Tony Armstrong Jones’ East End
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Tony Armstrong Jones (1930-2017) is remembered today as Lord Snowdon, husband to Princess Margaret, yet – before all that royal hullabaloo took over his life – he was a jobbing photographer in his twenties and took these photographs of the East End, as published in his book LONDON in 1958.
Cheshire St
Sclater St Market, Sunday Morning
Bomb site, St Mathias School, Bethnal Green
Rathbone St Market, Canning Town
Rathbone St Market, Canning Town
Garage hand, Stepney
The Magpie & Stump, Cable St
The Railway Tavern, West India Dock Rd – open 6am to 8am
Cafe in East India Dock Rd
Wens Cafe, Bethnal Green
Tattoo parlour
Tower of London
Smithfield Market
Christmas in Cable St
Pub in Cable St
Juke Box Dance
Deuragon Arms, Hackney
Bethnal Green Rd
Photographs copyright © Estate of Tony Armstrong Jones
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In Stepney, 1963
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Contributing writer Gillian Tindall’s memoir of her first visits to Stepney in 1963 is accompanied by photographs of the East End taken in that era by her husband Richard Lansdown. Gillian’s account of post-war demolition and ‘relocation’ of residents is strangely familiar as history appears to be repeating itself in the redevelopment and ‘decanting’ of our own time.
Old Montague St
The number of people who actually remember the Blitz that struck the East End between 1940 and 1944 is fast diminishing, yet everyone has heard of it. Today, it is generally assumed that the acres and acres of undistinguished post-war flats that are now the dominant architecture of much of the East End are the result of post-Blitz rebuilding. In fact, the truth is rather different.
It was twenty years after the worst of the Blitz that I first got to know Whitechapel and Stepney, Tower Hamlets’ ancient heartlands. It was 1963, the summer after the coldest winter for a century and so long ago that I can almost see – separate from my present self – the girl that I was then. She wears a checked cotton dress she made herself on a sewing machine and her plait of hair is pinned up. She is walking rapidly round the area with a pack of index cards from the Stepney Old People’s Welfare Association in a small basket. In her flat sandals, she is exploring the East End for the first time.
In those days, a pungent scent of hops from Charringtons’ Anchor Brewery enveloped a stretch of the Mile End Rd, and sometimes a dray cart pulled by huge shire horses rolled sonorously past and turned in at the great gates. The jingling harness and the rhythmic clopping of heavy, whiskered hooves, were an assertion of a long tradition that in only a few years would become extinct, but the girl who was me did not know that. Nor could she guess that the small shops in Whitechapel with Jewish names over the doors, selling kosher meat or Fancy Trimmings or jellied eels, were in their final years too. You do not know much when you are young.
I was employed by the Welfare Association, on a casual basis, to find out how many of several thousand old ladies on their books, and a smaller number of old gentlemen, were still at their recorded addresses, and how well – or not – they were managing. Their children, I learnt from conversations with them, had usually moved to London’s northern suburbs, or to Dagenham or Basildon – or had been ‘relocated’ more recently under The Greater London Plan. The old people’s cards mostly showed birth-dates in the 1880s, some even in the 1870s. Some had been widowed ever since the War of 1914-18, and one or two were even old enough to have lost sons in that war. Often, when I was invited into their houses, the mantlepieces in their front rooms were dressed with the bobbled chenille runners of the Victorian age, with symmetric ornaments at each end – a décor almost extinct today but commemorated in the two china dogs that are the symbol of Spitalfields Life Books.
