A Conversation With Milly Rich
Celebrating the eighth birthday of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
“You know, being nearly a hundred is a lot of years to account for…”
Portrait of Milly Rich by Patricia Niven
The Gentle Author – Are you from the East End?
Milly Rich – I am from the last place I have lived! But I was born at 19 Commercial Rd on October 23rd 1917, which of course was during the First World War and my mother, Leah, told me that the air raid warnings were sounding at the time. People were terrified of air raids but my she had a basement under her shop in Commercial Rd where she took shelter.
My mother made corsets and she taught me to make them too. Corsets were a vital part of a lady’s outfit in those days because – of course – smart clothes needed a good foundation and a good foundation was a nice heavily-boned corset with a strong steel bust in the front. Everybody had remarkably good posture, not slumped – like you see today – over a hand-held computer.
The Gentle Author – Your mother was proprietor of the shop?
Milly Rich – I have a picture of her standing outside the shop with her two assistants when she was not yet twenty. She was very creative, very artistic – and she got her first job in an embroidery factory in Hanbury St. Then she opened a shop at 87 Brick Lane and – many years later – it transpired that the young man I married was the son of the owner of the embroidery factory where my mother had once been a designer. So the world is full of concentric circles!
The Gentle Author – Tell me about your father.
Milly Rich – My father, Morris Levrant, was an ‘émigré of the Empire of Russia’ and I know that because he went to America first and patented an airtight valve for bicycle tyres when he was thirty. He was very clever. My mother said he spoke nine languages and he was an inventor. He was born in Siedlce in Poland where my daughter has traced our family back to 1733.
He left a wife and three children in New York when he came to London and my mother’s father was not very happy about that. Apparently, my grandfather put him through hoops to prove that he was properly divorced. I do not know how he got the divorce but he obviously did because otherwise they would not have allowed the marriage. My parents were married in Princelet St Synagogue and I was born in 1917, so I suppose they were married in 1916.
The Gentle Author – Do you have brothers and sisters?
Milly Rich – I had one brother, Mossy. He is dead now, he died at seventy-five years old. I suppose it speaks volumes for the kind of life we led that he had rickets, which is caused by malnutrition. He was very good with his hands and became a jeweller and worked in Black Lion Yard and Hatton Garden.
When the Jews were promised a homeland in the Balfour Declaration, my father decided he would settle in what was then Palestine. Of course, he was an inventor, and he was agog to go and be an inventor there – he was a clever chap. So in 1921 we set sail.
The Gentle Author – You shut the shop in Commercial Rd?
Milly Rich – Yes, we got rid of it and went off to Palestine but a war broke out there and, in the first month, my father was killed and he was buried there. He was only forty when he died and left three children in New York. We found them not very long ago. The two sisters were still alive, they were ten and eleven years older than me. We went and stayed with them, and they were lovely. They turned out to be artists and designers too
When my father died, my mother was expecting my brother, so she could not come back from Palestine at once but she did not speak the language and, of course, my father had all the money – she was stuck in Jaffa. Fortunately my uncle – my mother’s sister’s husband – came to the rescue and got us back to England. By that time, I was three, I remember. And we were stuck in Boulogne because I had a watery eye – they thought it was catching – an eye disease, maybe trachoma but it was just a trapped eyelash.
On our return, we stayed with my uncle in Whitechapel. He had a jewellery shop opposite the Whitechapel Gallery, it was museum as well in those days. I remember they had a septic mouse in a case on the stairs and an illuminated panorama of Medieval London on the landing. It was lovely, I used to stand and stare at it for hours.
We stayed there until my uncle found the shop at 192 Bethnal Green Rd. It was flanked on one side by the Liberal Party headquarters, Sir Percy Harris was the MP, and on the other side by a newsagent. They were not Jewish, but everybody was on excellent terms and there was no anti-Semitism where we were.
We lived above the shop and we had tenants as well, who had to come through the shop. Originally, it been a house and garden but it had been transformed into one great long space. My mother had a curtain put up to screen people walking through because they had to cross our parlour, which my mother also used as a fitting room for the corsets.
Women used to come in and treat her as an agony aunt. Like a hairdresser or a dressmaker, she was a recipient of confidences. All the locals would tell my mother their troubles which invariably were to do with their husbands. They used to speak Yiddish so that I should not hear but, knowing they were speaking so I could not understand, I soon picked up Yiddish. I never let on that I could and, of course, I would tell the stories to my friends at school which was a source of much merriment.
There was a window in the parlour so my mother could see if anyone came into the shop. My brother used to climb up to look through it at the women trying on the corsets and, of course, a good time was had by all!
The Gentle Author – What took you out of Bethnal Green?
Milly Rich – I won a scholarship to Central Foundation School in Spital Sq. It was a fee-paying school at the time and there used to be quite a division between the scholarship girls and the fee-paying pupils. I was a great reader and I have always loved words and I had a good vocabulary. The other children did not like it. “Oh you’ve swallowed a dictionary,” that was a great insult. I did not care, did I? From there, I won another scholarship but I could not make up my mind whether to go to the London School of Economics, because I wanted to be a journalist, or St Martin’s School of Art.
