A Conversation With Doreen Fletcher
On the eve of Doreen Fletcher’s second exhibition IN BETWEEN, ALMOST GONE which opens this Friday 13th October at Townhouse, Spitalfields, I visited Doreen in her studio to learn the story behind her remarkable urban landscape paintings of the East End
Turner’s Rd, 1998
Doreen Fletcher – Looking back, I suppose I was very spoiled. From a young age I liked painting and my dad used to take me to the toy shop and we had to buy the best, most expensive paints. I was an only child, born into a working class family, and my parents, Colin & Alice, were semi-literate, I guess you would say.
I was a bit of a loner, I liked going for long walks. I passed the eleven-plus but I had a very difficult time at Grammar School because, although I was clever, I came from the wrong side of the tracks. I used to have to wear this hat and every morning, as I was walking to school, the Secondary Modern kids would come and knock it off my head. When I got to school, I had to pretend I was from somewhere else, because all the other kids they came from families who were doctors, solicitors, and so I felt, you know… odd.
The Gentle Author – What was the first landscape that you knew?
Doreen Fletcher – It was grey. Grey, brown streets with sparrows, lots of sparrows and pigeons. I used to long for colour. I grew up in a two-up, two-down terrace in Stoke-on-Trent, but every Sunday my parents used to take me on a bus into the country and I just loved colour.
I remember, when I was five, I was bought a set of encyclopaedias from the guy who came round knocking on street doors and it had colour pictures in it – paintings – and I thought they were wonderful. And I suppose that was when I started to be interested in visual things – plus at Grammar School, when we were doing Art, I did not have to talk and my accent in those days was quite broad. All the other girls spoke with posh accents, so I would paint in silence and it was something I was good at, so I got praise for that.
The Gentle Author – What work did your parents do?
Doreen Fletcher – Oh Alice, my mother, she was a servant. She worked in a munitions factory during the war and then she became a servant afterwards. It gave her ideas about not having the newspaper on the table and no tomato ketchup, and healthy eating. So in her case, there was a slight social mobility. She was very very fussy about the front step being clean. Colin, my dad, started off as a farm worker, he had wanted to be a vet but the fact that he did not like school – could hardly read or write – stood in the way.
After I was born, they moved to the town because he could earn more money and, in the late fifties, when they started putting up pylons he worked on that, and then later he worked putting in pipes for North Sea Gas too. When he was fifty-seven, he had a brain haemorrhage when he was working, probably because of the pneumatic drills, and he did not work again after that.
The Gentle Author – So what took you away from the Potteries?
Doreen Fletcher – I did not like living in a small town. I hated the constrictions and the pettiness. I wanted to go to Art School in London, and I met a boy who got a place in one and I moved with him to London.
The Gentle Author– But did you apply to Art School yourself?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I did a Foundation Course in Newcastle but after that I became a model. I did that for a long time.
The Gentle Author – Where did you live when you came to London?
Doreen Fletcher – I moved to Colliers Wood in South West London and I got a job at an Art School as a model. Gradually, I started taking photographs and doing drawings but – at that point – I did not really know what I wanted to paint, except that it was almost a compulsive activity.
I did quite a lot of self portraits and still lives. It was only when I moved to Bayswater in 1976 that I developed a strong interest in urban landscape. For me, it was a very exciting place to be – having come from this small town – and it was close to the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Rd. I started painting the local streets – the Electric Cinema, the Serpentine Boathouse – and then I became interested in Underground stations at night – Bayswater, Paddington – and this continued when I moved to the East End.
The Gentle Author – What brought you to the East End?
Doreen Fletcher – Simply that the relationship I was in broke up and I met someone new and the housing was cheap in the East End. It was relatively cheap to rent at that time because lots of people were moving away, so artists were still moving in to places like Bow and Mile End.
The Gentle Author – How do you remember the East End as it was then?
