So Long, Olive Besagni
I was sorry to learn this week of the death of Olive Besagni on 12th December at the age of ninety, followed by the death of her husband Bruno last weekend at the age of ninety-one. The late photographer Colin O’Brien and I met Olive & Bruno at the Italian Parade in Clerkenwell and today I publish my profile of Olive followed by my profile of Bruno tomorrow, in tribute to this remarkable couple who enjoyed sixty-eight years of marriage.
This photograph by Colin O’Brien shows Olive Besagni at eighty-five years old, displaying a portrait of herself at nineteen. I think I can detect a hint of swagger in her eye, but let us grant Olive this indulgence – because she embraced existence with such exuberance and good humour she earned the right to show a little chutzpah.
Olive was standing in her flat in Myddleton Sq in Finsbury where she lived since 1956, just half a mile north of Clerkwenwell where her grandfather Giovanni Ferrari arrived from Borgotaro in 1880 to teach English to the Italian immigrants. Giovanni was a clever young man who loved to teach,and since most of the Italians needed to learn English if they were to advance, he became a very popular figure – known as Maestro Ferrari.
Giovanni’s eldest son Guiseppe (known as Joe) married Netta Oxley, an Englishwoman, and they moved to Gospel Oak where Olive was born in 1925. Then, when Olive was eleven they moved to Hampstead and at fourteen, upon the outbreak of war, she was evacuated to Rutland where she delighted to write sketches for performances in the village hall. Consequently, Olive grew up knowing little of the crowded Italian slum centred around Back Hill in Clerkenwell, that was the focus of the Italian community in London in those days.
“When I finished school, my parents wanted me to go to work in an office but I preferred to spend my time at Parliament Hill Lido and so I went for a few interviews that I messed up purposely. Finally, my father got a letter from a friend who ran a factory making religious statues, saying “Do either of your sons want a job?” It was in Great Sutton St in Clerkenwell and I went to work there, painting the lace and the gold lines onto the statues. Since I grew up in the suburbs, this was the first time I saw Italians in the raw but, once they discovered I was Maestro Ferrari’s granddaughter, they were very kind to me. And amongst the younger men was a sixteen year old boy called Bruno Besagni who worked as an artistic sprayer.
But I got bored with it there, and I found a job as a trainee negative cutter at a small documentary company in Dean St called Realist Films. They made mostly black and white films for medical students with close-ups of operations. I was only eighteen and there was a film of triplets being born, in colour, that I found especially traumatising, even more so than people having their legs removed. Yet I became an assistant film editor eventually, and from there I went to the best job I ever had – at Pathé Films in Wardour St.
I worked for Alexander Wilson Gardner making short pieces of film that could be inserted into news reports. We made a sequence about Christian Dior’s “New Look.” They had a model to wear the short hem and I had to appear as the legs of the woman in a long skirt. While I was there we discovered all these old reels, from the nineteen twenties and earlier, in the basement. We had to sort them out and I remember finding the film of Churchill dodging the bullets at the Battle of Sidney St. It was quite something, all these old cans of film, and it was exciting because it was all new to me.
I loved it, I absolutely loved it, but when I married Bruno Besagni and had two children, I was at home for five years as a housewife and mum. Then Alexander Milner Gardner rang me up and said “Do you want a job?” So I said, “I’ll ask my mum,” and she came and stayed with my children each day, and I went back to work. But very shortly, Alexander Milner Gardner died and my mother decided to go to America to see her other daughters, and I had to leave again. I pottered about doing freelance work. Commercials started then and I edited Butlins’ first adverts. But I resented leaving Pathé and I never became an editor because you had to do six years as an assistant editor before you could qualify.
I did all sorts of bits and pieces until I got a job in the Media Resources department at Kingsway College in Sans Walk, Clerkenwell. I had to work this horrible dirty old printing machine, and the boss didn’t like me because he thought I wasn’t young and he wanted a glamorous girl – but I didn’t mind because I have a sense of humour. I said, “I write plays, I can be a bit of a nuisance sometimes.” And he said, “Never mind, do it here!” So I wrote my plays there and they printed them for me and life was a ball.
I love razzmatazz and I used to write stuff for my friends, old time music hall etc, to entertain the old people at my church. Then one of the youngsters said, “Can’t we do a proper play?” So I said, “I can write something about the Second World War – if I don’t know anything about anything, I know about that.” I wrote a play, “Blitz & Peaces” with a cast of thirty and I produced, directed and acted in it. It was easy for me, and it was so successful, it was full every night. After that, I was offered the theatre at the St Luke’s Conference Centre in Central St. And I wrote and directed shows, one each year, for twenty years – I had this lovely theatre, some very talented actors and we played to two hundred people a night.”