In the event, I decided I would not train to be a journalist because I was not going to learn shorthand – I was not going to take down anybody else’s words. So I took the place at St Martin’s instead and hated it. We used to sign in and go off to the local Lyons teashop and sit there for hours, making patterns on the tablecloth with the salt cellar. Eventually, my mother could not afford for me to stay there any longer because I only got ten shillings a week and I did not like it anyway – I do not like any form of regimentation.
I got a job inscribing certificates because I was quite good at lettering and I did that for a couple of months. It was trees in Israel. They kept planting forests and I used to write ‘five trees planted in the name of so-and-so on the occasion of his this-and-that.’
I did not do it for long, I got a job in a drawing office instead. I told them I could do it, even though I had never held a drawing pen in my life. They said, “Well, here’s one – take it home and bring it back tomorrow, completed.” I went into an art shop and asked, “How do you do this?” They showed me a drawing pen and how you filled it and how you used it, so I went home and I did the drawing and I took it back the next day and I got the job. The drawing office was quite fun actually, I enjoyed it there. It was right at the top of Crown House, which is still there on the corner of Drury Lane and Aldwych. We used to feed the pigeons and there was a Sainsbury’s around the corner which delivered lunch in a box. You got a sandwich and some orange juice and a piece of cake for sixpence.
You know – being nearly a hundred is a lot of years to account for.
The Gentle Author – Tell me about Moss, your husband.
Milly Rich – We met at a play-reading group. He was a writer, and I always liked plays and acting and so on. We met there and he would walk me home.
The Gentle Author – Where did he come from?
Milly Rich – His father had the embroidery factory in Hanbury St, where my mother had once worked doing the patterns although we did not realise that at the time. It was only when our parents were introduced that they realised that they all knew each other already. Small world. People were so ready to help each other, I do not know if people are still like that in the East End, but they were once. I remember the blackshirts marching down Bethnal Green Rd and shouting “The Jews, the Jews, we’ve got to get rid of the Jews!” Whenever they passed our shop, my brother used to be outside yelling.
The Gentle Author – Did you feel threatened?
Milly Rich – I do not think I was aware of it, but I became aware because Moss used to take me to the political meetings and the Unity Theatre. When there was the Battle of Cable St, we went there. I remember leaning on the lamppost outside Gardiner’s Corner and we were all yelling, “They shall not pass, they shall not pass.”
The Gentle Author – That was eighty years ago.
Milly Rich – Then war was declared and we all thought the first air raid would obliterate London. Everybody was terrified and I had known Moss four years, so he said “We’d better get married right away, while we can,” and he got a special licence. I did not want any fuss and I told my mother, “I’m not having any ‘do’” because getting married, especially in Jewish families, was a great occasion you know. I said, “I’m not having any family there.” It was the custom then – I do not know what people do now– for the woman to take the man’s name but I did not like that, so I said, “If I have got to take your name, you have got to take my name.” His name was Rich and my name was Levrant so we became Levrant Rich, which sounds quite good.
The Gentle Author– Was that unusual in those days?
Milly Rich – Goodness knows! Moss was very easy about it, he said he did not care. My mother said she would kill herself if we did not get married in the synagogue, but I said “I’m not having anyone there , I don’t want a fuss,” so she agreed she would not tell anyone. But when Moss and I arrived at the synagogue, standing outside wreathed in smiles was my fat Aunty Milly and her husband. I said, “I’m not going to do it!” and we turned tail and ran away, so we did not get married that day.
We came back the next day and got married when nobody was there. We got no photographs, nothing. It was just the two of us, and Moss had to go back to work because he was in the timber importing business, doing the advertising, and everybody thought the work was absolutely vital. So he went back to work and I went shopping in Petticoat Lane for a couple of cups and saucers and a saucepan.
Moss had found us an attic room at 4 Mecklenburgh Sq and we went back there. It was one pound a week which was a lot of money for rent. There was an oven on the landing which four other tenants used and we each took a turn to put a shilling in the meter. Sometimes, I would come back early and find the landlady on her knees fiddling the meter!
When the air raid siren went, we dashed down to the shelter which was just opposite. One night we got a direct hit. The thing shuddered but it did not go off and we were marshalled out by wardens. I remember walking up Gray’s Inn Rd with fires blazing on either side right up to Euston Station. There were aeroplanes droning overhead and the church opposite the station was on fire. We were ushered into the station and we spent the rest of the night there, before returning to Mecklenburgh Sq.
Although our rent was one pound a week, Moss earned four pounds and I earned two pounds and a bit, so we only had just over six pounds as our total income. After our pound rent was paid and Moss had ten cigarettes delivered each day, I used to be able to send stuff to the laundry. They would come and collect and deliver it, all freshly ironed, and a sheet was tuppence to launder. Can you imagine? Shirts and everything. I never did any washing myself. As well as Mrs Pointy the landlady, there was a caretaker who kept our two rooms clean for two shillings a week, which was very nice. Mrs Pointy used to feed her cat cods’ heads and the smell – I can still smell it – was absolutely indescribable.
The Gentle Author – Nowadays in London, many people spend half their wages on rent.
