in West Ham, 1930.
Pancake Greaze at Westminster School on Shrove Tuesday, c.1910.
Variety at the Shepherds Bush Empire, c.1920.
Dignitaries visit the Chelsea Royal Hospital, c.1920.
Games at the Foundling Hospital, Bloomsbury, c.1920.
Riders in Rotten Row, Hyde Park, c.1910.
Physiotherapy at a Sanatorium, 1916.
Vintners’ Company, Master’s Installation procession, City of London, c.1920.
Boating on the lake in Battersea Park, c.1920.
The King’s Coach, c.1911.
Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession, 1897.
Lord Mayor’s Procession passing St Paul’s, 1933.
Policemen gives directions to ladies at the coronation of Edward VII, 1902.
After the procession for the coronation of George V, c.1911.
Observance of the feast of Charles I at Church of St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, 1932.
Chief Yeoman Warder oversees the Beating of the Bounds at the Tower of London, 1920.
Schoolchildren Beating the Bounds at the Tower of London, 1920.
A cycle excursion to Chingford Old Church, c.1910.
Litterbugs at Hampstead Heath, c.1930.
The Foundling Hospital Anti-Litter Band, c.1930.
Distribution of sixpences to widows at St Bartholomew the Great on Good Friday, c.1920.
Visiting the Cast Court to see Trajan’s Column at the Victoria & Albert Museum, c.1920.
A trip from Chelsea Pier, c.1910.
Doggett’s Coat & Badge Race, c.1920.
Feeding pigeons outside St Paul’s, c.1910.
Building the Great Wheel, Earls Court, c.1910.
Glass slides copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
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The Map Of Industrious Shoreditch
Each Saturday, we shall be featuring one of Adam Dant’s MAPS OF LONDON & BEYOND from the forthcoming book of his extraordinary cartography to be 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
Click to enlarge and study the details of Industrious Shoreditch
A century before the New Industries that define Shoreditch today, there were once the Old Industries. Then, small manufacturers and their suppliers occupied every building, and the neighbourhood teemed with skilled workers and craftsmen who made things with their hands. Cartographer extraordinaire Adam Dant celebrates this culture with his Map of Industrious Shoreditch, 1912.
“I chose 1912 because it precedes the First World War, when everything changed. It encapsulates Industrious Shoreditch,” explained Adam, “I started off with the major landmarks serving the industries of the time. For the main thoroughfares, I listed the concentrations of manufacturers, using lists of companies from the Post Office Directories. These are complemented by vignettes of people making things, and I filled the border with machines used for wood and metalwork.”
After the First World War, many of the industries moved to larger factories outside London and the twentieth century saw the decline of manufacturing in Shoreditch, with the hardware shops and suppliers of raw materials being the last to go, holding on even into recent decades. Now that Shoreditch is booming again with new technology companies occupying many of the old buildings once used for manufacturing, Adam Dant’s map offers us a poignant opportunity to explore that lost world of industriousness.
You will discover mattress makers, french polishers, feather dyers, hatters, bootmakers, chandlers, over-mantle manufacturers, cabinet makers, coach builders, wood turners, corset makers, and more…
Adam Dant goes in search of Industrious Shoreditch
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.
Adam Dant’s limited edition prints are available to purchase through TAG Fine Arts
Readers are invited to visit the London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy this weekend where some of Adam Dant’s prints are being displayed. Click here for two complimentary tickets.
The Little Yellow Watch Shop
John Lloyd, Watch Repairer
When you step into The Little Yellow Watch Shop in the Clerkenwell Rd, you discover yourself among an eager line of customers clutching their precious timepieces patiently and awaiting the moment they can hand them into the safe hands of John Lloyd, the watch repairer who has worked in Clerkenwell longer than any other. With his long snowy white locks, John looks like a magus, as if by merely peering down critically over his long nose at a broken watch and snapping his fingers, he could conjure it back into life.
While John works his charm, his wife Annie Lloyd fulfils the role of magician’s assistant with consummate grace, taking down all the necessary information from the owner and keeping everything moving with superlative efficiency. Together they preside over a hundred watches a week arriving for repair, and thereby maintain the tradition of clock-making and repair that has occupied Clerkenwell for centuries.
John has worked in the Clerkenwell Rd since 1956 and remembers when every shop between St John St and Goswell Rd was a watch repair or watch materials supply shop. Today, although his business is now one of just a tiny handful remaining in Clerkenwell, it is apparent that there is a healthy demand for his services to sustain him for as long as he pleases.
