William Fishman, Historian
Anne Kershen remembers William Fishman (1921-2014), distinguished historian of the East End
William Fishman in Whitechapel
The grandson of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, Bill walked the streets of the East End with his father as a young boy in the twenties and witnessed poverty little different to that of a hundred years before. As Bill described the experience in East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914, he ‘ate, laughed, wept and dreamed dreams with the immigrant poor.’ Seeing his tailor father giving coins to the needy in the street and his rabbi grandfather bringing home hungry strangers, whether Jew or Gentile, to the Friday night dinner table imbued Bill with two life-long guiding principles: compassion and charity – or in the Hebrew, rachamones and tzedakah.
As a teenager in the thirties, Bill was drawn to Labour and then to Communism, which at the time was seen as the only way to oppose men such as Oswald Mosley and Fascism in general. Bill was at Gardner’s Corner in Whitechapel on October 4th 1936, when Mosley attempted to march through the East End and ‘make it his own.’ Later, Bill admitted that, as a teenager, he was not quite sure why he was there, he ‘only knew I had to be.’ Those events of the thirties were to feature powerfully in his teaching, when he became a Professor at Queen Mary College, now Queen Mary University of London.
But the outbreak of the Second World War put Bill’s plans of becoming a teacher on hold. He served with the Essex Regiment in India and it was there he picked up the languages and dialects that he would use to greet South East Asian immigrants in Brick Lane forty years later. For a short while, Bill was seconded to Scotland and a Scottish regiment – the sight of William J. Fishman in a kilt was something to behold.
After demobilisation in 1946, Bill trained as a teacher and at the age of thirty-four became Principal of Bethnal Green Junior Commercial College. The College’s main activity was the provision of evening classes, enabling Bill – the ever hungry historian – to make up the study he had sacrificed at the outbreak of war. He enrolled as a student at the London School of Economics and combined a full-time job with being a full-time student.
A fluent French speaker, Bill was drawn to exploring theories of French anarchism. These studies resulted in his first book, which in subject matter was both geographically and temporally distant from the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel that were familiar to him. In The Insurrectionists (1970), he explored the lives and ideologies of French revolutionaries, including Marat and Robespierre, in order to identify their influence on Karl Marx, Lenin and the Russian Revolution. The writing demonstrated the originality, intellectual depth and lyricism that were to mark him out as a prize-winning historian.
Bill’s love of history and equal dislike of bureaucracy led to a Schoolmaster Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford, where he met a number of distinguished historians who stimulated his desire to research the area in which he had grown up, and bring its political and social history to a wider audience.
In 1972, awarded the Barnet Shine Fellowship, Bill was able to leave his college job with its demanding administrative work load and join the newly-formed Politics Department at Queen Mary College. There Bill completed East End Jewish Radicals, with whose gentle anarchist hero, Rudolf Rocker, he felt such empathy. After this, he embarked on other books which would take the study of the East End beyond the realms of academia and into the reach of a general readership, especially The Streets of East London (1979) and East End & Docklands (1980) which combined photography of the past and the present. At this time, Bill become celebrated for his walking tours of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and The Streets of East London included maps so readers could follow in his footsteps.
In his tour de force, East End 1888 (1988) Bill explored in minute detail the events of the decisive year in Victorian England. Poverty, criminality, immigration and overcrowded housing were all part of the East End landscape, but they resonated far beyond and the resolution of the consequent social problems became part of the national political agenda. East End 1888 was intended as a warning that these same issues were not to be ignored a hundred years later. In the words of George Santayana, which Bill quoted in the front of the book, ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ If we look around us today, it appears neither 1888 nor 1988 have been remembered, which makes East End 1888 a book for our time.
Colin Holmes and I have edited a book which celebrates Bill’s work, entitled An East End Legacy, Essays in Memory of William J. Fishman. It comprises a selection of writings which reflect not only the respect and love with which Bill Fishman was held, but also the extent to which his work has spoken to others.