Milly Rich – I was just thinking about the nature of progress. When I was young, it was usual for a woman to stay at home and the man would bring home the money – his wage could support the wife and the family. Now two wages are not enough, do you call that progress?
Transcript by Rachel Blaylock
Milly, aged one and a half in 1919
Milly, aged five in 1922
Milly, aged eighteen in 1935
Milly, aged twenty in 1939
Moss in 1939
Milly & Moss’ Marriage Certificate, 1939
Milly’s London Transport card, 1939
Milly & Moss in the forties
Milly & Moss in the eighties – Milly & Moss were married for seventy-two years
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The Alphabet Of Lost Pubs
Celebrating the eighth birthday of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
The Duke of Gloucester,
26 Seabright St, Bethnal Green, E2
(Opened prior to 1839 and now demolished)
Sometimes I find myself walking the streets looking for a pub. I am seeking an enclave of civility as a refuge from the barbarity of the city, a friendly bar where the publican lives upstairs and the residents of the street congregate. I am looking for a local.
Oftentimes, in accumulating disappointment, I stand and gaze at the fine buildings which once were pubs, now closed down and converted into flats or shops, or restaurants. So you can imagine my emotion when I discovered this cherished inventory of pubs from the early twentieth century, mostly pictured in their shining moment of glory, when the signwriting was crisp, the mirrors were polished and the lamps gleamed – the beloved drinking palaces of yesteryear. You can almost hear the clink of glasses, the hubbub of voices and distant tinkle of barroom ivories.
In collaboration with Heritage Assets, who work in partnership with The National Brewery Heritage Trust, I am able to publish these historic photographs of the myriad pubs of the East End from Charrington’s archive. It is no exaggeration to say that every street corner was once a pub, thus the catalogue of our loss runs into hundreds and this first instalment of The Alphabet of Lost Pubs only covers A-C.
I wish we could have enjoyed a pint together in every one. Instead we must be thankful we can go there in spirit thanks to the alluring visions conjured by these entrancing photographs, which might have vanished forever if they had not been rescued from a skip twenty-five years ago by some far-sighted soul.
The Adam & Eve, 126 Abbey Rd, West Ham, E15 (Damaged by enemy action 1st July 1944, reopened 2nd April 1948, closed 1994)
The Albert Arms, 66 Bancroft Rd, Mile End, E1 (Destroyed by enemy action 1944)
The Albion, 423 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 (Opened prior to 1870, now known as Coupette)
The Albion, 33 Albion Rd, Dalston, E8 (Opened prior to 1850, closed in 2002 and now residential)
The Albion, 211-212 High St (now The Highway), Shadwell, E1 (Opened prior to 1841, closed 1922 and now demolished)
The Albion, 2 Clissold Rd, Stoke Newington, N16 (Opened prior to 1855, converted to residential use in nineteen nineties)
The Alfred’s Head, 49 Shandy St, Stepney, E1 (Opened prior to 1849, damaged due to enemy action on 12th September 1940 and closed)
The Alma, 41 Spelman St, Spitalfields, E1 (Opened prior to 1870, closed 2001 and now offices)
The Angel & Crown, 170 Roman Rd, Bethnal Green, E2 (Opened prior to 1809, rebuilt in 1951 and still open)
The Astric Lodge, 60 Stepney Green, E1 (Opened prior to 1818 and closed in 1997)
The Barley Mow, 7 New Gravel Lane, Shadwell, E1 (Opened prior to 1778, now demolished)
The Bedford Hotel, 220 Victoria Park Rd, Hackney, E9 (Built 1870, converted to residential use 1999)
The Beehive, 36 Holly St, Dalston, E8 (Opened prior to 1848, closed 1964 now demolished)
The Bell, 116 George St (now The Highway), Shadwell, E1 (Named in 1839, closed 1922)
The Benyon Arms, 155 De Beavoir Rd, Hackney, N1 (Opened prior to 1852, closed 1984 and now residential)
The Black Bull, 192 Stoke Newington High St, N16 (Opened 1826, closed 1981 and now Kentucky Fried Chicken)
The Black Horse, 168 Mile End Rd, E1 (Opened prior to 1856, closed 2010 and currently vacant)
The Blade Bone, 185 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 (Opened in 1823, destroyed by enemy action in World War II and rebuilt, then closed in 1999 and became The Noodle King now a development site for flats)
The Brewery Tap, 17 Stean St, Shoreditch, E8 (Opened prior to 1881, closed 1921 and now demolished)
The British Queen, 31 White Horse Lane, E1 (Opened prior to 1843 and closed 1934, now demolished)
The Bull’s Head, 58 St Katharine’s Way, E1 (Opened 1838, closed 1952)
The Burford Arms, 11 Burford Way, Stratford, E15 (Opened prior to 1872, closed in 1990 and demolished in 1994)
The Camden’s Head, 456 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 (Opened prior to 1816 and still open)
The Carlton, 238 Bancroft Rd, Mile End, E1 (Opened 1836 and still open today)
The Carpenters’ Arms, 151 Cambridge Heath Rd, E1 (Opened prior to 1839, rebuilt in the nineteen-sixties and still open)
The Cat & Mutton, 76 Broadway Market, Hackney, E8 (Opened prior to 1732 and still open)
The City Arms, 2 Dock Rd, Canning Town, E16 (Opened prior to 1867 and closed in 1934)