Some of them would try to detain me with sagas of ancient achievements or griefs, to which I listened with a guilty awareness that I had many more names to visit in the next two hours. Today, how much I would like to have these garrulous old people back, even for one afternoon! They spoke of happy times past, of ‘nice shops’ and good markets and celebrations for forgotten victories and jubilees, of synagogues and Baptist Sunday schools, a world of neighbourliness which they perceived as dispersed and lost. To prolong the chat they would offer me very strong tea, to which very sweet, tinned milk was automatically added. Then I would be taken to see the place in the cracked wall of the kitchen or the upstairs bedroom where “you can see the daylight through it, darlin’, can’t you?”, and the privy in the backyard with the perennially leaking roof – “It isn’t very nice, you see, ‘specially when it rains. My husband, he could have fixed that, but now I’m on me owney-oh…”
I would assure them that the Old People’s Welfare would try to do something about these things. It took me a while to discover the extent to which the forces of bureaucracy were preventing such simple, ad hoc improvements from being carried out. Not long before, Stepney Council had specifically refused a landlord permission to make good minor damage to three houses in White Horse Rd, near Stepney Green. ‘The carrying out of substantial works of repair to this old and obsolete type of property would seriously prejudice the Council planning proposals for the redevelopment for residential purposes of this part of Stepney and Poplar Reconstruction Area.’
These post-war plans were not dreamed up by individual Councils. The Greater London Plan was imposed by the London County Council (the fore-runner of the Greater London Council), but the local authorities had adopted its assumptions with blinkered enthusiasm. As early as 1946, warning local voices had been raised, especially about the way the envisaged Brave New Stepney of high-rise blocks set in ‘green spaces’ did not seem to allow any place for the small businesses that had long been the life-blood of the East End. The truth was that Labour thinking in those years had an aversion to small businesses. And so carried away were the Council by the prospect of reducing the borough’s population substantially by moving half of them out of London (a key element of the Plan) that the views of the inhabitants themselves counted for little. An early, enthusiastic description of the Plan in a popular illustrated magazine shocks the reader of today by its Stalinist disregard for the population’s own preferences:
‘A New East End for London… will create a new and better London, of town planning on scientific lines… [It] will make a clean sweep of two-thirds of Stepney and one-third of the neighbouring borough of Poplar… More than 1,960 acres will be transformed… 3 ½ miles long and 1 1/2 miles wide.’
I noticed that among all the old people I visited, whether in snug little houses that only need the roof mended and a bathroom added to the back or in multi-occupied, once-elegant terraces or in serviceable Victorian tenements, the refrain was “Oh, it’s all coming down round here, dear.” I could tell that though they were acquiescent about the change, believing it to be in some way inevitable, they felt hurt at a profound, inarticulate level by what was being done. It became clear to me that something terrible was happening, a social assault that went far beyond any rational response to the Blitz.
It was true that to the east of St Dunstan’s church, in the ancient heart of Stepney, the war had left a scene of devastation. The bombs arrived here in battalions, aiming at the gasholders and the docks, although the church itself was hardly touched. But why, over twenty years later, was the place still a wilderness reminiscent of Ypres just after World War I? On what must once have been a street corner, the remains of a shoe-shop stood, apparently untouched since it was set alight by an incendiary bomb in 1940. Burnt shoes still littered the dank interior of the shop, among other rain-sodden rubbish.
On the west side of the church, running towards Jubilee St, there was still whole grid of streets standing, solid, liveable homes, many of which seemed hardly touched by bomb-blast – indeed the London County Council’s own contemporary maps of bomb-damage show that to have been the case. But not long after I first walked those streets they had almost all been boarded up. Other streets were already being supplanted by long fences of corrugated iron, with just the occasional public house left isolated on a corner without anyone to go to it. Here, I was told, was where a ‘green space’ was arbitrarily planned. Yet it could have been sited to the east of the church without destroying a whole neighbourhood, reducing to worthlessness in the eyes of the dispossessed inhabitants what had been the fabric of their existence. All coming down – people’s memories, the meaning of their lives.
The Welfare Association’s annual report for that year had lots to report on gifts, fuel grants, outings, chiropody and meals-on-wheels but – perhaps diplomatically – on the subject of ‘relocation’ it had little to say.