These plays, that Olive wrote and directed, dramatised aspects of the experiences of the Italian people in Clerkenwell and were in effect a collective history, performed by descendants of immigrants in front of an audience of their community. Yet in spite of the accomplishment and popular emotional import of these epic dramatic works that occupied Olive for twenty years, the culmination of her talents was yet to come.
In 2011, Olive Besagni published A Better Life, a collection of oral histories telling the story of Italian families in Clerkenwell going back through generations into the nineteenth century. In this authoritative book, Olive told the story of an entire society, allowing people to speak for themselves yet supplying pertinent historical material to give background to the testimonies. With her experience as an editor and her trained ear as a playwright, Olive was the ideal person to make a record of her people. The only shortcoming – if it may be called that – is that Olive modestly included very little of her own story, which is why I endeavoured to tell it here.
Colin O’Brien and I met Olive at the Italian Parade in Clerkenwell in 2011, which she had attended every year since it recommenced in 1946, except for 1948 – because Olive got married to Bruno on the day before the parade that year and she was away on her honeymoon. As a consequence, Olive & Bruno’s wedding anniversary was always the day before the parade and we met her on the day after her sixty-third anniversary. “I can’t believe it,” she confessed in wonder, “So many good things have happened to me.”
Olive looking like a Hollywood movie star in the nineteen forties
Olive & Bruno
Wedding at St Peter’s, the Italian church, in Clerkenwell, July 1948
Olive arrives at the church with her father Guiseppe Ferrari (known as Joe)
Olive & Bruno on their honeymoon, 1948
Olive & Bruno with their children Anita & Tony at Brambles Chine on the Isle of Wight
Olive & Bruno with their children, Anita, Tony & Nicolette
On New Year’s Eve
Bruno and Olive on their sixty-third wedding anniversary
Olive Besagni
Portraits copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
Copies of A Better Life by Olive Besagni are available from the publisher Camden History Society
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Terry Scales, Artist
Terry Scales
Terry Scales has lived for more than fifty years in a quiet back street in a forgotten corner of Greenwich where the tourists do not stray. To find him, I wandered through narrow thoroughfares between modest old terraces that splayed off at different angles with eccentric geometry, just like lines upon a protractor, to reach the park at zero degrees Longitude.
In the front room, Terry’s wife, Cristiana Angelini, was painting and he ushered me past. “She has the best room, but I have the best light,” He whispered with a sly grin as he led me quickly into his crowded studio overlooking the garden. There, among a proliferation of handsome pictures of boats upon the Thames that are his forte, Terry showed me the first oil painting that he did at art school – an accomplished still life in the manner of Cezanne – and a fine pencil drawing of him in his teens by Susan Einzeg. A portrait that is recognisable seventy years later on account of Terry’s distinctively crooked aquiline nose and feverish youthful energy.
I know of no other painter so well placed to paint scenes of the Thames as Terry Scales since, alongside his natural facility with the brush, he is able to draw upon a lifetime’s experience, growing up in a family that made its living upon the river for generations and then working in the Docks himself. “Because of the strikes, people think that dockers were all muscle and brawn, but we had men who left solicitors’ offices to work in Docks. It has to do with the independent lifestyle, you were never working for just one company, you were working all over the shop.” Terry assured me, eager to dispel the notion of dockers as an unsophisticated workforce, “Among that vast body of men, there were many very talented people.”
“They discovered I was a professionally trained artist and asked me to draw portraits,” he revealed, showing me his work for the National Dock Labour Board magazine in the fifties, “but my senior colleagues were very suspicious and conservative. I grew a beard after two years in the Docks and they were all scandalised!”
Terry’s work is the outcome of an intimate relationship with his subject, both the working life of the river and its shifting climate. “Most of the subjects of my paintings have gone now,” he confessed, casting his eyes fondly around the gallery of maritime scenes that surrounded us, evoking the vanished world of the Docks with such vibrant presence. I was fascinated to learn how Terry had combined his employment as a docker with his artistic endeavour – so that each fed the other – and he obliged by telling me the whole story.
“I was born in 1932 in St Olave’s, Rotherhithe, and my family lived in that area for as long as anyone knew. My mother’s people came over from Ireland in the eighteen-fifties after the potato famine, and they were called O’Driscoll which they changed to Driscoll. On both sides, my family worked in the Docks, and my father was a ganger in the Albert Docks and a lighterman. A hundred years ago, they were very adventurous, with my grandfather travelling to Australia and America, taking ships here and there, and picking up work. On my father’s side, they were all dockers in Bermondsey working on the grain wharfs near Cherry Gardens Pier – the lightermen’s stopping point where they changed barges.