The Clapton Park Tavern, 9 Chatsworth Rd, Hackney, E5 (Opened prior to 1872, closed and converted to a restaurant in 2001)
The Colet Arms, 94 White Horse Rd, Stepney, E1 (Opened prior to 1851, closed in 2003 and now residential)
The Commercial Tavern, 142 Commercial St, Spitalfields, E1 (Built in 1865 and still open today)
The Commercial Tap, 66 Ben Jonson Rd, Stepney, E1 (Opened 1881 and closed 1934, now demolished)
The Conqueror, Boundary St, Shoreditch, E2 (Opened prior to 1872 and closed in 2007, now residential)
The Crooked Billet, 93 Hoxton St, Hoxton, N1 (Opened prior to 1841, closed 1938 and now demolished)
The Crown & Anchor, 35 Temple St, Bethnal Green, E2 (Opened prior to 1831, closure unknown)
The Crown & Dolphin, 56 Cannon St Rd, Shadwell, E1 (Opened 1851, closed 2002 and now residential)
The Crown, St John St, Clerkenwell, EC1 (Opened in 1910, closed in 1953 and now a shop)
The Crown, 19 Mayfield Rd, Dalston, E8 (Opened 1866 and closed in 1954)
The Crown, 34 Redchurch St, Shoreditch, E2 (Established late seventeenth century and renamed The Owl & The Pussycat in 1990)
The Crown, 14 Goodman St, Whitechapel, E1 (Opened in 1823, closed in 1952 and now demolished)
The Cutlers’ Arms, 2 Cutler St, Houndsditch, E1 (Opened prior to 1839, closed in the nineteen-fifities and is now demolished)
Photographs courtesy Heritage Assets/The National Brewery Heritage Trust
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Misericords In Limehouse
Celebrating the eighth birthday of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
Tutivillus the demon eavesdropping upon two women
I spent yesterday morning on my knees in St Katharine’s Chapel in Limehouse, photographing these rare survivors of fourteenth century sculpture, believed to have been created around 1360 for the medieval St Katharine’s Chapel next to the Tower of London, which was displaced and then demolished for the building of the docks in 1825.
These marvellous carvings evoke a different world and another sensibility, combining the sacred and profane in grotesque and fantastical images that speak across time as emotive and intimate expressions of the human imagination. I am particularly fascinated by the sense of mutability between the human and animal kingdom in these sculptures, manifesting a vision of a mythic universe of infinite strange possibility which was once familiar to our forebears.
Intriguingly, these misericords appear to have been created by the same makers who carved those at Lincoln and Chester cathedrals, and a friary in Coventry.
After a sojourn of over a hundred years in Regent’s Park, the Royal Foundation of St Katharine, originally founded by Queen Matilda in 1147, moved back to the East End to Limehouse in 1948 where it flourishes today, offering an enclave of peace and reflection, sequestered from the traffic roaring along the Highway on one side and Commercial Rd on the other.
Centaur with club and shield
Tutivillus holds the parchment on the Day of Judgement
Owl
Bust of a bearded man in a striped cap with a cape and trailing drapery
Winged beast with a long tail and human head
Dragon
Edward III
Queen Philippa
Bishop’s head
Green man
Bearded man wearing a cap
A former Master of St Katharine’s was Chancellor of the Exchequer
Angel playing the bagpipes
Pelican in her piety with three chicks, supported by a pair of swans
Lion leaping upon the amphisbaena, supported by reptilian monsters
Coiled serpentine monster
Woman riding a beast with a man’s head
Elephant and castle surmounted by a crowned head
Beast with a hooded human head
Miser
Choir stalls with misericords
St Katharine’s Chapel was built in 1951 on the site of St James, Ratcliffe, destroyed in the blitz
Late fifteenth or early sixteen century carving of angel musicians playing a psaltery, a harp and tabor
The Royal Foundation of St Katharine, 2 Butcher Row, Limehouse, E14 8DS
With thanks to the Master of the Royal Foundation of St Katharine for permission to photograph the misericords
If you are interested to visit St Katharine’s Chapel please write to info@rfsk.org.uk
Eighth Annual Report
Eight years and three thousand stories ago, I published my first post in these pages. What a journey it has been and what sights we have witnessed. Already, I am approaching a third of the way towards my ambition of ‘at least ten thousand stories.’
Today – as it has become my custom upon this anniversary – I present my annual report looking back over the past twelve months.
One of the wonders of writing and making an account of life is that, even as it makes you aware of loss and time passing, it accumulates to create an ever-growing stack of pages. I take consolation that, thanks to my writing, I am able look back and revisit the people and experiences which I have cherished through the last eight years. Even if they are gone from the world, they will always reside here in this record.
When I began to write stories in the pages of Spitalfields Life, it was never my expectation or intention to become a publisher of books or get involved in politics. Yet both these activities have become an integral part of my work, offering challenges and rewards in equal measure.