Walking back up Stepney Green, an ancient curving route with trees and grass down the centre of it, a few runs of substantial old houses were still standing. I dreaded that, next time I came past, the iron screens would have taken over here too. In fact, this did not happen. Stepney Green itself was saved in the nick of time and rehabilitated. Unknown to me in that summer of 1963, a rebellious Conservation movement was beginning to grind into action. Post-war doctrines about the State knowing what was best for its citizens were at last being questioned, on the political Left as well as the Right. The ‘slum-clearing’ obsession, fixated on the need to destroy the architecture of the past in order to eradicate the poverty of that past, as if the streets themselves were somehow the source of urban ills, was at last perceived to be false. On the contrary, when whole districts were laid waste, crime and vandalism increased. By the seventies articles in illustrated magazines were not about a future of radiant towers but had titles such as ‘An Indictment of Bad Planning’. As the distinguished commentator Ian Nairn put it, the East End had not been destroyed so much by the War but had been ‘broken on the planners’ wheel’.
Today, it lives again in another form. The synagogues and Baptist chapels have been replaced by mosques, the Kosher butchers by Halal butchers. Whitechapel market is full of sarees and bright scarves. The Welfare Association is no longer in the same headquarters under the same name, but survives as Tower Hamlets Friends & Neighbours. We can at least be grateful for what has been saved – or re-born.
Old Montague St
Fruit Stall in Bow
Jubilee St
Jubilee St
Jubilee St
Jubilee St
Off Mile End Rd
Buxton St
Artillery Lane
Cheshire St
Bombsite at Club Row
Club Row Animal Market
Photographs copyright © Richard Lansdown
Gillian Tindall’s The Tunnel Through Time, A New Route For An Old Journey is out now as a Vintage paperback
You may also like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana
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This is William Conway of Crab Tree Row, Bethnal Green, who walked twenty-five miles every day, calling, “Hard metal spoons to sell or change.” Born in 1752 in Worship St, Spitalfields, he is pictured here forty-seven years into his profession, following in the footsteps of his father, also an itinerant trader. Conway had eleven walks around London which he took in turn, wore out a pair of boots every six weeks and claimed that he never knew a day’s illness.
This is just one of the remarkable portraits by John Thomas Smith collected together in a large handsome volume entitled “Vagabondiana,” published in 1817, that I discovered in the collection of the Bishopsgate Institute. John Thomas Smith is an intriguing and unjustly neglected artist of the early nineteenth century who is chiefly remembered today for being born in the back of a Hackney carriage in Great Portland St and for his murky portrait of Joseph Mallord William Turner.
On the opening page of “Vagabondiana”, Smith’s project is introduced to the reader with delicately ambiguous irony. “Beggary, of late, has become so dreadful in London, that the more active interference of the legislature was deemed absolutely necessary, indeed the deceptions of the idle and sturdy were so various, cunning and extensive, that it was in most instances extremely difficult to discover the real object of charity. Concluding, therefore, that from the reduction of metropolitan beggars, several curious characters would disappear by being either compelled to industry, or to partake of the liberal parochial rates, provided for them in their respective work-houses, it occurred to the author of the present publication, that likenesses of the most remarkable of them, with a few particulars of their habits, would not be unamusing to those to whom they have been a pest for several years.”
Yet in spite of these apparently self-righteous, Scrooge-like, sentiments – that today might be still be voiced by any number of venerable bigots – John Thomas Smith’s pictures tell another story. From the moment I cast my eyes upon these breathtakingly beautiful engravings, I was captivated by their human presence. There are few smiling faces here, because Smith allows his subjects to retain their self possession, and his fine calligraphic line celebrates their idiosyncrasy borne of ingenious strategies to survive on the street.
You can tell from these works that John Thomas Smith loved Rembrandt, Hogarth and Goya’s prints because the stylistic influences are clear, in fact Smith became keeper of drawings and prints at the British Museum. More surprising is how modern these drawings feel – there are several that could pass as the work of Mervyn Peake. Heath Robinson’s drawings also spring to mind, especially his illustrations to Shakespeare and there are a couple of craggy stooping figures woven of jagged lines that are worthy of Ronald Searle or Quentin Blake.
If you are looking for the poetry of life, you will find it in abundance in these unsentimental yet compassionate studies that cut across two centuries to bring us a vivid sense of London street life in 1817. It is a dazzling vision of London that Smith proposes, populated by his vibrant characters.
