Tower Hamlets Advertisements, 1967
To divert me while I have been poorly, Stefan Dickers the Archivist at Bishopsgate Institute kindly sent me these wonderful advertisements from a History of Tower Hamlets produced by the council in 1967 and I could not resist showing them to you. Fifty years later, it is poignant to contemplate these proud images of manufacturing and long-established local businesses which are now all gone.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Tony Bock On The Railways
A mischievous trainspotter changes the departure time at Liverpool St Station
“I have always liked railway stations, a focal point of the community – the start and finish of a journey,” Photographer Tony Bock admitted to me, introducing these elegant pictures. “Often the journey was a daily chore, but sometimes it was an occasion,” he added, in appreciation of the innate drama of rail travel.
Tony’s railway photographs date from the years between 1973 and 1978, when he was living in the East End and worked on the East London Advertiser, before he left to take took a job on the Toronto Star, pursuing a career as a photojournalist there through four decades.
“Although plenty has been written about the architecture of railways and the industrial ‘cathedrals’ – from the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is easy to forget the great change the railway brought when it first arrived in the mid-nineteeth century. Liverpool St Station was opened in 1874 and survived largely unchanged into the nineteen seventies.
So, in 1977, when proposals to redevelop the station were suggested, I decided to spend some time there, documenting the life of the station with its astonishing brick and iron architecture. I loved the cleaners, taking a break, and the young lad taking it upon himself to reschedule the next train – ‘Not This Train’! Meanwhile, the evening commuters heading home looked as if they were being drawn by a mysterious force.
Next door to Liverpool St was Broad St Station, only used for commuter trains from North London then and already it was looking very neglected. Only a few years later, it closed when Liverpool St was redeveloped.
Over in Stratford, the rail sheds dated back to the days when the Great Eastern Railway serviced locomotives there. Surprisingly, British Rail were still using some of the sheds in 1977, maintaining locomotives amongst the rubble that eventually became the site of the Olympic Park.
Finally, from the very earliest days of railways, I found three posters on the wall in the London Dock, Wapping. The one in the centre is from the Great Northern Railway, dated 1849, the other two from the North Union Railway Company, dated 1836, and it is still possible to read that one hundred and twelve pounds or ten cubic feet would be carried for three shillings according to the Rates, Tolls and Duties. The North Union operated in Lancashire and only lasted until 1846. How did these posters survive, they were likely one hundred and thirty years old. I wonder if anyone was able to salvage them?
I suppose there is an irony that I am writing this today in my home which is a village railway station built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1904. The building now sits in woods, since the local branchline is long gone. Yet any station – grand or modest – will always carry a significance for the community they are part of.”
Farewells at LIverpool St
Ticket collecting at Liverpool St
Cleaners, taking a break, at Liverpool St.
Commuters at Broad St Station.
Waiting for a train at Victoria Station
Wartime sign in the cellar of Broad St Station, demolished in 1986.
Stratford Railway works, now engulfed beneath the Olympic site
Repair sheds at Stratford
Engine sheds at Stratford
Railway posters dating from 1836 in London Dock, Wapping
Photographs copyright © Tony Bock
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East End Snowmen Of Yesteryear
While languishing in my bed with a chill these past few days, I have been watching the snow falling outside and recalling the transient souls of those long-gone East End snowmen of yesteryear that I was able immortalise with my camera
At first I came upon them in yards and gardens, but before long they were scattered all over the parks and open spaces, lonely sentinels with frozen smiles. Snowmen are short-lived beings and many of those I photographed were just completed, only to be destroyed shortly after my pictures were taken. Yet when I returned later, I often found they had been reconstructed, and – as others appeared in the vicinity and the creators sought to be distinctive – a strange kind of evolution was taking place.
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The Gentle Author At The Society Of Genealogists
I am giving an illustrated lecture on the CRIES OF LONDON at the Society of Genealogists in Clerkenwell on Thursday 15th March at 2pm, showing images of itinerant traders over the last four hundred years and talking about the reality of the lives of those who once eked an ingenious living on the streets we walk today.