William J. Fishman (Bill to all of us who knew and loved him) was a true child of the East End. Born and raised here, he spent his entire teaching and academic career in the area he captured so brilliantly in his writing. Whilst the sight of him striding down the streets of the East End is no more, his memory and impact live on.
William Fishman (1921- 2014)
Photographs courtesy © Bishopsgate Institute
The Launch Of EAST END VERNACULAR
Join me for the launch of my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow, E3 2SJ, on Tuesday 10th October from 6pm.
Courtesy of Bow Arts, there will be a special opening of their new exhibition THE WORKING ARTIST, The East London Group for Spitalfields Life readers.
At 6:30pm, I will be introducing my new book and then signing copies in the gallery where some of the paintings by Albert Turpin, Elwin Hawthorne, Harold Steggles, Walter Steggles and other East London Group artists featured in EAST END VERNACULAR will be on display. There will be drinks and live music.
Click here to order a copy of EAST END END VERNACULAR for £25
John Allin – Spitalfields Market, 1972
S.R Badmin – Wapping Pier Head, 1935
Pearl Binder – Aldgate, 1932 (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
Dorothy Bishop – Looking towards the City of London from Morpeth School, 1961
James Boswell – Petticoat Lane (Courtesy of David Buckman)
Roland Collins – Brushfield St, Spitalfields, 1951-60 (Courtesy of Museum of London)
Alfred Daniels – Gramophone Man on Wentworth St
Anthony Eyton , Christ Church Spitalfields, 1980
Doreen Fletcher – Turner’s Rd, 1998
Geoffrey Fletcher – D.Bliss, Alderney Rd 1979 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Barnett Freedman– Street Scene. 1933-39 (Courtesy of Tate Gallery)
Noel Gibson – Hessel St (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Charles Ginner – Bethnal Green Allotment, 1947 (Courtesy of Manchester City Art Gallery)
Lawrence Gowing – Mare St, 1937
Harry T. Harmer – St Botolph’s Without Aldgate, 1963 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Elwin Hawthorne – Trinity Green Almshouses, 1935
Rose Henriques – Coronation Celebrations in Challis Court, 1937 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Nathaniel Kornbluth – Butcher’s Row, Aldgate 1934 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Dan Jones – Brick Lane, 1977
Leon Kossoff – Christ Church Spitalfields, 1987
James Mackinnon – Twilight at London Fields
Cyril Mann – Christ Church seen over bombsites from Redchurch St, 1946 (Courtesy of Piano Nobile Gallery)
Jock McFadyen – Aldgate East
Ronald Morgan – Salvation Army Band Bow, 1978 (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives)
Grace Oscroft – Old Houses in Bow, 1934
Peri Parkes – House in the East, 1980-81
Henry Silk – Snow, Rounton Rd, Bow
Harold Steggles – Old Ford Rd c.1932
Walter Steggles – Old Houses, Bethnal Green 1929
Albert Turpin, Columbia Market, Bethnal Green
Take a look at some of the artists featured in East End Vernacular
The Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl
As the darkness closes in, it delights me to go on a dead pubs crawl around Spitalfields to pay my respects at former hostelries and listen for the clinking glasses of the phantom regulars. Although I still mourn the loss of The Gun, I take consolation The Well & Bucket and The Crown & Shuttle have returned to vibrant life in recent years, which permits me to believe there may still be the possibility of life after death for other lost pubs in the neighbourhood.