The quality of Smith’s portraits transcend any condescension because through his sympathetic curiosity Smith came to portray his vagabonds with dignity, befitting an artist who was literally born in the street, who walked the city, who knew these people and who drew them in the street. He narrowly escaped a lynch mob once when his motives were misconstrued and he was mistaken for a police sketch artist. No wonder his biography states that, “Mr Smith happily escaped the necessity of continuing his labours as an artist, being appointed keeper of prints & drawings at the British Museum.”
Smith described his subjects as “curious characters” and while some may be exotic, it is obvious that these people cannot all fairly be classed as vagabonds, unless we chose instead to celebrate “Vagabondiana” as the self-respecting state of those who eek existence at the margins through their own wits. One cannot deny the romance of vagabond life, with its own culture and custom. Through pathos, John Thomas Smith sought to expose common human qualities and show vagabonds as people, rather than merely as pests or vermin to be driven out.
A Jewish mendicant, unable to walk, who sat in a box on wheels in Petticoat Lane
Israel Potter, one of the oldest menders of chairs still living
Strolling clowns
Bernado Millano, the bladder man
Itinerant third generation vendor of elegies, Christmas carols and love songs
A crippled sailor advertises his maritime past
George Smith, a brush maker afflicted with rheumatism who sold chickweed as bird food
A native of Lucca accompanying his dancing dolls upon the bagpipes
Blinded in one eye, this beggar seeks reward for sweeping the street
Priscilla who sat in the street in Clerkenwell making quilts
Anatony Antonini, selling artificial silk flowers adorned with birds cast in wax
This boot lace seller was a Scotman who lost his hands in the wars
Charles Wood and his dancing dog
Staffordshire ware vendors bought their stock from the Paddington basin and sold it door to door
Rattle-puzzle vendors
A blind beggar with a note hung round his neck appealing for charity
Pickled cucumbers!
Very fine, Very cheap
Tinker
Fly poster
Door mats
Windmills
Live haddock
Henry Dinsdale
Plaster casts
Roasting Jack
Young lambs
The flying pie man
A poor painter removing
Umbrellas to mend
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
CLICK HERE TO BUY A COPY OF THE CRIES OF LONDON
The Gentle Author assembles a choice selection of CRIES OF LONDON, telling the stories of the artists and celebrated traders, and revealing the unexpected social realities contained within these cheap colourful prints produced for the mass market.
For centuries, these lively images of familiar hawkers and pedlars have been treasured by Londoners. In the capital, those who had no other means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.
Meandering Along The Lea
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Taking advantage of the spring sunshine as an excuse to escape the city and seek some fresh air, I wandered along the river bank from Bow as far as Tottenham Hale
At Cody Dock
Sir Corbet Woodall, Gas Engineer and Governor of the Gas Light and Coke Company, with two of his historic gasometers at Bow
At Bow Lock
Looking towards the tidal mill at Three Mills Island
At Three Mills Island
Who can identify this water fowl?
Old Ford Lock
Beneath the Eastway
Sculling on the Hackney Cut
At Lea Bridge
Barge cat
The Anchor & Hope
Looking towards Clapton
The Lea Rowing Club
At Tottenham Lock
Two Thames Barges at Tottenham Hale
Coal & diesel delivery barge
At Stonebridge Lock
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Kevin O’ Brien, Retired Roadsweeper
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Kevin O’Brien at Tyers Gate in Bermondsey St with Gardners’ Chocolate Factory behind
One bright morning, I walked down to Bermondsey St to meet Kevin O’Brien and enjoy a tour of the vicinity in his illuminating company, since he has passed most of his life in the close proximity of this former industrial neighbourhood. Nobody knows these streets better than Kevin, who first roamed them while playing truant from school and later worked here as a road sweeper. Recent decades have seen the old factories and warehouses cleaned up and converted into fashionable lofts and offices, yet Kevin is a custodian of tales of an earlier, shabbier Bermondsey, flavoured with chocolate and vinegar, and fragranced by the pungent smell of leather tanning.
