Dicky Lumskul’s Ramble Through London
Courtesy of the late Mike Henbrey, it is my pleasure to publish this three-hundred-year-old ballad of the London streets and the trades you might expect to find in each of them, as printed and published by J. Pitts, Wholesale Toy & Marble Warehouse, 6 Great St Andrew Street, Seven Dials
Copyright © Mike Henbrey Collection
GLOSSARY
by Spitalfields Life Contributing Slang Lexicographer Jonathon Green
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Edith Tudor-Hart, Photographer
Mark Richards explores the controversial work of photographer Edith Tudor-Hart and her secret life as a Soviet agent in London during the Cold War
Child staring into a bakery window, Whitechapel, 1935 (Courtesy of National Gallery of Scotland)
On a wall in a flat in Maida Vale hangs this small photograph. It is a window into a world of social unrest, poverty, espionage and insurrection. The photograph and the story behind it add weight to the view that there is often little truth in photography. What we see is what the photographer wants us to see.
I saw the photograph when I visited the late photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky for an interview and portrait session in 2016. It was not taken by him, but by his sister Edith Tudor-Hart (1908–1973). The picture had pride of place on a wall of well-known photographs just inside the entrance. Edith Tudor-Hart was one of the most talented documentary photographers of her time, but has now faded into obscurity after being being blacklisted for her Communist activity.
For me, it is one of the strongest photographs of its era. One of those pictures that all photographers hope to be able to capture one day. Its ability to tug the heartstrings and generate strong emotion remains even eighty years after it was taken. On face value, it is a photograph of a poor child staring into a bakery window in Whitechapel in 1935. The disparity between the hungry child and the plentiful display has an enduring poignancy, inspiring a futile desire to intervene.
This photograph was first published next to another of a baby chimp in a zoo, which was much better fed than this girl. The message was clear, as was Edith’s ability to use her camera as a weapon for social justice. The picture was subsequently reproduced widely in Communist leaflets, representing a call to action. Yet to grasp the nature of this phenomenon and understand the other photographs that Edith took of the East End, we need to appreciate both the social context and her personal motives. None of the photographs that she took at that time can be taken at face value.
There is no doubt that this photograph was staged – the bundle clutched tightly in the girl’s left hand is evidence of that. We shall never know who the girl was or how she became to the subject. Edith destroyed her photographic records in 1951 for fear of prosecution, so the background to most of her work is now lost. She used photography to highlight social inequality and deprivation, realising early on – while studying at the Bauhaus – that photographs have the power to alter people’s beliefs and change the world. In her time, photography had become a medium for social change, ideal for the promotion of political views to a large audience, affecting them through the impact of the visual image more powerfully than by the written word.
Edith was acutely aware of the potential to use photography to break down social barriers and influence an audience like never before. For her, photography represented a move of the locus of control into the hands of the people, offering the possibility of self-representation for everyone. She understood that those who press the camera shutter can control the story that a picture tells.
As well as being an accomplished photographer, Edith was also a committed Communist and a Soviet agent who used her power to further her hidden agenda. Born in Vienna in 1908, she had grown up during a period of unprecedented political and social upheaval which shaped her beliefs. Her radical views are probably best summed up in Das Eland Wiens by the Marxist writer Bruno Frei, which attacks the inequality of capitalism and demands a commitment to revolutionary activism and change. Unusually, the book contained photographs and this was probably a decisive influence in Edith’s choice to become a photographer.
Edith’s father ran a Socialist bookshop which stocked Bruno Frei’s work and she mixed in radical Jewish circles in Vienna. In 1927, she trained as a Montessori teacher in England until she was deported to Austria in 1931 after being photographed at a Communist rally. Once in Austria again, she worked as a photojournalist for the Soviet news agency TASS, but in 1933 she was arrested there, again for being a Communist activist. At this point, Edith fled from Austria with her husband and was exiled in England.
Back in England, she continued her affiliation with the Communist party, both as an activist and a Soviet agent. It is likely that she had been recruited by the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) as early as 1927. Edith is often portrayed as a low-level agent yet she spotted and recruited Kim Philby. He was one of the Cambridge spy ring with Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who caused damage to British interests and threatened its intelligence relationship with America during the Cold War. Edith knew Kim Philby’s wife Litzi Friedmann and was the one who introduced Philby to Arnold Deutsch, the Soviet Agent who managed the Cambridge spy ring. Her recruitment of Kim Philby was a seminal moment in her espionage activities.