If you have never visited the Society in Charterhouse before, this is the ideal introduction.
Of all the CRIES OF LONDON I have come across, this anonymously-published set believed to be by Luke Clennell is my favourite. The hawkers in his woodcuts look filthy, with bad skin and teeth, dressed in ragged clothes, either skinny as cadavers or fat as thieves, and with hands as scrawny as rats’ claws.You can almost smell their bad breath and sweaty unwashed bodies, pushing themselves up against you in the crowd to make a hard sell.
Luke Clennell was apprenticed as an engraver to Thomas Bewick and then moved to London in 1804 as a young man, seeking a career as a painter and winning a major commission in 1816 from the Earl of Bridgewater to do portraits of more than four hundred guests at dinner in the Guildhall. The impossibility of getting all these subjects to sit for him drove Clennell to a nervous breakdown and he was committed to Salisbury Asylum. Although he recovered sufficiently to continue his career, he was afflicted with mental illness for the rest of his life and died in Newcastle Asylum in 1840.
The distinctive quality of Clennell’s Cries, first published as ‘London Melodies & Cries of the Seasons’ in 1812, stands out among the hundreds of anonymous woodcuts published in chapbooks in the early nineteenth century by virtue of their lively texture and unapologetic, unsentimental portraiture.
Clennell’s hawkers are never going to be framed on the parlour wall and they do not give a toss. They own their defiant uncouth spirit. They are a rough bunch with ready fists that you would not wish to encounter in a narrow byway on a dark night. Yet they are survivors who know the lore of the streets, how to scratch a living out of little more than resourcefulness, and how to turn a shilling as easily as a groat.
With unrivalled spirit, savage humour, profane vocabulary and a rapacious appetite, Luke Clennell’s woodcuts are the most street-wise of all the Cries. He gloried in the grotesque features and unrestrained personalities of hawkers, while also permitting them an unbridled humanity that we can only regard with esteem. They call to me across the centuries, crying, “Sweet and Pretty Beau-Pots – One a-Penny” and “Buy my Live Scate.”
Rabbit, Rabbit – Nice fat Rabbit
All Round & Sound, Full Weight, Threepence a Pound, my Ripe Kentish Cherries.
Buy my Fresh Herrings, Fresh Herrings, O! Three a Groat, Herrings, O!
Buy a Nice Wax Doll – Rosy and Fresh.
The King’s Speech, The King’s Speech to both Houses of Parliament.
Here’s all a Blowing, Alive and Growing – Choice Shrubs and Plants, Alive and Growing.
Hot Spice Gingerbread, Hot – Come buy my Spice Gingerbread, Smoaking Hot – Hot Spice Gingerbread, All Hot.
Any Earthen Ware, Plates, Dishes, or Jugs, today – any Clothes to Exchange, Madam?
Hot Mutton Dumplings – Nice Dumplings, All Hot.
Buy a Hat Box, Cap Box, or Bonnet Box.
Buy my Baskets, a Work, Fruit, or a Bread Basket.
Chickens, a Nice Fat Chicken – Chicken, or a Young Fowl.
Sweet and Pretty Beau-Pots, One a-Penny – Chickweed and Groundsel for your Birds.
Buy my Wooden Ware – a Bowl, Dish, Spoon or Platter.
Six Bunches a-Penny, Sweet Lavender – Six Bunches a-Penny, Sweet Blooming Lavender.
Here’s One a-Penny – Here’s Two a-Penny, Hot Cross Buns.
Lilies of the Valley, Sweet Lilies of the Valley.
Cats Meat, Dogs Meat – Any Cat’s or Dog’s Meat Today?
Buy my Live Scate, Live Scate – Buy my Dainty Fresh Salmon.
Mackerel, O! Four for shilling, Mackerel, O!
Hastings Green and Young Hastings. Here’s Young Peas, Tenpence a Peck, Marrow-fat Peas.