Doreen Fletcher – There was corrugated iron everywhere! I loved it here because I had had enough of the sophistication of the West End. It seemed to me like coming back home here – lots of corner shops and tiny pubs. There was a community but, after a couple of years, I realised that they were not staying, and the corner shops and pubs were closing.
Bus Stop, Mile End, 1983
The Gentle Author – Why did you start painting the East End?
Doreen Fletcher – I was visually excited by being somewhere new. The first painting I did in the East End was the bus stop in Mile End in 1983, and then I think I did Renee’s Café next. Once I realised they were going, it triggered this idea of painting the pubs and the shops.
The Gentle Author – Was this your full time occupation?
Doreen Fletcher – No, I was working as a model. It was the most boring job you could imagine but I just stuck at it during term time, so I would have periods of full-time painting and I could keep myself by working three days a week as model.
The Gentle Author – How central to your life were your paintings at that time?
Doreen Fletcher – Very. That was my focal point. My studio was a small room at the top of a run-down three-storey house in Clements St. It faced north so the lighting was good in the day time.
I spent a lot of time just walking around at all times of day and in different weather conditions. Eventually a specific scene imprinted itself on my mind which I felt could have potential as a painting. I would make thumbnail sketches sketches on the spot and take a picture with my camera.
Once I had gathered as much information as I could, I would make a highly detailed drawing which acted as a basis for the painting. This might evolve gradually over a period of months or even years, as a tension built up between my need to represent reality and the demands made by the painting itself. I always struggled to resolve it in an abstract and objective way as well as recording a recognisable subject.
I used to try and work twenty-eight hours a week, I never wanted to become a Sunday painter.
The Gentle Author – Did you have ambition for this work?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes and I did have some limited success in the eighties. I had a show at Spitalfields Health Centre on Brick Lane and then at Tower Hamlets Library in Bancroft Rd. Local people loved my paintings but there was limited interest from any critics.
The Gentle Author – Did you pursue other avenues to get recognition for your work?
Doreen Fletcher – Once a month, I used to send off for lots of slides in response to competitions and requests for submissions in Artists’ Newsletter but it never seemed to go anywhere.
The Gentle Author – How did you maintain morale through that twenty year period?
Doreen Fletcher – I have an optimistic nature and I remained optimistic up until the late nineties when my interest in the genre waned and I think it affected the quality of what I was doing. I realised I was coming to the end of the series I was doing of the East End.
The Gentle Author – What told you that you were coming to the end?
Doreen Fletcher – The East End was changing and I was not really interested any more. The new build made it very dense, taking away the individuality and the sense of community. At first, I was interested while it was being built – on the Isle of Dogs, for instance – but once it became functional there were just too many people.
The Gentle Author – At the time you concluded the series, were there changes in your life?
Doreen Fletcher – I became more involved in teaching Art to kids with special needs. I grew more interested too, because I appeared to be good at it and my work was successful. Gradually, I became involved in the tutorial side of it as well and supporting other lecturers.
The Gentle Author – Did you find that rewarding?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I was earning money from it and it was rewarding working with other people, so I became more and more involved in that.
The Gentle Author – Once you had completed nearly twenty years of painting the East End, what were your feelings about that series of work?
Doreen Fletcher – I felt that I had tried very hard to be successful, to get my work out there and get it seen. I had hoped for some kind of recognition. I was never ambitious in terms of international recognition or anything like that, but I did feel that the work was good enough to be recognised more than it was
The Gentle Author – Were you disappointed?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes. I remember the day I made a conscious decision to pack away my paints. It was November 16th 2004. I said, ‘That’s it!’ I am not going to paint again.
The Gentle Author – Do you think your project reached its culmination?
Doreen Fletcher – At the time I thought not, but looking at the work again, I am very very glad I did it now – what I think was important was that I recorded something which has gone.
The Gentle Author – Do you think that you evolved as a painter by doing this work?