In 1964, Anthony Blunt described Edith in his confession as being ‘the grandmother of us all.’ Yet, although she continued to be monitored by the security services until her death in 1973, she was never prosecuted for spying due to lack of evidence.
She had planned to produce a book of her photographs called Rich Man, Poor Man, after the nursery rhyme:
Daisy, daisy, who shall it be?
Who shall it be who will marry me?
Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…
The ambition of the book was to highlight the contrast between rich and poor in British society and it would have featured her photographs of the East End, together with a series she took of mining communities in Wales. The shocking juxtaposition of her ‘Poodle Parlour’ photograph with the picture of the Clerkenwell slums at Gee Street in Lilliput in 1939 demonstrated he power of her approach. However, the book was never published. Eventually, the difficulty of being a woman photographer as well as being blacklisted for her Soviet connections led Edith to abandon photography altogether at the end of the fifties.
Some of the images that were intended for this book are incredibly powerful and reveal the nature of her talent as a photographer. Her method included talking to her subjects instead of photographing them from a distance and she showed a real ability for putting people at their ease.
Bakery Window was to have been the cover photograph of Rich Man, Poor Man and what a book it might have been. Today it lies unconstructed among the negatives of her photographic archives held by the National Gallery of Scotland which were given to them by her brother Wolfgang in 2004.
Slums at Gee St, Clerkenwell 1936
Poodle Parlour, West End, 1935
Family Group, Stepney, 1932
No Home, No Dole, London 1931
Communist Party demonstration, Hyde Park, c.1934
In Total Darkness, London 1935
Caledonian Market, 1931
Self portrait with unknown man, Caledonian Market c.1935
Edith Tudor-Hart, self portrait 1936
Photographs courtesy National Gallery of Scotland
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Roy Reed At Billingsgate Market
Roy Reed took these pictures of Billingsgate Market when he was a twenty-three-year-old documentary photography student at the London College of Printing in 1975 and they are seeing the light of day for the first time now.
Roy’s enthusiasm for the subject was greater than the interest of the student-journalist who asked him to take the pictures for a project on London’s dying markets. “When I suggested we get there early, she said, ‘See you there at eight,'” Roy recalled, rolling his eyes significantly. In the event, Roy got there at seven-thirty on a February morning and took his pictures just here as business was winding up at the nocturnal market. Forty years later, any disappointment Roy might harbour that the project was never written up and published is outweighed by his satisfaction in having taken these rare photographs of a lost world.
“It was nice chatting with the porters,” Roy remembered fondly, “No-one seemed to mind having their photograph taken – except maybe the guy in the tweed hat, you can see him looking at me suspiciously in the picture.” Taken at the time the market was already due to leave its ancient location next to London Bridge, Roy’s lively photographs comprise a fascinating record of a seemingly recent era in market life that grows increasingly remote.
Photographs copyright © Roy Reed
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Charles Ginner In Bethnal Green
In today’s extract from my forthcoming book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century I need your help to identify the exact location of this painting in Bethnal Green. Click here to preorder a copy of EAST END VERNACULAR
Bethnal Green Allotment (Courtesy of Manchester City Art Gallery)
How neatly aligned are the leeks in this allotment painted by Charles Ginner in 1943. They are almost as tidily organised as the council flats, assembled in towering brick mansions and each dwelling connected to its neighbour by a balcony, thus granting tenants the opportunity of both privacy and community as they feel disposed. And how convenient for the residents to have an allotment on the doorstep, encouraging them to spend their leisure time in the fresh air as well as ensuring a regular supply of fresh vegetables and soft fruit in season. A prominently placed Union Jack flutters over the allotment for all to see, serving to rouse the patriotic spirit of the gardeners and encourage them to contribute to the war effort through their horticultural labours. Observe the nettles on the right, opposing the well-ordered vegetables on the left. We know which is going to prevail.
When this picture was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, Charles was in his mid-sixties and a veteran Official War Artist of two world wars. Born in Cannes to British parents, he made London his home from 1910. Starting out as a young painter in France, his inspirations were Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne, but in London he joined the Camden Town Group. He shared their concern with representing everyday life and adopted their New Realism for which he wrote the manifesto, yet he brought his own post-Impressionist sensibility to it, as evidenced by his use of thick paint and bright colours.