The Ship & Blue Ball, Boundary Passage, where they planned the Great Train Robbery (1851-1994)
The Frying Pan, Brick Lane (1805-1991)
The Crown, Bethnal Green Rd (1869-1922)
The Britannia, Chilton St (1861-2000)
The Laurel Tree, Brick Lane (1813-1983)
The Well & Bucket, Bethnal Green Rd (1861-1989 & now resurrected)
The Dolphin, Redchurch St (1835-2002)
The Jolly Butchers, Brick Lane (1839- 1987)
Seven Stars, Brick Lane (1711-2002)
The Crown & Shuttle, Shoreditch High St (1861-2001 & now resurrected)
Sir Robert Peel, Bishopsgate Without (1871-1957)
The Queen Victoria, Barnet Grove (1856-1993)
You may also like to take a look at
Remembering Stratford’s Lost Industries
Too often when the story of the Queen Elizabeth Park – site of the 2012 Olympics – is told, the place is referred to as a former ‘wasteland’ prior to the ‘regeneration’ that we see today. Yet the truth is that this was once the location of hundreds of thriving local industries, many established over generations. Most of these premises were compulsorily purchased and demolished by the Olympic Authority, and a great proportion of these businesses closed down with a consequent loss of employment, skills and community, all for the sake of three weeks of sports events.
I have selected this gallery of dignified portraits from DISPERSAL, Picturing urban change in East London by Marion Davies, Juliet Davies & Debra Rapp which is published today, documenting these important industries and asserting the existence of this ‘lost’ manufacturing district in Stratford that has been conveniently marginalised from history in less than a decade.
Engineer Joe Mahari with a stator at Dowding & Mills, an electro-mechanical company founded in 1913 and established in White Post Lane over forty years but closed in Hackney Wick in 2010.
Brian Paverley finishing a stained glass panel at Goddard & Gibbs Studios Ltd, established in 1868. They did work for Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal at St James Palace, moved to Cooks Rd in 2001 but closed down when the Olympics arrived.
Tim Bird at New Image Upholstery. Tim ra the company with his wife Valerie since the mid-nineties but decided not to renew the lease due a rent increase at the time of the Olympics and they closed down the company.
Ahmed Rafik checking glass firing at the kiln at Bowdens Glass Ltd. This company specialising in curved glass had been established on this site since before the 1820s but closed in 2007.
Mandeep Sandhu in the milk store at Capital Dairy. Established in Bishopsgate, the dairy moved to Carpenters Rd in 1993 and then to Barking in 2007.
Paul Alexander adding ink to a printing duct at Club Le Print Ltd. This printing business was established for twenty-three years in King’s Yard but moved out to Thurrock in 2007.
Harry West, rag trade waste and textile merchant, at A&S Trading Company, set up by grandfather in the forties by dismantling Anderson shelters. He moved to Stratford in 2001 and was forced out by the Olympics but now trades from Epping and has weekly market stall in Hackney.
In the cold store at H.Forman & Sons, Salmon Smokers. Formans were first established in the East End in 1905. They moved to Stratford in 2002 and moved again to Hackney Wick in 2006 when they were displaced.
Jenny Mann owned the Golden Dragon take-away in Barking and ran a mobile catering van offering congee, rice and noodles until she sold up in 2011.
Waheed Rahman owner at Jay J Autos Ltd traded for ten years offering recycled spare car parts and repair work, until 2007 when he moved to South Woodford but the cost of relocation caused his company to close in 2013.
Mechanics Ghazansar Hussain & Jamshed Khan at Jay J Autos Ltd
Amerjeet & Gurdeep Singh at Lucky Wholesale Company, established by their father who worked as a door-to-door salesman in 1955 when he arrived from Delhi. Beginning in Shepherds Bush Market, they were in Aldgate East for thirty years, before moving to Straford in 2001. Before the Olympics, the brothers closed down the company and retired.
Erdal Oyak (centre), son Kozan and Uncle Andy at M&M Taxis
Seamstress checks coats made for Hackett at the finishing station at Panache Outerwear Ltd in Marshgate Lane. They were forced out from their factory by the Olympics but continue to operate from another location nearby.
Steve Goodchild, Transport Manager at Parkes Galvanising Ltd, established in Marshgate Lane since the fifties but closed in 2007
Cutting cloth at Panache Outwear Ltd
Pentaluck Ltd, wholesale dealers in Chinese vegetables, was established by Chin Check in Camberwell in 1991, moved to Waterden Rd in 2001 and then to Leyton in 2007.