This year, I am especially proud to have launched the writing career of Julian Woodford by publishing his debut book The Boss of Bethnal Green. Julian’s brilliant account of the breathtakingly appalling life of Joseph Merceron, the eighteenth century gangster and corrupt East End politician, proved to be a major work of biography, which was recognised as a significant contribution to the history of London by glowing reviews in the Evening Standard, the Times, the Times Literary Supplement.
This spring, I published a handsome new illustrated edition of AS Jasper’s compelling memoir of growing up in the East End at the beginning of the twentieth century, A Hoxton Childhood, accompanied by the first publication of the sequel The Years After, detailing the author’s struggle and eventual triumph in the Shoreditch cabinet-making trade. If anyone ever wonders why it is we need a National Health Service, proper Council Housing or legislation to ensure decent working conditions, they should read this candid and heart-breaking account of life in the world before these things came into existence.
More than two years have passed since five hundred of you joined hands around Norton Folgate to save it from demolition. Readers frequently ask what has become of British Land’s threatened development in these streets. The answer is that the campaign and the Spitalfields Trust’s Judicial Review, challenging Boris Johnson’s ‘calling-in’ of the development over the heads of Tower Hamlets Council, postponed matters long enough for the European Referendum to happen. Overnight, this office development became no longer financially viable and, subsequently, British Land saw an 85% fall in profits. In Spitalfields, people say that the consequence of the Referendum was, ‘We lost Europe but we saved Norton Folgate.’ Yet, as long as the planning permission stands, the door remains open for the revival of this hideous scheme when the economy improves.
We can celebrate two notable successes in conservation in the past year. Largely due to letters of objection written by readers of Spitalfields Life, the murals in the Royal Exchange were saved when the developer withdrew their application to bisect these magnificent paintings. Similarly, the historic Still & Star in Aldgate ( the last ‘slum pub’ in the City of London) was given a reprieve from demolition when it was granted Asset of Community Value status.
Thus another year passes in the pages of Spitalfields Life.
As the season changes and the summer fades away, there is much to look forward to this autumn and I hope I will have the pleasure of meeting you at one these forthcoming events.
14th SEPTEMBER: A HOXTON CHILDHOOD AT V&A BETHNAL GREEN MUSEUM: Celebrating our new edition of AS Jasper’s classic East End childhood memoir, we present an evening of readings from A Hoxton Childhood & The Years After and an interview with the author’s son, Terry Jasper. Additionally, Derrick Porter, Poet of Hoxton, will read a selection of his poems and Henrietta Keeper, Belle of Bethnal Green, will sing. Click here for tickets.
10th OCTOBER: LAUNCH OF EAST END VERNACULAR AT NUNNERY GALLERY: There will be a special viewing for Spitalfields Life readers from 6-8pm of Bow Arts’ exhibition The Working Artist: The East London Group at which I will introduce my new book East End Vernacular, Artists who painted London’s East End streets in the 20th century. Make a note in your diary and watch this space for further details.
4th & 5th NOVEMBER: BLOG WRITING COURSE IN SPITALFIELDS: I have been running these courses for five years now and it is an enduring delight to spend a weekend with readers in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, and hear the wonderful ideas and stories that people bring. With delicious lunch served by Leila’s Cafe and cakes baked by the Townhouse to eighteenth century recipes, we always have a lot of fun. Click here for more information and email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book.
Over the next week, I shall be at the printers overseeing the production of EAST END VERNACULAR and, in the meantime, I will be publishing favourite posts from the past year until I resume with new stories on Monday 4th September.
Click here to order a copy of THE BOSS OF BETHNAL GREEN
Click here to order a copy of A HOXTON CHILDHOOD & THE YEARS AFTER
Click here to pre-order a copy of EAST END END VERNACULAR
You may like to read my earlier Annual Reports
Lunch At Mama Thai
Raj Chawla (centre) and his team at Mama Thai
Mama Thai on the corner of Toynbee St and Brune St, just fifty yards from Christ Church, has long been one of my favourite lunch spots. Thus it was with great sadness in 2015 I reported the death of chef Pam Chawla who had run this beloved establishment with her husband Raj since 1991.
Two years later, I am delighted to announce that, under the continuing supervision of Raj, there are new chefs at Mama Thai and the standard of fresh food prepared daily is as high as it has ever been. I know of nowhere else in Spitalfields where you can find such a reliably wholesome lunch for just five pounds. In face of a disappointing proliferation of chain outlets around the Spitalfields Market offering fast pre-prepared food, it is heartening to return to an old haunt and find it reinvigorated with new life.
At least once a week you will find me here tucking in to a tasty plate of vegetables and rice. In my opinion, it is the ideal healthy lunch. I always have the same thing and I am never disappointed by its reliable high quality. Sometimes, Abdus Samad Ajad, the chef who does the serving, asks me which vegetables I should like from the seasonal selection they have cooked that day and my reply is always the same, ‘You decide!’
Spinach is one of my favourites and the texture is very important, it should not be overcooked and turn to slush. At Mama Thai, head chef Mohammed Shofique Miah understands this and his spinach is always chewy and freshly cooked. I cannot to pretend to enjoy lentils on the whole, but here they are cooked to such a gentle consistency and so subtly spiced that they are delicious. Similarly, the pumpkin accompanied by ground coconut is another favourite of mine.