“I’m from Shepherd’s Bush originally and my stepfather had a watch repair stall in Romford Market,” John admitted to me, “I was only eleven when I started to work with him, but I quickly took to it.”
“I first came to Clerkenwell in the nineteen-forties, when I did a three year course in Instrument Making at the Northampton Polytechnic, now known as the City University. Then I joined A. Shoot & Sons in Whitechapel at seventeen years old, was conscripted for National Service at eighteen and returned to my job again in 1956. Shoot & Sons supplied watch materials from a tall thin building at 85 Whitechapel High St next to the Whitechapel Gallery, but in that year we moved to Whitworth Buildings in Clerkenwell and then to the corner of St John St & Clerkenwell Rd in 1959. At Shoot & Sons, I used to go to the manager Leslie Lawson at weekends and we stripped down antique watches together – not many people these days know the inside workings of a watch.”
In 1992, when Shoot & Sons Ltd closed after more than thirty years on the corner, John moved to the kiosk fifty yards away at 60 Clerkwenwell Rd which was even smaller than the current Little Watch Shop. He opened it in partnership with his colleague Barry Benjamin but, when Barry became ill after just three years, John continued the business alone until his wife Annie came in one day a week and then later joined him full time. What was once a miniscule kiosk has expanded into a tiny shop where John presides happily from behind the counter, surrounded by photos of old Clerkenwell and his step-father’s sign from Romford market where John started out in the nineteen-forties.
“People ask me when I ‘m going to retire,” John confided to me gleefully, “but I’m already past retirement age – I’m having too much fun here.”
John Lloyd – Clerkenwell’s longest-serving member of the watch business
John’s mother and stepfather in Brighton, 1954
At Shoot & Sons Ltd
Maurice Shoot, John’s boss from the early fifties until his retirement in 1989
Phil, John and Barry at Shoots
Shoot & Sons Ltd on the corner of St John St & Clerkenwell Rd in the eighties
The interior of the shop at Shoot & Sons Ltd
60 Clerkenwell Rd in 1900, note the watch and clock shops
Clerkenwell Rd in the sixties
Barry Benjamin outside the original Little Yellow Shop
Signs uncovered in the expansion of the Little Yellow Shop
John & Annie Lloyd
Portraits © Estate of Colin O’Brien
The Little Yellow Shop, watch service centre, 60 Clerkenwell Rd, EC1
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At Embassy Electrical Supplies
At The Brady Clubs
These lively photographs of activities at the Brady Clubs are from a collection of pictures uncovered by Hannah Charlton at the former Museum of Labour History in Limehouse.
The Brady Boys’ Club in Whitechapel was the first Jewish boys’ club in this country. Founded in 1896 by philanthropists Lady Charlotte Rothschild, Mrs Arthur Franklin and Mrs N. S. Joseph, the club provided both recreational and educational opportunities as well as the chance to go to a summer camp. The Girls’ Club was founded in 1921 by Miriam Moses, social reformer and first woman mayor of Stepney.
At the girls’ summer camp in Swanage, 1934
Miriam Moses at an ARP meeting, c. 1938
Brady music group, 1949
A club show, c. 1950
At the boys’ summer camp in Dymchurch, c. 1951
At the playcentre, c. 1957
A gymnastic display, c.1957
The film club, c. 1958
The girls’ netball team, c. 1958
The photography club, c. 1960
The football team in training, c. 1960
At the boys’ summer camp in Charmouth, c.1963
At a social event, c. 1965
At the girls’ summer camp, Skeet House, Kent
At Skeet House c. 1966
In the canteen, c. 1968
Prince Philip visited the Brady Club in the sixties
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Charles Chusseau-Flaviens, Photographer
Petticoat Lane
Photographer Charles Chusseau-Flaviens came to London from Paris and took these pictures, reproduced courtesy of George Eastman House, before the First World War – mostly likely in 1911. This date is suggested by his photograph of the proclamation of the coronation of George V which took place in that year. Very little is known of Chusseau-Flaviens except he founded one of the world’s first picture agencies, located at 46 Rue Bayen, and he operated through the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century. Although their origin is an enigma, Chusseau-Flaviens’ photographs of London and especially of Petticoat Lane constitute a rare and surprisingly intimate vision of a lost world.