Doreen Fletcher – I think, if I had I been taken on by a gallery, I would have developed more as a painter. Instead, I think I found a method of working that suited what I was doing and I stayed with it. Maybe with a bit more encouragement I would have done what I am doing now – since I have come back to painting – which is pushing the boundaries?
The Gentle Author – Do you have a criterion for judging if one of your paintings is successful?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, a painting is successful for me when I believe I have captured a moment.
Transcript by Louisa Carpenter
Portrait of Doreen Fletcher by Lucinda Douglas Menzies
Doreen Fletcher’s exhibition IN BETWEEN, ALMOST GONE opens on Friday 13th October at Townhouse, 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields and runs daily until 27th October. Catalogues are available for £5.
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Doreen Fletcher’s New Exhibition
Readers will be familiar with the work of Doreen Fletcher whom I met in 2015, when she had hidden twenty years worth of paintings away in an attic, after giving up her work as an artist ten years earlier due to the lack of any interest in her pictures.
Subsequently, Doreen and her paintings have become acclaimed and this Friday 13th October, following the success of her debut show in 2016, she opens her second exhibition at Townhouse, 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields, which runs until 29th October.
Most excitingly, inspired by the immense positive response to her work, Doreen has started painting again and her exhibition, entitled IN BETWEEN, ALMOST GONE, is a mixture of old and new pictures.
Postbox in Tooley St, 1997
Popcorn Stand at the Wakes, 1994
The Ragged School Museum, Copperfield Rd 2017
Thames Pier, Isle of Dogs, Boxing Day 1988
Metalworks, Chasely St, 2017
East End Dentist, 2017
Foot Tunnel, Silvertown, 2017
Train Over Canal, 1993
The Queen’s Head, York Sq, 2017
Bow Police Station, 2017
Road To Nowhere, 2013
Summer in Limehouse, 1997
Massala Cafe, E14, 2017
Carwash, Salmon Lane, 2017
Browns, We Have Moved, 2017
Emporium, Commercial Rd, 2017
Pharmacy, Commercial Rd, 2017
Fried Chicken Shop, 2017
Lino Shop, 2017
Tyre Shop, Salmon Lane, 2017
Dr Barnardo’s, Copperfield Rd 2017
‘Your no Bansky!’ Docklands Tyres & Exhausts, Commercial Rd, 2017
The Little Cottage, Silvertown, 2017
Twilight, St Anne’s Churchyard, 1998
Paintings copyright © Doreen Fletcher
Doreen Fletcher’s work is featured in EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century
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Bert Hardy, Photographer
Continuing his series of profiles of photographers who pictured the East End in the twentieth century, Contributing Writer Mark Richards explores the photography of Bert Hardy
Father Joe Williamson, Cable St, 1940
Bert Hardy is the quintessential London photo journalist – confident, skilled and fearless. He was the lead photographer for Picture Post for nearly two decades until it closed in 1957 and won numerous awards. His series ‘Fire Fighters!’ won him his first named credit in Picture Post and he followed this up with a number of equally celebrated series such as ‘East End at War’ and ‘Life in the Elephant.’
When Stefan Lorant came to London and established Picture Post, he revolutionised photo journalism in this country, establishing a format that endured long after he stopped being editor in 1940. The unique character of Picture Post was its ability to tell stories through a balance of photography, captions and text which was immediately accessible to all readers. It reached a circulation of nearly two million and, at the peak, it was estimated that it was read by nearly half of the adult population of Britain.
Lorant’s publications (Weekly Illustrated, Lilliput, Picture Post) gave exposure to many well-known photographers including Brassaï, Bill Brandt and Henry Cartier-Bresson, as well as less well-known but equally accomplished photographers such as Kurt Hutton, Wolfgang Suschitzky and Thurston Hopkins. However, if one photographer encapsulated the spirit of Picture Post it was Bert Hardy.