Cooking vegetables well is the test of any chef and it is an unexpected delight to discover real cooking in this cosy corner cafe where no dish costs more than five pounds. Among all the junk food and over-hyped pretentious places, Mama Thai is Spitalfields’ best kept culinary secret and I do recommend you seek it out. Raj Chawla is waiting to welcome you in person.
Chef Mohammed Shofique Miah
Hajera Begum prepares all the vegetables freshly for the chefs during service
Mohammed with his Deputy Chef Abdus Samad Ajad
The kitchen team
Raj Chawla has run Mama Thai in Spitalfields since 1991
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may also like to read my earlier story about Mama Thai from 2010
Sheila Bell of Great Eastern Buildings
(Click on this photograph to enlarge it)
Can you spot Sheila Bell in this photograph of the residents of Great Eastern Buildings celebrating Victory in Europe Day at the Grey Eagle in Quaker St on 2nd May 1945? Look more closely, there she is sitting in the front row, to the left of the girl in a floppy hat. Sheila has a bow in her hair for this special occasion.
Unfortunately, this picture was not too much use when I met Sheila at Victoria Station recently to hear about her life at Great Eastern Buildings on the corner of Brick Lane and Quaker St. Yet, as Sheila began to tell her story, I quickly recognised the little girl in this photograph of a lifetime ago.
“My grandparents, George & Sarah Keppel, lived in Great Eastern Buildings and my great-grandparents, Emma & Frederic Lewis lived in the same flat before them – before that I do not know. My nan never went out to work, she stayed at home, cooked the dinner and kept the house, and my granddad worked down Spitalfields Market. He started off as a porter but he was a carpenter by trade, so he made the ladders for the guys in the market. He hired two rooms in the next block at the Buildings and did all his carpentry work there. I used walk in there and smell the fresh wood shavings. He had a black iron glue pot and he made me stir it. It looked like toffee but it did not smell like toffee, I can assure you.
My parents lived in the Buildings as well and, as soon as I was born, I was taken to the Buildings, as the fourth generation of my family there. My mother worked in Truman’s Brewery as a bottling girl, she wore a green overall, a white apron and clogs, and my father was a smoked salmon curer in Frying Pan Alley, opposite Liverpool St Station. We lived in flat number sixty-eight Great Eastern Buildings, on the second floor. I was brought up in those Buildings with Jewish, Irish and Maltese, and we all rubbed along very nicely.
There always used to be a lot of workmen in and out of the Buildings, fixing things, and my first memory was of playing with a load of sand and water. Me and my cousins used to make sandcastles in the builders’ sand. That was our life! We lived in two rooms. We shared a wash house with a mangle and three sinks, two normal-sized and one butler’s sink with two taps. There was no hot water and each of the four flats on the landing shared the wash house. If you wanted a bath you had to boil a kettle. We had a tin bath like everybody else and an outside toilet that we shared with the three other families. We took it in turns to clean the toilet on a weekly rota system.
I do not remember a gas stove but I do remember a black range. You could lift the lid with a poker and put coal in. The kettle was always on the hob and there was an oven to the side. On Sunday, my nan would black-lead the range and it used to gleam. It had a white hearth and she used to whiten it, that was her pride and joy. It was always done, and our two rooms were kept clean. One room doubled as a front-room-come-kitchen, -come-everything really. We had old armchairs in there and a settee made of Rexine, that looked like leather but it was plastic and, in the summer, it used to stick to your legs, so we had to put a blanket on it. We had an old piano, I think everybody in those days had a piano. There was a little sink in the corner for the bowl and jug which we kept in the bedroom. That was all you had plus a table and a cupboard.
In the bedroom, we had a double bed and a single bed, if you had more than one child or if anybody came to stay. Unfortunately, that was how it was. We put up with because we did not know any different. I was the eldest and I had a younger brother. Now my nan had two rooms and my mum had two rooms, so my brother slept in the front room which meant mum and dad had the bedroom, my nan and grandad had the other bedroom and I slept in the other front room on a made-up bed. I used to lie on the floor and listen to the trains shunting in the goodsyard. Both flats were opposite each other across the same landing.
When I was fourteen, the flats were modernised by combining two, so then we had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a lounge. They put in electricity. It was amazing because I had only known gaslight since childhood. We did not know we were born! It was like a palace. I had my own room and my brother had his own room. It was our home and they did not move us out while they modernised, they just worked around us.
As children, we used to love to run through Wheler St Arch because it was always dark and gloomy with gas lamps – it was a dare really. We liked to go down Spitalfields Market and pick up the specks – the damaged fruit – and we used to bring them home. We did not have any other fruit. At Christmas time, my granddad came home with a sack full of specks. All the family would get together round the piano. My Auntie used to play the piano fantastically, sitting on a crate of brown ale. My nan never went out all week but on a Saturday night she went with out her friend and they would go either to the Two Brewers on the corner or the Grey Eagle. On a Saturday night, when she did not go out, my nan and I, we would get our pillow and put it on the window sill, and sit with our cups of tea and wait for the pubs to turn out. There would be fights and it was entertainment for us.