Self-portrait by Luke Clennell (1781–1840)
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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CLICK TO BUY A COPY OF THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S CRIES OF LONDON FOR £20
Kate Parry Frye’s Suffragette Diary
Elizabeth Crawford, bookdealer and writer specialising in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, reveals how she discovered Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary, telling the forgotten story of one woman’s contribution to the campaign for Votes for Women which took place in the East End a century ago.
Kate Parry Frye (1878-1959)
Operating from 321 Roman Rd, Sylvia Pankhurst’s ‘East London Federation of Suffragettes’ is the most famous of the groups in the East End who backed George Lansbury, the Labour MP, when he resigned his Bromley & Bow seat to fight a by-election on the ‘Votes for Women’ issue in the autumn of 1912. Yet, also knocking on doors and holding meetings was the ‘New Constitutional Society for Women’s Suffrage’ about which very little was known, until now.
In 1912, the diarist, Kate Parry Frye, was out on the streets of Bow canvassing for Lansbury and she also took part in a short, sharp Whitechapel campaign, a year later. Her voluminous diary has only recently come to light, replete with an archive of associated ephemera, recording her efforts to convert the men and women of Southern England to the cause of ‘Votes for Women.’ Her diary entries, written while she was a paid organiser for the Society, bring to life what was – in her eyes – the alien territory of the East End.
I discovered the diaries piled in boxes in a dripping North London cellar while working in my capacity as book dealer. Loath to reject this record of one woman’s entire life, however unsellable the soaking volumes appeared, curiosity got the better of my common sense and I purchased them. Once they were dried out, I began to read them and the existence of the diarist took shape – or, rather, Kate reshaped herself as she came to life.
Her story is not extraordinary in outline, but extraordinary in the engrossing details of life that she committed to paper. Where another diarist might select only the highlight of a day, Kate gives us train times, meal times, details of the contents of those meals, details of lodgings, landladies, restaurants, tube lines, parties, palm readings, clothes-buying, dog-walking, dentist and doctor visits, attendance at election meetings, Suffrage campaigning – both as a volunteer and as an employee – and of play-going and play-writing.
Kate, a well brought-up daughter of the ‘grocerage,’ had been a devotée of the stage, pursuing acting until she realised the theatre would never pay. And being able to pay her way became increasingly important when her father, who in the eighteen-eighties developed a chain of grocery shops, forsook his business for politics, holding the North Kensington seat as a radical Liberal MP. Beguiled by Westminster, he subsequently lost control of his family business and, eventually, even of his home – which led to Kate taking up work as a paid organiser for the New Constitutional Society.
It is extraordinary that, even after a hundred years, new primary material such as Kate Parry Frye’s Diary has surfaced, allowing us access to the experience, without the interference of hindsight, of the life of a Suffragette. Recognising the value of Kate’s experience, I decided that rather than selling the manuscripts of her diaries I would edit the entries for 1911-1915 as Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary.
With Kate as a guide, readers may trace the ‘Votes for Women’ campaign day by day, as she knocks on doors, arranges meetings, trembles on platforms, speaks from carts in market squares, village greens, and seaside piers – enduring indifference, incivility and even the threat of firecrackers under her skirt. Her words bring to life the experience of the itinerant organiser – a world of train journeys, of complicated luggage conveyance, of hotels and hotel flirtations, of boarding houses, of landladies, and of the quaintness of fellow boarders. No other diary gives such an extensive account of the working life of a Suffragette, one who had an eye for the grand tableau as well as the minutiae, such as producing an advertisement for a village meeting or, as in the following entries, campaigning in Whitechapel.
Saturday September 27th 1913
Another boiling day. On top of a bus to Whitechapel. A meeting of women and girls who had been before – and a tea given by Miss Raynsford Jackson who afterwards addressed them and could not be heard beyond the first row, I should say, and in any case was very tedious. However one girl ended by playing the piano and made a deafening row. Miss Mansell, Miss McGowan’s nice friend, was there – she is a dear – she did all the tea. I chatted and handed round. The girls were so nice – nearly all Jewesses. The pitiful tales they tell of the sweated work is awful – and they are so intelligent – and quite well dressed. The Jews are an example to the gentile in that way.