Hardy was a firmly grounded and talented documentary photographer. The strength of his work lay in his ability to capture a moment, put people at their ease, marshal a crowd, and get in there and take the photographs that others would miss. By all accounts, he was a photographer who would run toward danger rather than from it if that was needed to get the photograph.
Born in May 1913 in Priory Buildings, Webber St just off the Blackfriars Rd, Bert Hardy’s personal confidence and courage was legendary, which perhaps came from being the eldest of seven children and growing up as a Cockney in early twentieth century London. He left school at the age of fourteen and worked for a developing and printing company. This was the start of a long and remarkable career working with film, first as a developer and printer and then as a self-taught freelance photo journalist.
Shortly after beginning work at the Central Photographic Service, he decided to do his own work on the side and set up a processing unit at home. Then he decided to try his hand at photography, having heard that it could be quite lucrative. He purchased an old plate camera from a pawnbroker and that was the beginning of his photographic career.
His first commercial photograph was of the King and Queen on Blackfriars Rd, where he famously used his sister’s head as a rest for the heavy plate camera. After selling two hundred copies of the picture as a postcard, Hardy decided that photography was for him and began photographing people in pubs, on outings and on the street, then selling them the pictures as a way of making money.
As his career developed, it became clear that Bert Hardy was a natural with a camera and this was complemented by his easy way with people and his bold approach to getting a photograph. In 1936, he began working as a freelance photographer with the General Photographic Agency and his photographs began to appear in the Daily Mirror, Weekly Illustrated, and the Illustrated London News among others. Many of the photos were unattributed with the photographer simply being recorded as a ‘stringer,’ yet his reputation began to be established quite early on as someone who enjoyed working under pressure and could produce quality photographs quickly and at a high volume. By 1940, Bert had become a rising star at Picture Post and a whole series of commissions followed, leading to him becoming their top photographer.
He risked his life regularly when photographing the Blitz in London and captured a whole series of photographs of the city burning and of the heroic firefighters dealing with the aftermath. It was an approach that defined him as a photographer both in London and when covering the Second World War in Europe (he was a sergeant in the British Army Film Unit from 1942 to 1946) as well as wars in Korea and elsewhere.
In retrospect, his work now provides us with a unique record of everyday life in London and elsewhere. In particular, his series Life in the Elephant has a quality reminiscent of the work by John Thomson in Street Life in London some seventy years earlier. Bert Hardy had an empathy with his subjects that draws out their humanity and you feel as though you could step through his photographs into the scene.
Bert Hardy’s photographs of the Gorbals in Glasgow in 1948 were one of his most striking series. He was sent there by the Picture Post along with Bert Lloyd to do a follow-up of the commission that was originally given to Bill Brandt. Brandt’s photos were considered too abstract and did not show to the genuine poverty of the area. Picture Post needed someone with a different approach to bring out the essence of the Gorbals. In typical daring fashion, Bert Hardy persuaded the locals to let him photograph some of their living conditions directly. As always, he had his camera pre-set to middle-distance focus – just in case he spotted a potential photograph – when he suddenly came across two urchins in the street. This became the defining image of that series and won a prize from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
One of Bert Hardy’s most famous photographs was a racy picture of two young women sitting on the railings at Blackpool – the Blackpool Belles. It is instantly recognisable as one of the most loved images of that era and many believe it was spontaneous. Like most similar images, it was staged. Yet the surprising thing about this photograph is not the set-up but the fact that he took it using a Box Brownie camera rather than his usual Leica. He did this to illustrate that it is not the camera that makes a great photograph but the photographer. In his account of this in ‘My Life’ Bert Hardy said:
“With a standard-issue Box Brownie and a close-up lens plus yellow filter and an improvised cardboard viewfinder, I roamed the Golden Mile looking for suitable subjects. In the end, I got a couple of showgirls from the pier theatre to help me. The picture I eventually took of the two girls sitting on the railings with their skirts blowing up has been one of my most popular photographs.”