Fellow artist Marjorie Lilly observed Charles at work at this time, noting his painstaking method, by which he “drew in his picture, faintly but carefully, then applied a thin colour wash of approximately the right colours, using turpentine so that it dried quickly. Then he started his real painting with a quantity of rather small, flat brushes and in his methodical way working from left to right across the canvas, finishing the picture in one very thick coat of paint. His aim was to complete this second coat without any corrections.”
Celebrated for his street scenes in the West End of London, Charles also painted street markets and circuses, before travelling north to portray industrial scenes, factory interiors and hospital wards. “Each age has its landscape, its atmosphere, its cities, its people. Realism, loving Life, loving its Age, interprets its Epoch by extracting from it the very essence of all it contains of great or of weak, of beautiful or of sordid, according to the individual temperament,” he wrote in 1919, “Realism is thus not only a present intimate revelation of its own time, but becomes a document for future ages. It attaches itself to history.”
Bethnal Green Allotment is a fine example of his meticulous technique and composition, dignifying the commonplace through authoritative and sympathetic representation, and delighting in a harmonious image of social order. A nineteenth century street can be seen in the background but Charles chose to view the East End as a location of recent social improvement, looking from the foreground of a communal garden.
Self portrait by Charles Ginner (1878–1952) Courtesy of Tate Gallery
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
John Thomas Smith’s Antient Topography
Bethelem Hospital with London Wall in Foreground – Drawn June 1812
Two centuries ago, John Thomas Smith set out to record the last vestiges of ancient London that survived from before the Great Fire of 1666 but which were vanishing in his lifetime. You can click on any of these images to enlarge them and study the tender human detail that Smith recorded in these splendid etchings he made from his own drawings. My passion for John Thomas Smith’s work was first ignited by his portraits of raffish street sellers published as Vagabondiana and I was delighted to spot several of those familiar characters included here in these vivid streets scenes of London long ago.
Bethel Hospital seen from London Wall – Drawn August 1844
Old House in Sweedon’s Passage, Grub St – Drawn July 1791, Taken Down March 1805
Old House in Sweedon’s Passage, Grub St – Drawn July 1791, Taken Down March 1805
London Wall in Churchyard of St Giles’ Cripplegate – Drawn 1793, Taken Down 1803
Houses on the Corner of Chancery Lane & Fleet St – Drawn August 1789, Taken Down May 1799
Houses in Leadenhall St – Drawn July 1796
Duke St, West Smithfield – Drawn July 1807, Taken Down October 1809
Corner of Hosier Lane, West Smithfield – Drawn April 1795
Houses on the South Side of London Wall – Drawn March 1808
Houses on West Side of Little Moorfields – Drawn May 1810
Magnificent Mansion in Hart St, Crutched Friars – Drawn May 1792, Taken Down 1801
Walls of the Convent of St Clare, Minories – Drawn April 1797
Watch Tower Discovered Near Ludgate Hill – Drawn June 1792
An Arch of London Bridge in the Great Frost – Drawn February 5th 1814
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana
Dorothy Bishop in Bethnal Green
Today I present another extract from my new book EAST END VERNACULAR, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century to be published by Spitalfields Life Books in October. Click here to preorder your copy
Looking towards the City of London from Morpeth School, 1961
This painting shows the view from the Art room at the top of the school in Bethnal Green where Dorothy Bishop taught for twenty years. It was a formative experience that Dorothy treasured and this painting – which her friend Ruth Richardson kindly brought to my attention – is one of only a few pictures of hers that are known to exist. Although she painted throughout her life, she did not consider herself a professional artist.
Born in Brockley, Dorothy lived with her parents, her elder sister and younger brother for most of her life. After training as an Art teacher, she taught at a school in the north west of England for the duration of the war, returning south to live in Harefield, Uxbridge with her parents afterwards. In 1947, Dorothy took a job teaching evening classes Stewart Headlam Recreational Evening Institute in Morpeth Street, an employment which was to occupy her until 1968. Recording her memory of these years, Dorothy wrote a diary of her impressions of the people and the place from which we include these excerpts.
“I was there for twenty-one years and it was one of the best things in my life. Now I am old and I must lead a quiet life, I would give much to be back at Stewart Headlam School. I really loved the cockney boys and girls, especially the wit and vitality of the boys. The whole atmosphere was full of life and rough kindness. I loved the wildness of the boys, once it had snowed and they made for me with snowballs and I saw their dark eyes dancing with joy, shining in the lamplight. They did enjoy things. The layabout boys tended to come to Art as in football training you had to do something, whereas in Art you could just sit and exercise your wit on the teacher and thus show off to your friends. The girls then were almost a different tribe and provided me often with members of the class who would work and were also friendly. They always supported me in any trouble with the boys and, on the whole, sex solidarity was more powerful than class solidarity.”