Wednesday October 1st 1913
Bus to Piccadilly Circus – lunch at [Eustace] Miles [a vegetarian restaurant] – by train from Charing Cross to St Mary’s [the nearest railway station to the Whitechapel Committee room], getting there at two o’clock. I need not have hurried as we did not start out on our Poster Parade until three o’clock. Miss McGowan, Miss Simeon, Miss Goddard and myself, with Miss Mansell to help give out bills. It was a great success – the Whitechapel folks were very entertained and very few were rude and rough. We got back about five all very tired – it is tiring work, the pace is so slow and one has to be so keenly on the lookout for everything – and the mud and dirt in the gutter is so horrid. Then after tea I went off to Mark Lane again to give out bills. Had some sardines on toast at Lyons and to the Committee room 136 Whitechapel Rd at 7.45pm where I was joined by Mrs Merivale Mayer and Mrs Kerr and we all went off to Mile End Waste for an open-air meeting at eight o’clock. I gave out hand bills and chatted to the crowd. Some of our girl friends were there – they are so affectionate and nice. I was simply dead from standing and did not get home until 10.45pm. I was so tired I wept as I walked from the station.
Kate Frye’s account of the activities of the New Constitutional Society is the fullest that exists. Nothing of the Society’s archive has survived, presumably destroyed when the society dissolved in 1918, once the vote was won and its work done. Although she never again had reason to venture into the East End, the Suffrage movement had opened Kate’s eyes to the deprivations endured by its people and gave reality to her hope that after women got the vote ‘something would be done’..
Members of the New Constitutional Society for Women’s Suffrage in their workroom.
“It was all simply magnificent, 70,000 of us, five abreast, and some of the sections were just wonderful – a real pageant and I enjoyed myself tremendously. It started at 5.30pm and it was not much after 6pm when we were off. We were in a splendid position. The end had not left the Embankment before we started the meeting at 8.30pm, seven miles, a thousand banners and seventy bands. We were just behind one and it was quite lovely marching to it. We all kept time to it and at least walked well. Several of the onlookers I heard say that ours was the smartest section. We went along at a good steady pace – not nearly so much stopping about as usual and it was lovely to be moving, though I had not found the wait long. Such crowds – perfectly wonderful – there couldn’t have been many more and they must have waited hours for a good view. The stands were crowded too and one could see the men lurking in the Clubs – some of them looking very disagreeably.”
Kate Parry Frye’s Diary entry for Thursday May 21st 1914
Kate kept one of the handbills that she distributed around Whitechapel – The New Constitutional Society translated their message into Yiddish. Thursday, October 2nd 1913 “To Whitechapel at 10.30am. Miss Goddard was the only one who turned up till afternoon so she and I went off to the Docks to give out handbills. We had a funny morning, as I got arrested twice. The first time by a young and foolish Policeman for holding a Public Meeting where it was not allowed. ‘Now then young woman come out of this,’ with a most savage pull at my arm, nearly knocking me over. It was so absurd.”
In February 1910, Members of the House of Commons formed what was termed the Conciliation Committee to prepare a private member Conciliation Bill acceptable to all parties. The Bill passed its first reading on 14th June and, in order to give the campaign maximum publicity, the Women’s Social & Political Union and another militant society, the Women’s Freedom League, joined together with other societies to mount a spectacular procession through London. Kate, to her delight, marched with the actresses,“Everyone was interested in us and sympathisers to the cause called out ‘Well done, Actresses.'”