I was evacuated to Seaton in the West Country which opened my eyes to the splendour of landscape and I returned after the war with a broad Devon accent to live in one of the prefab villages in Bermondsey. After a good schooling in Devon, I was sent to school in Rotherhithe which was appalling – there was a complete lack of discipline and I learnt absolutely nothing. The Labour government brought in a scheme where pupils that were talented but not academic could go to a college and learn a craft. So, at the age of thirteen, I applied to Camberwell School of Art and was accepted. And when I arrived there it was like heaven, because we had the best painters in England teaching us and, being thirteen I took it very seriously indeed – there was Victor Pasmore, Keith Vaughan, John Minton, William Coldstream and members of the Euston Rd Group.
I think the teachers must have appreciated that I was such a serious student because, by the age of sixteen, I had sold paintings to all the staff and William Coldstream bought a canal scene of mine. So I was doing very well as a student artist. Keith Vaughan, John Minton and Susan Einzig, they were the Neo-Romantic group and they took me under their wing. But the members of the Euston Rd Group taught me to draw because they were keen on observation, so I owe my drawing ability to them. There was an ideological war going on between their subdued English Realism and the Neo-Romantics who were influenced by Picasso and Matisse.
I was the youngest in my year and, when we graduated in 1952, I had to do National Service so I applied to the RAF. A Jazz musician called Monty Sunshine told me I should be a telephonist because it was the cushiest job. So I applied to do signals in the Far East, but they sent me to work at East India Docks and I was able to live at home. By the time I was demobbed all my friends were teaching, but I didn’t fancy that, as I was only twenty-one, so I took a job at a publicity studio in Fleet St that did posters for Hollywood films and I became a background artist. Once, I painted a brooding sky with lightning as the background to the poster for ‘The Night My Number Came Up’ but after they had put a great big aeroplane on it, and the stars’ faces, and the title, you could hardly see any of my work! I was paid a very low wage, the painters who did the stars’ faces got the top money with the lettering artists below them, so I realised it would be a long time before I earned any money.
I was ambitious, so my father said to me, ‘This is peanuts – why don’t you come and work in the Docks? You could build up your bank balance.’ In 1955, I took a docker’s brief at number one sector, Surrey Docks, and over a five year period I worked every wharf from Tower Bridge to Woolwich. In the summer, once the Baltic Sea thawed, I worked on the timber ships. They came with huge cargoes and every strip had to be manhandled into barges. I worked quite hard, earned very good wages and had no accidents.
One day, I finished early after unloading a ship of Belgian chocolates, so I decided to go over to Camberwell and see my old teachers. I dropped in on the Foundation Course and they said, ‘Thank God you’ve turned up because one of the tutors has been taken ill! Can you take the class?’ And afterwards, they said, ‘Can you come back tomorrow?’ Prior to that, I had an exhibition at the South London Gallery and I continued painting while I was working at the Docks. I painted a whole exhibition once during an eight week strike.
I knew the Welfare Officer at the Surrey Docks and I said, ‘I’m going to leave to teach.’ He said, ‘Teaching is a very insecure profession, you shouldn’t give up the Docks.’ But the Docks closed ten years later and I stayed teaching at Camberwell in the Fine Art Department for the next thirty years, until I retired in 1990 to concentrate on my own work.
The appeal of painting the Thames for me is not just because of my personal background, but because the river has space. In London, you are aware of being closed in yet when you see the Thames it has a grandeur, and when the tall ships are there you feel the magnificence of it. You get changes of light and, although I’ve often been prevented from finishing paintings because of surprises, like breaks in the weather or the sudden appearance of smoke, it always adds something. You start to paint a ship on a Monday, it rains on a Tuesday and it’s a different ship there on the Thursday – but if you are a landscape artist seeking qualities of light, ambiguity has to be part of it.”
Terry in his studio, sitting with the first painting he ever did at art school. “A man who paints puts his heart on the wall and in that painting is the man’s life” – John Minton, 1951.
Bert and James, Barges, Prior’s Wharf, 1990
Hungerford Bridge
View from the Festival Hall
Pier at Bankside
Red Tug passing St Paul’s
Shipping off Piper’s Wharf, 1983
Greenwich Peninsula.