“I was born and bred in Bermondsey, born in St Giles Hospital, and I’ve always lived in Bermondsey St or by the Surrey Docks. My dad, John O’Brien was a docker and a labourer, while my mum, Betsy was a stay-at-home housewife. He didn’t believe in mothers going to work. He was a staunch Irishman, a Catholic but my mum she was a Protestant. I’ve got six brothers and two sisters, half of us were christened and half ain’t.
I grew up in Tyers Gate, a three bedroom flat in a council estate for nine children and mum and dad, eleven people. It was quite hard, we topped and tailed in the bedrooms. From there, we went into a house with three bedrooms in Lindsey St off Southwark Park Rd. It had no bath or inside toilet, so it was quite hard work living there for my mum. Bermondsey was always an interesting place because I had my brothers and my sisters all around me, and I had lots of good friends. Our neighbours were good. We helped one another out and everybody mucked in. Those were hard times when I was a kid after the war.
We used to play in the bombed-out church in Horselydown. That was our playing field and we crawled around inside the ruins. There were feral cats and it was filthy. We’d come home filthy and my mother would give us a good hiding. My brother, Michael loved animals and he used to bring cats home with him but my mother would take them back again. He was terrible, he wanted every animal, he would fetch home pigeons – the whole lot.
We were playing once and I fell in the ‘sheep dip’ – one of the vats used for tanning leather. We were exploring and we climbed down these stairs but I fell through a missing stair and into this ‘dip.’ It sucks you under. It stinks. It’s absolutely filthy. It’s slime. They had to drag me out by my arms. I went home and my mum made me take all my clothes off outside the front door on the balcony before scrubbing me down with carbolic soap and a scrubbing brush. All of me was red raw and I never went back in there again. It taught me a lesson. My mum was hard but fair.
In those days, the industries in Bermondsey were leather, plastic, woodwork and there was a chocolate factory. Nearly everybody in Bermondsey St worked in Gardners’ Chocolate Factory at some point. My first job was there, I worked the button machine, turning out hundred and thousands of chocolate buttons every day.
I hated school. I never liked it. I really hated it. I used to run out of school and they had trouble getting me back. I roamed the streets. The School Board man was always round our house, not just for me but for my brothers as well – although they went to school and actually managed to learn to read and write. Me, I hated it because I didn’t want to learn. I left when I was fifteen and went to work in the chocolate factory, I started as a labourer and worked my way up to being a machine operator. It was better than the apprenticeship I was offered as a painter and decorator at three pounds a week. At Gardners’ Chocolate Factory I was offered nine pounds and ten shillings a week. I was still living at home and my brothers couldn’t understand how I could put half of my earnings in a savings book. They couldn’t save but I didn’t drink. I didn’t like the taste of it. I didn’t start drinking until I was twenty-one or twenty-two. I was a late starter but I’m making up for it now.
I was always in the West End. I loved Soho and I liked being in the West End because I was free and I could do what I wanted. As a gay man in Bermondsey, it was hard. So all my friends and the people I got to know were in the West End. There were loads of gay places, little dive bars in Wardour St, as small as living rooms. The Catacombs was one I went to, in Earls Court. That was a brilliant place. When I was thirteen, I got into The Boltons pub. It was hard work, getting into pubs but you got to know other people who were gay. You could get arrested for being gay and that was part of the excitement. There was fear but you got to meet people.
I was about fifteen when I told my mum I was gay. Her first words were, ‘What’s your dad going to say?’ That was hard, because my dad didn’t speak to me for nearly a year. He wouldn’t even sit in the same room as me. He was such hard work. If I was going out anywhere, my brothers and sisters would say ‘He’s going out to meet his boyfriends!’ But they all loved me and I loved my family. I could always stick up for myself. If someone said something to me, I’d say something back. I was one of those that didn’t worry what people thought.