Black Friday‚ 18th November 1910. At a meeting in Caxton Hall, members such as Kate, heard the news that, with the two houses locked in a battle for supremacy, Parliament was to be dissolved. This meant that the Conciliation Bill would be killed. In retaliation, the WSPU immediately ended the truce it and prepared to resume militant tactics. A deputation of three hundred women, divided into groups of ten, set out from Caxton Hall for Parliament and in Parliament Sq met with violence such as they had never previously encountered. This day has gone down in Suffrage history as Black Friday. As Kate reported, “I was almost struck dumb and I felt sick for hours. It was a most horrible experience. I have rarely been in anything more unpleasant. It was ghastly and the loud laughter & hideous remarks of the men – so-called gentlemen – even of the correctly attired top-hatted kind, was truly awful.”
Saturday, July 3rd 1926, Mrs Pankhurst addressing the last Suffrage Demonstration – to persuade the government to give votes to women at twenty-one‚ and for peeresses in their own right to be given a seat in the House of Lords. “[After lunch] changed, off with John‚ bus to Marble Arch and walked to Hyde Park Corner. Sat a little then saw the procession of women for equal franchise rights and to the various meetings and groups. Heard Mrs Pankhurst and she was quite delightful.”
Photograph of Kate Parry Frye at Berghers Hill in the thirties.
Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary – edited by Elizabeth Crawford can be ordered direct from the publisher Francis Boutle and copies are on sale in bookshops including Brick Lane Bookshop, Broadway Books, Newham Bookshop, Stoke Newington Bookshop and London Review Bookshop.
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Down A Well In Spitalfields
Twenty-five years ago, eighteen wooden plates and bowls were recovered from a silted-up well in Spitalfields. One of the largest discoveries of medieval wooden vessels ever made in this country, they are believed to be dishes belonging to the inmates of the long-gone Hospital of St Mary Spital, which gave its name to this place. After seven hundred years lying in mud at the bottom of the well, the thirteenth century plates were transferred to the Museum of London store in Hoxton where I went to visit them as a guest of Roy Stephenson, Head of Archaeological Collections.
Almost no trace remains above ground of the ancient Hospital of St Mary yet, in Spital Sq, the roads still follow the ground plan laid laid out by Walter Brune in 1197, with the current entrance from Bishopsgate coinciding to the gate of the Priory and Folgate St following the line of the northern perimeter wall. Stand in the middle of Spital Sq today, and you are surrounded by glass and steel corporate architecture, but seven hundred years ago this space was enclosed by the church of St Mary and then you would be standing in the centre of the aisle where the transepts crossed beneath the soaring vault with the lantern of the tower looming overhead. Stand in the middle of Spital Sq today, and the Hospital of St Mary is lost in time.
In his storehouse, Roy Stephenson has eleven miles of rolling shelves that contain all the finds excavated from old London in recent decades. He opened one box containing bricks in a plastic bag that originated from Pudding Lane and were caked with charcoal dust from the Fire of London. I leant in close and a faint cloud of soot rose in the air, with an unmistakable burnt smell persisting after four centuries. “I can open these at random,” said Roy, gesturing towards the infinitely receding shelves lined with boxes in every direction, “and every one will have a story inside.”
Removing the wooden plates and bowls from their boxes, Roy laid them upon the table for me to see. Finely turned and delicate, they still displayed ridges from the lathe, seven centuries after manufacture. Even distorted by water and pressure over time, it was apparent that, even if they were for the lowly inhabitants of the hospital, these were not crudely produced items. At hospitals, new arrivals were commonly issued with a plate or bowl, and drinking cup and a spoon. Ceramics and metalware survive but rarely wood, so Roy is especially proud of these humble platters. “They are a reminder that pottery is a small part of the kitchen assemblage and people ate off wood and also off bread which leaves no trace.” he explained. Turning over a plate, Roy showed me a cross upon the base made of two branded lines burnt into the wood. “Somebody wanted to eat off the same plate each day and made it their own,” he informed me, as each of the bowls and plates were revealed to have different symbols and simple marks upon them to distinguish their owners – crosses, squares and stars.