“The class was from 7:30pm to 9:30pm with a quarter of an hour’s break to go to the canteen for a cup of tea. The second half of the class was the most difficult as the boys would become restless, even to throw pencils. Sometimes I was utterly exhausted at the end and thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’ but then I thought, ‘Why should they drive me out?’ also I really loved them and there were some gentle quiet boys and girls who would talk to me. The next week they would be quite different and ask, ‘Did we upset you, Miss? We was only having a bit of a giggle.’”
“I was not approved of by the L.C.C. inspectors. Once they found my class copying Mickey Mouse and painting him in bright colours. I told them I could not change the taste of Bethnal Green for such things, but did not add – as I thought – that it would be impertinent to try to do so. In their report they said I was ‘defeatist’. I got a letter which said, ‘While your qualifications remain at their present level you are not suitable for employment by the L.C.C.” I was devastated. I was not terrific but I had had a full art training. As to drawing Mickey Mouse, the Pop Artists were doing this a few years later.”
Dorothy Bishop (1913-2005)
Painting copyright © Estate of Dorothy Bishop
(With thanks to Esther North, Dorothy’s niece)
Take a look at some of the other artists featured in East End Vernacular
Lost Spitalfields
Looking towards Spitalfields from Aldgate East
London can be a grief-inducing city. Everyone loves the London they first knew, whether as the place they grew up or the city they arrived in, and everyone loses it. As the years pass, the city bound with your formative experience changes, bearing less and less resemblance to the place you discovered. Your London is taken from you. Your sense of loss grows until eventually your memory of the London you remember becomes more vivid than the London you see before you and you become a stranger in the place that you know best. This is what London can do to you.
In Spitalfields, the experience has been especially poignant in recent years with the redevelopment of the Market and the demolition of the Fruit & Wool Exchange. Yet these photographs reveal another Spitalfields that only a few people remember, this is lost Spitalfields.
Spital Sq was an eighteenth century square linking Bishopsgate with the Market that was destroyed within living memory, existing now only as a phantom presence in these murky old photographs and in the fond remembrance of senior East Enders. On the eastern side of Spitalfields, the nineteenth century terraces of Mile End New Town were erased in ‘slum clearances’ and replaced with blocks of social housing while, to the north, the vast Bishopsgate Goodsyard was burned to the ground in a fire that lasted for days in 1964.
Yet contemplating the history of loss in Spitalfields sets even these events within a sobering perspective. Only a feint pencil sketch of the tower records the Priory of St Mary which stood upon the site of Spital Sq until Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ it and turned the land into his artillery ground. Constructing the Eastern Counties Railway in the eighteen-thirties destroyed hundreds of homes and those residents who were displaced moved into Shoreditch, creating the overcrowded neighbourhood which became known as the Old Nichol. And it was a process that was repeated when the line was extended down to Liverpool St. Meanwhile, Commercial St was cut through Spitalfields from Aldgate to Shoreditch to transport traffic more swiftly from the docks, wreaking destruction through densely inhabited streets in the mid-nineteenth century.
Look back at these elegiac photos of what was lost in Spitalfields before your time, reconcile yourself to the loss of the past and then brace yourself for the future that is arriving.
Spital Sq, only St Botolph’s Hall and number 37 survive today
Spital Sq photographed in 1909
Church Passage, Spital Sq, 1733, photographed in 1909 – only the market buildings survive.
17 Spital Sq, 1725
25 Spital Sq, 1733
23 Spital Sq, 1733
20 Spital Sq, 1723
20 Spital Sq, 1723
20 Spital Sq, 1732
32 Spital Sq, 1739
32 Spital Sq, 1739
5 Whites Row, 1714
6/7 Spring Walk, 1819
Buxton St, 1850
Buxton St, 1850
Former King Edward Institution, 1864, Deal St
36 Crispin St, 1713
7 Wilkes St, 1722
10 & 11 Norton Folgate, 1810 – photographed in 1909
Norton Folgate Court House, Folgate St, photographed in 1909
52 & 9a Artillery Passage, 1680s
Bishopsgate Goods Station, 1881
Shepherd’s Place arch, 1820, leading to Tenter St – photographed 1909
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