The woman in the spotted dress was a ‘Tiller Girl’ called Pat Stewart who was wearing a bathing costume under the dress. The striped costume was prominent in the original photograph and was airbrushed away in the darkroom leading to much speculation as to what she was wearing under the dress, if anything at all! The picture has become one of those that is often reproduced without being attributed to the photographer.
When Edward Hulton took over as Editor in 1953 it was the beginning of the end for Picture Post which went into terminal decline, closing in 1957. It was the close of an era for photo journalism in Britain. Hulton blamed its failure on the arrival of television but poor editorial decisions by him and a change of focus in 1953 were significant factors. Although he was kept on doing other work for Hulton publications, Hardy moved into photography for advertising where he had great success and work flowed in.
Then, in 1964, Bert Hardy chose a complete change of direction and bought a farm in Oxted, Surrey. He still kept his printing business going but became a farmer and lived on the farm for the rest of his life. Even as a farmer, he still lectured on photography and was also made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. By all accounts, these were happy times but London had lost one of its most influential photographers. In 1995, he suffered a heart attack which proved fatal but his spirit lives on through his work which has stood the test of time.
Cockney Life in the Elephant & Castle, 1948
Fabric shop at the Elephant & Castle, 1948
Dishwashers, Life in the Elephant, 1948
Shopping for jewellery, Life in the Elephant, 1948
Homeless shelter, Life in the Elephant, 1948
Gorbals boys, Glasgow, 1948
Game of Stones, Gorbals, Glasgow, 1948
Royal Wedding – King George VI with the bride, Princess Elizabeth 1947
The Pool of London, 1949
Docks near the Pool of London, 1949
Woman on the London Underground, 1952
Piccadilly, 1953
The combined fleets ashore, Gibraltar, 1954
The Bluebell Girls on stage, 1954
Blackpool belles, 1951
Shoe shiner, Piccadilly, 1953
Loneliness in London, Katherine Whitehorn as a new arrival at Waterloo, 1956
Too Many Spivs, Notting Hill, 1954
Liverpool, 1950
Saying goodbye to a loved one, Paddington Station, 1940
Firefighters during the London Blitz, 1941
Photographs copyright © Estate of Bert Hardy
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Edith Tudor-Hart, Photographer
Dan Jones’ East End Portraits
In recent years, Dan Jones has painted a magnificent series of portraits from different eras for East End Tales by the Speed History Writers Group. Many of these are well known but others less familiar, so you can click on any of the names below to learn more about the subjects. Click here to book for SPEED HISTORIES at Bishopsgate Institute this Wednesday 11th October
Police Constable James Stewart
Portraits copyright © Dan Jones
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Postcards From Petticoat Lane
Today I am sending you postcards from Petticoat Lane. Here are the eager crowds of a century ago, surging down Middlesex St and through Wentworth St, everyone hopeful for a bargain and hungry for wonders, dressed in their Sunday best and out to see the sights. Yet this parade of humanity is itself the spectacle, making its way from Spitalfields through Petticoat Lane Market and up to Aldgate, before disappearing into the hazy distance. There is an epic quality to these teeming processions which, a hundred years later, appear emblematic of the immigrants’ passage through this once densely populated neighbourhood, where so many came in search of a better life.
At a casual glance, these old postcards are so similar as to be indistinguishable – but it is the differences that are interesting. On closer examination, the landmarks and geography of the streets become apparent and then, as you scrutinise the details of these crowded compositions, individual faces and figures stand out from the multitude. Some are preoccupied with their Sunday morning, while others raise their gaze in vain curiosity – like those gentlemen above, comfortable at being snapped for perpetuity whilst all togged up in their finery.