Contemporary with the plates, there are a number of ceramic jugs and flagons which Roy produced from boxes in another corner of his store. While the utilitarian quality of the dishes did not speak of any precise period, the rich glazes and flamboyant embossed designs, with studs and rosettes applied, possessed a distinctive aesthetic that placed them in another age. Some had protuberances created with the imprints of fingers around the base that permitted the jar to sit upon a hot surface and heat the liquid inside without cracking from direct contact with the source of heat, and these pots were still blackened from the fire.
The intimacy of objects that have seen so much use conjures the presence of the people who ate and drank with them. Many will have ended up in the graveyard attached to the hospital and then were exhumed in the nineties. It was the largest cemetery ever excavated and their remains are now stored in the tall brick rotunda where London Wall meets Goswell Rd outside the Museum of London. This curious architectural feature that serves as a roundabout is in fact a mausoleum for long dead Londoners and, of the seventeen thousand souls whose bones are there, twelve thousand came from Spitalfields.
The Priory of St Mary Spital stood for over four hundred years until it was dissolved by Henry VIII who turned its precincts into an artillery ground in 1539. Very little detail is recorded of the history though we do know that many thousands died in the great famine of 1258, which makes the survival of these dishes at the bottom of a well especially plangent.
Returning to Spitalfields, I walked again through Spital Sq. Yet, in spite of the prevailing synthetic quality of the architecture, the place had changed for me after I had seen and touched the bowls that once belonged to those who called this place home seven centuries ago – and thus the Hospital of St Mary Spital was no longer lost in time.
Sixteenth century drawing of St Mary Spital as Shakespeare may have known it, with gabled wooden houses lining Bishopsgate.
“Nere and within the citie of London be iij hospitalls or spytells, commonly called Seynt Maryes Spytell, Seynt Bartholomewes Spytell and Seynt Thomas Spytell, and the new abby of Tower Hyll, founded of good devocion by auncient ffaders, and endowed with great possessions and rents onley for the releffe, comfort, and helyng of the poore and impotent people not beyng able to help themselffes, and not to the mayntennance of chanins, preestes, and monks to lyve in pleasure, nothyng regardyng the miserable people liying in every strete, offendyng every clene person passyng by the way with theyre fylthy and nasty savours.” Sir Richard Gresham in a letter to Thomas Cromwell, August 1538
Finely turned ash bowl.
Fragment of a wooden plate
Turned wooden plate marked with a square on the base to indicate its owner.
Copper glazed white ware jug from St Mary Spital
Redware glazed flagon, used to heat liquid and still blackened from the fire seven hundred years later.
White ware flagon, decorated in the northern French style.
A pair of thirteenth century boots found at the bottom of the cesspit in Spital Sq.
The gatehouse of St Mary Spital coincides with the entrance to Spital Sq today and Folgate St follows the boundary of the northern perimeter .
Bruyne:
- My vowes fly up to heaven, that I would make
- Some pious work in the brass book of Fame
- That might till Doomesday lengthen out my name.
- Near Norton Folgate therefore have I bought
- Ground to erect His house, which I will call
- And dedicate St Marie’s Hospitall,
- And when ’tis finished, o’ r the gates shall stand
- In capitall letters, these words fairly graven
- For I have given the worke and house to heaven,
- And cal’d it, Domus Dei, God’s House,
- For in my zealous faith I now full well,
- Where goode deeds are, there heaven itself doth dwell.
(Walter Brune founding St Mary Spital from ‘A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed’ by William Rowley, 1623)
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Cecil Osborne’s Lost Murals Rediscovered
Today I can reveal the three lost panels by East End artist Cecil Osborne (1909-96) which once hung in St Pancras Town Hall in Euston Rd and have recently been rediscovered. Now the owner is seeking a permanent new home for these paintings where they can be seen publicly and I hope my readers will be able to assist in this endeavour.
St Pancras & Kings Cross, 1956 (Click to enlarge)
Camden, Highgate & Hampstead, 1958 (Click to enlarge)
Bloomsbury & Fitzrovia, 1965 (Click to enlarge)
Last week, David Buckman author of From Bow to Biennale, the history of the East London Group of painters, took me to meet anthropologist Dr Kaori O’Connor at her flat on the top floor of an old mansion block near Bedford Sq.