Petticoat Lane
Sandys Row with Frying Pan Alley to the right
Proclamation of the coronation of George V, 1911
Crossing sweeper in the West End
Policeman on the beat in Oxford Circus, Regent St
Beating the bounds for the Tower of London, Trinity Sq
Boats on the Round Pond, Kensington Gardens
Suffragette in Trafalgar Sq
Photographs courtesy George Eastman House
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At Morden College
At the southeast corner of Blackheath Park stands a red-brick nineteenth century gatehouse with a drive curving beyond and disappearing into the trees. You might wonder if this is the London retreat of a reclusive plutocrat, yet a sign announcing ‘Morden College’ disabuses you of this notion. So then you assume it must be an exclusive private school and you look for errant pupils in uniform, yet you are wrong again. Morden College is one of the capital’s best-kept secrets.
It was founded by Sir John Morden (1623-1708) in 1685 as a charitable home for ‘decayed merchants’ of the Levant Company and constructed in the style of Christopher Wren by Wren’s master-mason Edward Strong. Remarkably, it is still going strong and now offers good quality retirement accommodation to four hundred people, including a nursing home.
When I visited recently, I walked up the sweeping drive to pass through the main entrance beneath the statues of Sir John & Lady Susan Morden and arrive at the central quadrangle, which looks as fine today as it did three hundred years ago. It was my privilege to enjoy lunch in the dining hall, sitting beneath the portrait of Sir John, followed by a stroll around the well-kept gardens just as the wisteria was coming into flower.
Sir John Morden administered the college himself in his final years and it flourishes today as a inspirational and far-sighted example of philanthropy. Born into a modest family in the parish of St Bride’s, Fleet St, he rose by his own ability through an apprenticeship to a Committee Member of the East India Company. After a successful posting to Aleppo, he later became Deputy Governor of the Company and a Board Member of the Levant Company. Yet he also lived through the Plague and the Great Fire, causing him to move from the City to Greenwich where Charles II held court and many distinguished Londoners sought refuge at the time. As his friend Daniel Defoe noted, “The beauty of Greenwich is owing to the lustre of its inhabitants.”
Without children, Sir John had no heir for his fortune and decided to use his wealth to found a college for, “Poor Merchants and such as have lost their Estates by accidents, danger and Perills of the Seas or by any other way of means in their honest endeavours to get a living by means of Merchandizing.”
Defoe wrote describing the venture.
“I had it from his own mouth that he was to make apartments for forty decay’d merchants to whom he resolv’d to allow forty shillings per annum each, with coals, a gown (and servants to look after their apartments) and many other conveniences so as the make their lives as comfortable as possible.
Each apartments consists of a bedchamber and a study, or large closet for their retreat, and to divert themselves with books etc.
They have a public kitchen, a hall to dine in. There is also a very good apartment for the chaplain, whose salary is fifty shillings a year, there are also dwellings for the cooks, butlers, porter, the women, and other servants, and reasonable salaries allow’d them. Behind the chapel is a handsome burial ground wall’d in, there are also very good gardens. In a word, it is the noblest foundation and most considerable single piece of charity that has been erected in England since Sutton’s hospital in London.”
While enjoying the benefits of good fortune, John Morden recognised that it was equally possible to suffer ill-fortune and – with startling insight and generosity – left his inheritance to support to those who needed it, in perpetuity. When William Morris campaigned to save the Trinity Green Almhouses in Whitechapel in the eighteen-eighties, he argued that we need them as a reminder of the enduring spirit of fellowship. I came away from Morden College uplifted by the same thought, humbled and touched by John Morden’s open-handed appreciation of the needs of others, and with a renewed recognition of the responsibility we all have to support those who are vulnerable in our society.
Anagram & acrostic in memory of Sir John Morden over the entrance to the dining hall
At the southeast corner of Blackheath Park stands a red-brick nineteenth century gatehouse
Constructed in the style of Christopher Wren by Wren’s master mason Edward Strong
“His statue in stone set up by his lady and since her death her own is set up near by the trustees” – Daniel Defoe commented on the statues of Sir John & Lady Susan Morden when he visited in 1725
Entrance to the quadrangle
“And that there be a Sun Dyall set up for Keeping the Clock right w’ch often goes wrong.” The motto reads “Sic Umbra, sic vita,” comparing the transiency of life to a fleeting shadow.
“the chaplain, whose salary is fifty shillings a year”
“a handsome burial ground wall’d in”
The Edwardstone bell from the church where Lady Susan Morden worshipped as a child
Mulberry tree c.1700
“there are also very good gardens”
Purple sprouting and wisteria in the allotments
The college fire engine was presented by Richard Chiswell in 1751
Morden College, 1755
Sir John Morden (Courtesy of Wellcome Foundation)
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