I got the sack from the chocolate factory because I didn’t like one of the managers and I threatened to put him in one of the hoppers. I chased him round the machines with a great big palette knife and he sacked me, so I walked straight out of that job, walked round to Sarsons’ Vinegar in Tower Bridge Rd and got another job the same day for more money. It was a two minute walk. Within a matter of two or three weeks, I became a brewer. It was a good job but many people did away with themselves there. They climbed onto the vats of vinegar until they got high on the fumes and fell into it. People were depressed, they had come back from the war to nothing and they couldn’t rebuild their lives.
After the vinegar factory, I got a job with Southwark Council as a road sweeper in Tower Bridge Rd. I couldn’t read or write but I used to memorise all the streets on the list that I had to sweep. Even though I’d walked down many of these streets all my life, I didn’t know their names until I learned to read the signs. It was an interesting job because you got to meet a lot of people on the street and I got chatted up as well. I got to know all the pubs and delivered them bin bags, so I could rely on getting myself a cup of tea and a sandwich. There was always a little fiddle somewhere along the line.
It’s all office work and computers in Bermondsey St now, but I’m here because this is my home. This is where I want to be, all my family are here. There’s loads of locals like me. There’s still plenty of Bermondsey people. I’ve got friends here. We grew up together. It’s where I belong, so I am very lucky. We’ve got a lot here. I walk around, and I go to museums, and I look at buildings. I go to Brighton sometimes just for fish and chips, that’s a very expensive fish and chips!”
“There’s still plenty of Bermondsey people”
Kevin O’Brien at the former Sarsons’ Vinegar Factory in Tower Bridge Rd where he once worked
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Dennis Anthony’s Petticoat Lane
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If you are looking to spruce up your linen cupboard with some fresh bolster cases or if it is time to replace those tired tea towels and soiled doilies, then these two lovely gentlemen are here to help. They have some super feather eiderdowns and quality blanket sets to keep you snug and cosy on frosty nights, and it is all going for a song.
One Summer Sunday in the nineteen fifties, Dennis Anthony took his camera down Petticoat Lane to capture the heroes of the epic drama of market life – all wearing their Sunday best, properly turned out, and even a little swanky. There is plenty of flash tailoring and some gorgeous florals to be admired in his elegant photographs, composed with dramatic play of light and shade, in compositions which appear simultaneously spontaneous and immaculately composed. Each of these pictures captures a dramatic moment – selling or buying or deliberating – yet they also reward second and third glances to scrutinise the bystanders and all the wonderful detail of knick-knacks gone long ago.
When the West End shops shut on Sundays, Petticoat Lane was the only place to go shopping and hordes of Londoners headed East, pouring through Middlesex St and the surrounding streets that comprised its seven “tributaries,” hungry for bargains and mad for novelty. How do I know this? Because it was the highlight of my parents’ honeymoon, when they visited around the same time as Dennis Henry, and I grew up hearing tales of the mythic Petticoat Lane market.
I wish I could buy a pair of those hob-nailed boots and that beret hung up beside the two sisters in shorts, looking askance. But more even than these, I want the shirt with images of records and Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle group, hung up on Jack’s stall in the final photograph. Satisfied with my purchases, I should go round to Necchi’s Cafe on the corner of Exchange Buildings and join those distinguished gentlemen for refreshment. Maybe, if I sat there long enough, I might even glimpse my young parents come past, newly wed and excited to be in London for the first time?
I am grateful to the enigmatic Dennis Anthony for taking me to Petticoat Lane in its heyday. I should like to congratulate him on his superlative photography, only I do not know who he is. Stefan Dickers, the archivist at the Bishopsgate Institute, bought the prints you see here on ebay and although they are labelled Dennis Anthony upon the reverse, we can find nothing more about the mysterious photographer. So if anyone can help us with information or if anyone knows where there are further pictures by Dennis Anthony – Stefan & I would be delighted to learn more.
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George Dickinson, Sales Manager At Jackie Brafman’s
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George Dickinson, Sales Manager at Jackie Brafman’s in Petticoat Lane
Through the nineteenth and twentieth century, Petticoat Lane market was one of the wonders of London, until deregulation in the eighties permitted shops across the capital to open and the market lost its monopoly on Sunday trading.