There was an air of mystery about David’s invitation and I was excited because he promised to show me three important lost murals by East End artist Cecil Osborne illustrating the history of the former London Borough of St Pancras. Let me confess, I was not disappointed to encounter this splendid triptych revealed here today.
Cecil Osborne was born in Poplar in 1909 and, after studying at a commercial college, sought clerical work. Yet he had artistic talent and educated himself in art by reading books and visiting galleries. After viewing the East London Group exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1928, Cecil presented his work to the leader of the Group, John Cooper, and joined Cooper’s art classes at the Bow & Bromley Institute. As a consequence, Cecil exhibited around thirty of his paintings in East London Group exhibitions from 1929 until 1936, as well as supplying his clerical skills as secretary and treasurer of the Group.
In writing his book, David Buckman spent more that twenty years researching the lost history of the East London Group which had become dispersed after the Second World War. When David corresponded with Cecil in the last years of his life, after he had retired to Spain, David learnt of three murals which Cecil had painted for St Pancras Town Hall in the Euston Rd that had been removed from their original location and subsequently lost.
Cecil’s son Dorian Osborne supplied this description:
“The offer was from my father to supply three pictures painted in oils depicting the history of the Borough on canvases to be hung in the small Assembly Room at St Pancras Town Hall in Euston Rd. The council supplied the materials and father designed and painted the series which are six feet by six feet square.
We were living at 46 Belsize Sq at the time and that is where the first was painted, the work commencing in, I seem to recall, 1956 or thereabouts. My brother and I were used as artist’s models for some of the children depicted. Also there are two rather ragged children shown in some sections which were based on the Bisto advertisement – for example, in one panel, pushing a hand-cart. The motorcar depicted in the illustration of the Doric Arch at Euston Station is a Triumph Gloria.
In 1958, we moved to 7 Redston Rd, N8, and that is where the second panel was completed and the third executed. It is the third which shows the Post Office Tower, as it was in progress when Mary and I married in 1965 and she remembers seeing this panel in the house. At a later date, the council moved all three to the public lending library in Brecknock Rd near Kentish Town from where they were moved into storage.”
After David’s book was published, Dr Kaori O’Connor contacted him to say she had the murals, as she explained to me:
“I did not acquire the paintings so much as rescue them. They turned up in a weekly sale at the old Phillips auction rooms in Bayswater in the nineteen-nineties. Not a picture sale, but a general one, thrown in with furniture and oddments.
I saw one of the canvas panels poking out from behind a fridge. The Phillips staff knew nothing about their background and did not know what to make of them. I realised that some of the places featured in the paintings were near to where I live in Bloomsbury and knew I had to save them. If they had failed to sell, they would have been scrapped. As I recall, there were no other bidders.
Once I got them home, I realised they were a unique social history of a part of London that is rapidly changing out of recognition, while also acquiring a new cultural and artistic life today. Only recently, when I met David Buckman, I learned about the artist Cecil Osborne, his life and how the panels came to be painted for the old St Pancras Borough Council which no longer exists.
I have had the panels for some twenty years, and they remain as fresh and fascinating as the day I first saw them. They have a unique presence with a very strong sense of time and place, and tell their many stories eloquently. They are also very good company.
They were painted for a public space, intended to be seen by many people, so I would like them to find a new home where they can be widely appreciated as the remarkable artworks they are. I believe the past they depict can only enrich the present and future.“
If you can offer a new home for Cecil Osborne’s triptych please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com and I will forward your messages to Dr Kaori O’Connor.
St Pancras Town Hall, now Camden Town Hall, where Cecil Osborne’s murals originally hung
Paintings photographed by Lucinda Douglas Menzies
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Dorothy Annan’s Murals at the Barbican
Lucy Kemp Welch’s Mural at the Royal Exchange