My granddad used to have a stall at the top of Brick Lane on Sundays and sell nuts and bolts, and I took tea to him in a white enamel flask. The market was packed in those days and, by the time I got there, the tea would be splashed everywhere, so he only got one cup out of it.
My first job was for Durrants the printers opposite Mount Pleasant Post Office in Clerkenwell and I absolutely hated it. I was sixteen or seventeen and I used to come home black with ink. Then I went into the rag trade, machining at Universal Underwear – it was very highbrow, we made it for Marks & Spencers – just off Shoreditch High St. I loved it and stayed there for ten years. I did an apprenticeship and my first week’s pay was four pounds, nineteen shillings and eleven pence. I thought I was rich!
After three months, they put you on piecework and I used to earn a fortune. Twenty or thirty pounds a week was a lot of money in those days. I was a saver and there would be times when I only had a shilling and sixpence in my purse but that was fine. I have always put a bit by because you never know what might happen. My parents did the same and they taught me not to spend money on non-essentials. Then, if you really need that money you do not have to go to anybody, you have got it there. My mother was very independent and my parents never owed anybody any money. I only ever wanted to pay the rent and put food on the table.
When I was twenty-five, I left Great Eastern Buildings to get married. I met my husband Riaz at Queen’s Ice Skating Rink in Bayswater. It was a ritual, I used to go there every Friday. Every Saturday, we went to the cinema and, every Sunday, we went to the Mecca Ballroom in Leicester Sq. We had a fantastic social life. We moved to a rented two bedroom flat in Hackney Downs when we got married and my daughter was born in Lower Clapton Rd at the Salvation Army Hospital. My husband was an aircraft engineer at Gatwick and the travelling was too much for him, so they offered us a flat down there and we stayed thirty years.
I still miss the community spirit of Great Eastern Buildings. Nobody went without, the people in those Buildings would give you their last ha’penny even if they had nothing.”
The Grey Eagle photographed by Philip Marriage in 1967
Corner of Grey Eagle St today
Steven Harris, who also grew up in Great Eastern Buildings, managed to identify these people:
Little girl at front, right of centre, with floppy white hat is Joyce Gibbons (my Aunty Joyce).
Next to floppy white hat, toddler with bow in hair is Sheila Bell herself.
The lady to the left, with her arm up, may well be Franny Vigas.
Behind Franny, with the dark hair is Sarah Keppel (Sheila’s grandmother)
The shorter of the two men, just to Sarah’s right, is Sheila’s granddad, George Keppel.
To George’s right, with her back against the pub wall is Lily Bell (Sheila’s mother)
Further to the right, holding two children (you can just see her head against the pub window) is Bessie Lee, sister to Lily Bell. The two children were Lorraine and Ronnie Lee.
Staying at the back and just along from Bessie Lee and her children, are two dark haired women – they were sisters, Celia and Sarah Bawes.
One forward and three along to the right from Lily Bell is a blond girl with roundish face – that was Betty Wright (who was long standing friends with my Aunty Pat)
Third row back, a little to the left of the roll of honour, with her beret pulled down at a sharp angle and standing slightly alone, is Phyllis Greenslade.
To the extreme right of the photo, sitting next to the honours roll, is Pat Green.
Third row back, to the left of the central line of children, is George Hall (with finger in mouth).
To the left of George is, I believe, my very own nine-year-old dad – Eddie Harris!
George’s sister, Rosie, is the blond girl with big smile, one row forward and three along to the right of George.
Sheila Butt (nee Bell)
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At Kelmscott House
I have walked past William Morris’ former house on the river bank in Hammersmith many times and always wondered what it was like inside but, since it is now a private dwelling, I never expected to visit. However, the residents kindly open their doors to members of the William Morris Society once every two years and thus, a couple of weeks ago, I was permitted to join the tour.
William Morris was forty-three years old when he came to live here. It was to be his last house in a succession that began with his childhood home in Walthamstow and included the Red House in Bexleyheath, designed for him and Jane as their marital home by Philip Webb, and the sixteenth century Kelmscott Manor by the Thames in Lechlade. The rural idyll which William Morris hoped for at Kelmscott Manor had been sullied by the overbearing presence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose obsession with Jane Morris had led him to take up permanent residence.
“If you could be content to live no nearer London than that, I cannot help thinking we should do very well there and certainly the open river and the garden at the back are a great advantage,” William wrote tactfully to Jane in February 1877. “If the matter lay with me only, I should be setting about taking the house, for already I have become conscious of the difficulty of getting anything decent. As to such localities as Knightsbridge or Kensington Sq, they are quite beyond our means.”
Built in the seventeen-eighties, the house was known as The Retreat and had once been the home of Sir Francis Ronalds, inventor of the electric telegraph, who had filled the long garden, which stretched all the way back to King St then, with buried cables as part of his experiments. When William Morris came here and renamed it Kelmscott House, it had been the home of the novelist George MacDonald for a decade. However – somewhat ominously for Morris – they chose to leave since MacDonald believed that the proximity to the polluted river was responsible for his family’s ill-health. In those days, the riverfront at Hammersmith was heavily industrialised with factories and wharfs.