One of the most celebrated and popular traders was Jackie Brafman, still remembered for his distinctive auctioneering style, standing on a table in the Lane and selling dresses at rock bottom prices.
George Dickinson worked as Sales Manager for Jackie Brafman for thirty-three years during the heyday of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Losing his father when he was still a child and coming to London from Newcastle as a teenager, George discovered a new family in Petticoat Lane and a surrogate father in Jackie Brafman.
“I was born as George Albert Dickinson in Heaton, Newcastle Upon Tyne, one of six brothers and a sister. We had a very good family life and we were happy until my father died when I was nine. In those days, they did not know whether it was cancer or tuberculosis. He was manager of a brewery and a very good piano player. He used to get behind the piano in the dining room and play the chords.
My mother had to sell our four-bedroomed house and we moved in with an aunt. After three months, the aunt died and we had to get out again. We moved to a small terraced house in Scotswood, and my mother did cleaning and worked in a pub in the centre of Newcastle. Our neighbour was a retired miner and every month he got a ton of coal from the coal board. His wife used to come ask, ‘George, Would you like to shovel it into the coal hole? If anybody wants to buy some coal, it’s sixpence a bucket.’ I used to do that for her and she gave me a shilling.
I lived there until I was fourteen when I was allowed to leave school and go to work because of the situation. My eldest brother became a fireman in Newcastle during the war and another was sent to Burma as a medic. There’s only me and my younger brother left now.
I had two jobs in Newcastle. First in a bedding company, making divans, and then I had a go at French polishing, but I got the sack from that – why I do not know. So I went to try to get a job at a fifty shilling tailors and I think I lasted about two days, I did not like it at all.
At fifteen years old, I decided to come to London. My sister met me at King’s Cross and took me to Camden Town. I was just mesmerised by it all. It was Irish and Greeks. A nice place to live at the time. She had a dairy in Pratt St and I lived with her for a little while. I got a job at a textile firm in the West End as a storeman and travelled back and forth by bus.
Then I got my call-up papers at the age of eighteen in 1956. I did ten weeks training at Winchester Barracks and from there we flew from Luton airport to Singapore where we were given a week’s jungle training before being sent to a rubber plantation which was a base for an army camp.
When I came out of the forces, I returned to the old firm but they went into liquidation, so I went to another firm which I did not like at all. I was walking around the West End and I bumped into a driver from a dress company, Peter. I had known him from the old firm. I said, ‘I’m looking for a job, Peter.’ He asked, ‘Do you mind what you do?’ I replied, ‘No, not at all.’ So he told me, ‘There’s a job going. It’s a Mr Brafman, he owns a place in Petticoat Lane.’ I did not know what Petticoat Lane was. Evidently it was a market but, coming from Newcastle, I did not have a clue.
So I phoned him up, went down the same day for the interview and met him in the dress shop. He asked me, ‘What are you doing now?’ I explained who I had worked for and he must have phoned them up, because he told me, ‘Mr Flansburgh thought a lot of you.’ After that, he said, ‘When can you start?’ ‘Any time,’ I replied. ‘Start on Monday,’ he told me.
Jackie Brafman was a terrific boss. At first, I did general things, sweeping and clearing up hangers. There were two shops, a small one which was retail and the large one was wholesale, full of stock. Over the course of time, I started selling in the wholesale department. Eventually, I met Mrs Brafman who was a pet lover. They bought two dogs and called them George & Albert after me. I built up a reputation as a good salesman and I never had to ask for a rise all the years I was there. If the boss was going to a boxing match, he always took me, even if it was Mohammed Ali. I was ringside with him when Cooper fought Ali and he split his glove. A very good man. He was like another father to me. He insisted I call him ‘Jack’ from the second week at work, so eventually I called him ‘JB.’ He did not mind that at all.