Martin Walrand packing boxes at Tyrone Textiles Ltd in Marsgate Lane. Founded in 1978, this family-owned wholesale cloth business was in Stratford for seventeen years before moving to Enfield in 2007
Bradlee Priest cutting bracket feet at Priest Brothers. Established by his grandfather Ron Priest in the fifties in Bethnal Green, they relocated to Marshgate Lane in 2000 and moved to Chelmsford in 2007
Bow Tyres occupied a site that had opened as a car mechanic in 1917 under the name W J Cearns
Photographs copyright © Debra Rapp
Click here to buy a copy of DISPERSAL, Picturing urban change in East London published by Historic England. Spitalfields Life readers get 20% discount by entering code DISPSL17
You may also like to read about
At The Eagle Tavern
I wish you would take me out to the theatre. As the autumn nights draw in, I dream of leaving the gloomy old house one evening and joining the excited crowds, out in their best clothes to witness the spectacular entertainments that London has to offer. The particular theatre I have in mind is the Grecian Theatre attached to the Eagle Tavern in Shepherdess Walk, City Road between Angel and Old St.
The place seems to have developed quite a reputation, as I read yesterday, “The Grecian Saloon is really a hot house or a black hole, for the number of human beings packed in there every night would induce a supposition there was no other place of entertainment in London. At least two thousand persons were left unable to procure admission.” This was written in 1839, demonstrating that the popular art of having a good time – still pursued vigorously in the many pubs and clubs here today – is a noble tradition which has always thrived in the East End, outside the walls of the City of London.
“Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle, that’s the way the money goes…” The Eagle public house in the rhyme still exists to this day, though barely anything remains of the elaborate entertainment complex which developed there during the nineteenth century – apart from a single scrapbook that I found in the archive of the Bishopsgate Institute. All the balloon ascents, the stick fights, the operas, the wrestling and the wild parties may be over, and the thrill rides closed long ago, but there is enough in this album to evoke the extravagant drama of it all and fire my imagination with thoughts of glamorous nights out on the town.
You only have to walk through Brick Lane and up to Shoreditch on a Saturday night, through the hen parties and gangs of suburban boys out on a bevy, jostling among the crowds of the intoxicated, the drugged and the merely overexcited, to get a glimpse of what it might have been like two hundred years ago. With as many as six thousand attending events at the Eagle Tavern, we can assume that lines must have formed just as we see today outside nightclubs.
On the site of the eighteenth century Shepherd & Shepherdess Pleasure Garden, the Grecian Saloon developed at the Eagle Tavern to provide all kinds of entertainments, from religious events to conjuring and equestrian performances. There are only tantalising hints that survive of these bygone entertainments. Yet sentences like “We are glad to find that little Smith has recovered her hoarseness” and “We have little to find fault with save that the maniac was allowed to perambulate the gardens without his keeper” do set the imagination racing. There are many fine coloured playbills in the cherished album, crammed with enigmatic promises of exotic thrills. I wonder who exactly was the beautiful Giraffe Girl, or General Campbell, the smallest man in the world. Amongst so much hyperbole there is a disappointing modesty to learn that the central attractions are merely supported by the “artistes of acknowledged talent.”
Elaborate pavilions with all manner of special effects were constructed at the Grecian Saloon, which in turn became the Grecian Theatre in 1858 where Marie Lloyd made her stage debut aged fifteen. Eventually the building was acquired in 1882 by General William Booth of the Salvation Army and the parties came to an end. Yet this site saw the transition from eighteenth century pleasure garden to nineteenth century music hall. The many thousands of souls who experienced so much joy there over all those years impart a certain sacred quality to this location, even if it is now mostly occupied by Shoreditch Police Station.