I realised that, in my imagination, I felt I had already visited Kelmscott House. Long ago, when I read Morris’ novel News From Nowhere, I was seduced by his vision of a homespun Utopia that had turned its back on industrialism. In my memory, as if in the moonlight of a dream, I joined the characters as they departed Kelmscott House and undertook the journey up the Thames from Hammersmith to Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, travelling a hundred years into the future.
In reality, it was one of the brightest days of our rather disappointing summer when I paid my visit to Kelmscott House. Comparable to the experience of visiting a location from a dream, there were compelling details which evoked that faraway world, even if time and change had wiped away almost all of the evidence of Morris’ occupation of the house. “Let us hope that we shall all grow younger there,” he wrote to Jane with forced optimism in October 1878, just before they moved in.
Walking through the narrow passage beside The Dove, you discover the wide expanse of the Thames on the left and Kelmscott House rising up on your right, presenting an implacable frontage to the river. You enter through the area stairs on the left of the house, leading down to the kitchen, and immediately you notice a wall of original trellis wallpaper, designed by Morris with birds drawn by Philip Webb. If no-one told you, you would assume it was a recent reprint since these papers remain in production today. The low-ceilinged basement rooms are now the headquarters of the William Morris Society, where you may admire his Albion Press before climbing stairs again into the former coach house. This long narrow room was employed by Morris as a workshop for knotting carpets, also lectures and meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist League were held here. During his final years at Kelmscott, Morris became increasingly involved with politics and the Socialist cause.
The garden no longer stretches to King St, just as far as M4, yet it is impressively generous for a London garden, with well-kept herbaceous borders and a wide lawn. Most fascinating to me, though, was the strawberry patch – since William Morris’ Strawberry Thief is one of his most celebrated textile designs, inspired by his experiences at Kelmscott Manor where the thrushes raided his soft fruit.
Approaching the house from the rear, it presents quite a different aspect than from the front, with assymetric projections and a bowed turret. The high-ceilinged dining room at the back was especially offensive to Morris with its Adam detailing and Venetian window. This seems a curious prejudice to the modern sensibility. Perhaps our equivalent might be those eighties post-modern buildings which have not aged well. Fortunately, Morris suspended a vast sixteenth century Islamic carpet across one wall and part of the ceiling, drawing the eye from the Georgian elements which he found so hideous.
Emery Walker photographed the interiors, capturing Morris’ personal sense of interior design, employing lush textiles and extravagant antiques, mixed with furniture painted by Philip Webb and fine oriental ceramics. Architecturally, the most impressive space is the first floor drawing room which spans the width of the house, created by George MacDonald by knocking two bedrooms into one. In this south-facing room, the views over Chiswick Reach are breathtaking. Morris lined it with a rich, bluish tapestry of birds in foliage that he designed for this location. A huge settle painted with sunflowers by Philip Webb once sat beside the fireplace, lined with blue and white tiles manufactured by Morris & Co and still in situ.
In 1881, seeing children from the nearby slum known as Little Wapping swinging on his garden gate, Morris recognised, “It was my good luck only of being born respectable and rich, that has put me on this side of the window among delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the other side, in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor shops, the foul and degraded lodgings.”
Overlooking the garden at the back was Jane Morris’ room, somewhat detached from the rest of the house, granting her the independence she required as she withdrew from her marriage during the years at Hammersmith. The two front rooms on the ground floor, overlooking the river, comprised William Morris’ workroom and bedroom. It was in the workroom to the left of the front door that he supervised the creation of the Kelmscott Press, publishing fifty-two titles in five years. In his bedroom to the right, he installed a loom to undertake tapestry through the long hours of the night when he could not sleep. Here he died from tuberculosis on 3rd October 1896, aged just sixty-two, nursed by Emery Walker as his breath failed him. His last words were, “I want to get mumbo jumbo out of the world.”
I walked back along King St to the tube, past the Lyric Sq Market where William Morris once spoke. I thought about him taking the District Line back and forth to visit East London for public speaking – and I decided I should trace his footsteps in the East End next.
Basement stairs with original Morris ‘Trellis’ wallpaper
William Morris’ design for ‘Trellis’ wallpaper with birds drawn by Philip Webb
William Morris’ Albion Press
Hammersmith Socialist League gathering on the back lawn at Kelmscott House, 1885
William Morris’ workroom from which he ran the Kelmscott Press, with stairs leading up to the coach house where Hammersmith Socialist League meetings were held (Photograph by Emery Walker)
Strawberry patch in the garden at Kelmscott
William Morris’ ‘Strawberry Thief’ design
Sixteenth century Islamic carpet displayed by Morris in the dining room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
‘William Morris’ rose blooms at Kelmscott
The drawing room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
Tapestry designed for the drawing room at Kelmscott
The drawing room at Kelmscott (Photograph by Emery Walker)
William Morris spoke here – Lyric Sq Market, Hammersmith
Archive photographs courtesy William Morris Society
The lower floor and coach house of Kelmscott House are open on Thursday and Saturday afternoons. Visit the William Morris Society website for further details
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