When the rest of London was in church, these people congregated to assuage their Sunday yearning in a market instead, where all temporal requirements might be sought and a necessary sense of collective human presence appreciated within the excited throng. At the time these pictures were taken, there was almost nowhere else in London where Sunday trading was permitted and, since people got paid in cash on Friday, if you wanted to buy things cheap at the weekend, Petticoat Lane was the only place to go. It was a dramatic arena of infinite possibility where you could get anything you needed, and see life too.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St
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Val Perrin’s Brick Lane
Photography has been a lifetime’s hobby for Val Perrin. Yet it is apparent from this selection of his pictures of Brick Lane Market, taken between 1970-72, that he possesses a vision and ability which bears comparison with the Magnum photographers whose work he admired at that time.
While studying Medicine at University College, London, Val visited East End markets with members of the University Photographic Club, but Brick Lane drew his attention. Over the next two years, he returned alone and with fellow students, with whom he shared a flat in West Dulwich, to document the vibrant market life and surroundings of Brick Lane.
Born in Edgware, Val moved to live near Cambridge in 1976 and now photographs mainly wildlife and landscapes, but the eloquent collection of around a hundred photographs he took of Brick Lane in the early seventies comprises a significant and distinctive record of a lost era.
Photographs copyright © Val Perrin
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The Last Gasometer In Poplar
This is the last gasometer in Poplar and, as you can see, it is not all there. Already parts have gone and quite soon it will vanish entirely. The pleasing circularity that once enclosed the sky diminishes with the loss of each segment. They are disappearing like slices of a cake devoured by a hungry ogre and, shortly, nothing will remain.
To visit now – and come upon it, as I did, lit by the last rays of the setting sun – is to be like one of those travellers of old who undertook the Grand Tour and saw the Coliseum for the first time, marvelling upon it as an heroic example of an earlier age of handmade engineering upon an epic scale. Designed in 1876 by Robert & Henry Edward Jones, father and son engineers of the Commercial Gas Company, the iron structure was manufactured nearby between 1876-78 by Samuel Cutler & Sons of Millwall on the Isle of Dogs, constructional engineers who specialised in the erection of gasometers.
Once you understand that this gasometer has dominated the skyline in this corner of Poplar for nearly a hundred and fifty years, and your eye attunes to the elegant proportion of its criss-cross braced structure, you recognise its similarity to the rope work on a regimental drum or that button-back, deep upholstery of which the Victorians were so fond. It is the oldest example of a lattice-work framed gasometer in this country. Look more closely and admire the nineteen elegant tee-sections which brace the frame with their intricate ironwork consisting of a vertical tapering lattice girder at right angles to a vertical tapering plate girder. They are the first and only examples of this type.
To the left, you can see the march of generic new-London ugly flats which will become slums within a generation. This last gasometer was one of three that formerly comprised Poplar Gas Works here beside the cut, but there will be no preservation and reuse, such as we have seen at Kings Cross where gasometers have been integrated into a new housing scheme to enliven the architecture and maintain a sense of place.
Demolition was granted in September last year with the approval of Historic England, although this was not made public until last December when it was revealed that a public consultation had only been advertised by an obscure notice at the site in Leven Rd. In July this year, a local councillor asked the Mayor to save the gasometer and received the following response.
“The Council recognises this significant local historical asset and there is a case that it should be preserved as part of redevelopment. In planning policy, this is specifically reflected in the adopted and emerging Local Plan, where in the site allocation, it states that development should aim to ‘…retain and integrate the gas holders as part of the provision of green open space…’ The council plans to strengthen the design principle within the site allocation and seek to further acknowledge the gasholders significant local historical merit.”
Yet the gasometer is in the midst of demolition and, despite a petition by several thousand local people, no proposal has been put forward to integrate it into future plans. Long-time local heritage campaigner Tom Ridge is currently fighting for the preservation of the relics on site, so that future generations may marvel, as we do today, at piles of ancient carved stones from antiquity, and wonder at past glories which are lost.
Gasholder Number One is partially dismantled
The tee-sections which brace the frame with their intricate ironwork, consisting of a vertical tapering lattice girder at right angles to a vertical tapering plate girder, are the first and only examples of their type
Gasholder Number Two is already lopped off
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