Watercolours of the New Grecian Theatre in 1899, built during the management of George Augustus Oliver Conquest in 1858 and later purchased by General William Booth of the Salvation Army
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Dennis Anthony’s Petticoat Lane
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 Anthony, 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. Stefan Dickers, Archivist at the Bishopsgate Institute, bought the prints you see here online and although they are labelled’ Dennis Anthony’ upon the reverse, nothing more is known bout the mysterious photographer.
You might also like to see
Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Great News!
Although Thomas Rowlandson was born as the son of a wool and silk merchant in Old Jewry in the City of London who went bankrupt when Thomas was just two years old, he had the unexpected good luck to inherit a fortune of £7,000 from a French aunt. Yet due to a profligate nature, Thomas’ inheritance got quickly squandered and he turned to caricature as a means of income, achieving memorable success. A series of life experiences which may permit us to surmise that Rowlandson’s use of the term Lower Orders, in the title of his Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders (a set of fifty prints published in 1820), was not entirely without irony.
While many sets of Cries of London over the centuries presented a harmonious social picture in which hawkers knew their place, I treasure Rowlandson’s work for the exuberant anarchy that he brings to his subjects who stride energetically through the London streets like they own them, gleefully lacking any sign of subservience. Rude, rambunctious, horny and venal as rats, these are Londoners that we can all recognise and, even though Rowlandson’s vision is not a flattering view of humanity, his lack of sentimentality endears us to his subjects in spite of their flawed natures.
In Rowlandson’s work, the drama of the city is all-consuming as everyone strives for gratification, whether making a living, seeking sexual pleasure, or simply to assert their being. These people appear childlike in their preoccupations, because nobody has time for self-conscious reflection when everyone is too busy pursuing life.
In the Newspaper Seller and the Cab Driver, the “lower orders” are placed in relation to their “superiors” and, in each case, the tension of the relationship is obvious. The Paper Sellers’ trumpet and loud cries are irking their customers by awakening them in the early morning, while the Cabbie is affronted by his meagre tip and challenges his passengers. And neither shows any regard for those who are offended by their lack of manners.
By contrast, in the plates of the Postman and the Rose Seller, the tension is erotic – the Postman checks out his young female customer while a voyeur cranes from a balcony above and the Rose Seller assumes a faux innocence when an old lecher chucks her under the chin – in each instance proposing transactions both covert and overt. Then there are the clownish Cat & Dogs’ Meat Seller, beset by hungry dogs, and the senile Night Watchman, oblivious of burglars. Only two hawkers demonstrate humility, the Knife Grinder preoccupied with his work and the Curds & Whey Seller sitting to watch the happy young mother and her children with tacit envy. Finally, the China Sellers and the Tinker mending pots and kettles are grotesques. The China Sellers ingratiate themselves in a predatory manner, but the Tinker meets his match in the demanding old hag.
There are some appealingly scruffy spontaneous lines are familiar to us in the drawings of Quentin Blake. By his early sixties, Rowlandson had sacrificed the precise elegant flowing lines of his early career for these off-the-cuff sketches which communicate character with great immediacy.
Ultimately, the central ambiguity and source of drama in Rowlandson’s Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders is the question – Who is playing who? It is apparent that there is no simple answer. Instead, Rowlandson presents a series of precise scenarios that trace delicate lines of social and economic distinction with wit and humanity, avoiding any didactic or moral conclusion. Above all, these wonderful prints illustrate that moral worth does not equate with the “Lower” or “Higher” orders, and their relative economic worth. Thomas Rowlandson’s Londoners are just as good and as bad each other.
Wot d’yer call that?
Cats and Dogs’ Meat?
Letters for Post?
Past one o’clock and a fine morning!
Buy my Sweet Roses?
Knives and Scissors to Grind?
Curds and Whey?
Any Earthenware? Buy a Jug or a Teapot?
Pots and Kettles to Mend?
You may also like to take a look at
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