On Sunday, he used to stand on a table and auction goods to the public in Petticoat Lane. I arranged for a special desk to be made that was big enough and strong enough to stand on. We had iron rails suspended above from the ceiling where we could hang dresses, a few of each in different sizes. I used to stand on a ladder and feed the clothes to him. I even picked up a bit of Yiddish, I could count the dress sizes in Yiddish. He would tell the customers he had sizes from ten to eighteen and they put their hands up, asking ‘Have you got a ten? Have you got a twelve?’ and I would be feeding the dress out to the crowd. On two occasions, he was in hospital so I got up and auctioneered. It was at Christmas time and we did very well. He was so well known and liked.
One of his favourite sayings was ‘You’ve heard of Christian Dior, I’m the Yiddisher Dior!’ He always had a bottle of whisky on the shelf and he would say, ‘George, get the paper cups.’ Maggie, a regular customer, would come in and he would ask, ‘Would you like a drink, Maggie?’ He poured whisky into these paper cups and topped it up with cola. He would tell her, ‘I’m only doing this to get you a little but tipsy so you don’t know what you are buying.’
There was another guy who used to come in and stand on the side of the shop, and I realised what he wanted. I asked, ‘Can I help you, Sir?’ and he said, ‘No, I’m waiting for one of the ladies to serve me.’ So I called, ‘Celia, Can you come and look after this gentleman?’ Eventually, I gained his trust and he showed me his photographs of him in dresses with wigs and makeup. He looked brilliant. He was a drag artist, but he did not want the lads to know. He used to spend a lot of money and only Celia could serve him.
I became manager of the wholesale department, a double-fronted shop in Wentworth St, opposite the public toilets. People came from all over the world. Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Saudi Arabia and Arabia, as well as from all over this country. There were five girls working in the retail shop and we used to employ schoolkids to stand outside by the stall and make sure nothing got pinched.
Jack would go to the West End and buy stuff from Clifton, which was very big fashion house for larger size women, and Peter Kay and Remark and Kidmark. These were all top names years ago. He would buy ‘over-makes’ from them. If they were given an order from Marks & Spencer for a thousand garments, they might make twelve hundred in case of any problems. Jack would buy the extra at a knock-down price. We might sell a dress for four-fifty retail and three-fifty wholesale, but Jack got them for seventy pence each. He done so well Jackie.
Jackie’s father Maurice Brafman lived in Nightingale House, a home for the elderly.It was a beautiful place and he had his own room. The dining room was just like a hotel. He used to phone me up on a Friday morning and say, ‘George, Can you get me some groceries?’ I would go to Kossoff’s and buy cholla for him, and collect his kosher meat from the butcher. He did like his salami and occasionally a bit of fruit. I would put it all in a bag and, when I was going home, I would make a stop in Nightingale Lane to deliver his groceries. He would always check them and pick an argument about something. He would say, ‘You haven’t brought me so and so!’ and I would reply, ‘Mr Brafman, it’s in the bottom of the bag.’ ‘Alright,’ he would concede but he would always find fault. It was lovely seeing him. He lasted about five years there.
In the end, Jack took very ill. He was only coming in occasionally. He had a silver cloud Rolls Royce and I drove it a couple of times up to the West End to pick up stuff when he was not too well. He ran the business from home and his wife would come in occasionally to collect the takings. Sometimes, he would turn up in his wife’s car and stagger in to say, ‘Hello.’
He had two sons and two daughters and eventually Mark, the eldest brother, opened clothes shops all over London called ‘Mark One.’ His wife caught him with another woman and took him for everything. He was worth a fortune and he had a house with a ballroom in the middle. The youngest son, David, went into the business in Petticoat Lane and closed the shop.
Working at Jackie Brafman’s was the best part of my life, apart from getting married and having daughters. When I first came to London to find work at fifteen years old, I was rather shy and a bit inward. By working with Jack and talking to him, I changed. When he was not too busy, Jack would call me into the retail shop and ask me questions, ‘What do you think of this?’ I would give him my opinion and gradually I built up a bit of confidence. Mrs Brafman told me one day, ‘You know, Mr Brafman says you are the backbone of the business.’ I felt so good about it.”
Jackie Brafman, Petticoat Lane (Photograph courtesy of Jewish East End Celebration Society)
George Dickinson, Sales Manager at Jackie Brafman’s
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