The ‘John Mackay,’ Trans-Atlantic Cable Layer, Enderby’s Wharf, 1979
Mike Canty’s Boat Yard, 1988
Terry with his shed that he constructed entirely out of driftwood from the Thames.
Paintings and drawings copyright © Terry Scales
SCENES FROM POST-WAR LONDON 1946 – 1960, the early paintings of Terry Scales, runs until 10th June 2017 at West Greenwich Library, 146 Greenwich High Rd, Greenwich, London, SE10 8NN. Terry will be talking about his work on 9th June 3-4pm
At Emery Walker’s House
Kelmscott Press & Doves Press editions at Emery Walker’s House
Typographer and Printer, Emery Walker and Designer and Poet, William Morris both lived in houses on the Thames in Hammersmith, but they first met at a Socialist meeting in Bethnal Green and travelled home together on the train to West London.
Today both houses are adorned with plaques commemorating their illustrious former residents, and remarkably Emery Walker’s House in Hammersmith Terrace has survived almost as he left it, thanks to the benign auspices of his daughter, Dorothy, and her companion Elizabeth de Haas. Today it boasts one of London’s best preserved Arts & Crafts interiors and stepping through the threshold – as I did last week – is to step back in time and encounter the dramas that were played out here over a century ago.
After their first meeting, Emery Walker and William Morris met each other regularly walking on the riverside path and soon became firm friends. Morris once commented that his day was not complete without a sight of Walker and the outcome of their friendship was that Emery Walker took responsibility for the technical side of Morris’ printing endeavours at the Kelmscott Press – designing the Kelmscott typeface – and then subsequently nursing Morris through his final illness.
The previous resident of Emery Walker’s house was Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, who is credited with coining the phrase ‘arts and crafts.’ After Morris’ death, he and Emery Walker established the Doves Press in 1900, for which Walker designed the celebrated Doves typeface. Although this highly successful creative partnership set the precedent for the private press movement of the twentieth century and they employed typographer Edward Johnston, who also lived in Hammersmith Terrace, it came to grief due to Cobden-Sanderson’s volatile emotional behaviour. The nadir arrived when Cobden-Sanderson dumped more than a ton of Doves type off Hammersmith Bridge to prevent Emery Walker having any further use of it. Only in own time have specimens been retrieved from the Thames and the font recreated digitally.
Meanwhile, William Morris’ daughter May and her husband, Henry Halliday Sparling, who was Secretary of the Socialist League moved in next door to Emery Walker – until May’s lover, George Bernard Shaw, moved in with them too and Henry Halliday Sparling moved out.
As with many old houses, you wish the walls could speak to you of the former residents and at Emery Walker’s house they do, because they are all papered with designs by William Morris. Within these richly patterned walls are rare pieces of furniture by Philip Webb, hangings and carpets by Morris & Co, photographs of William Morris by Emery Walker, a drawing of May Morris by Edward Burne Jones, needlework by May Morris and more. Most of the clutter and paraphernalia gathered by Emery Walker remains, including a lock of William Morris’ hair and several pairs of his spectacles.
Yet in spite of these treasures, it is the unselfconsciously shabby, lived-in quality of the house which is most appealing, mixing as many as five different William Morris textile and wallpaper designs in one room. Elsewhere, a Philip Webb linen press has been moved, revealing an earlier Morris wallpaper behind it and a more recent Morris paper applied only on the walls surrounding it.
Thus, the ghosts of the long-gone linger in this shadowy old riverside house in Hammersmith.
Looking upriver
This seventeenth century chair belonged to William Morris and was given to Emery Walker by May Morris after her father’s death with addition of the tapestry cushion designed and worked by May
Portraits of William Morris taken by Emery Walker
Four different designs by William Morris for Morris & Co combined in the same room
Emory Walker looks down from the chimney breast in his drawing room. The teapot and salts once belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Fireplace with tiles by William de Morgan
Traditional English rush-seated ladder back chair by Ernest Barnsley and Morris & Co carpet bearing the tulip and lily design which is believed to have belonged to Morris, acquired from the sale at Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire
William Morris’ daisy wallpaper and Sussex chairs in the bedroom overlooking the river
Woollen bedcover embroidered by May Morris
Looking downstream
A yellow flag iris at Hammersmith Bridge where Emery Walker’s Doves typeface was dumped in to the Thames by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson
Emery Walkers’s House, 7 Hammersmith Terrace, W8 9TS, may be visited by tours which can be booked at www.emerywalker.org.uk
The Gentle Author’s Cries Of Covent Garden
I am taking part in the SOUNDS OF THE CITY evening at the London Transport Museum next Friday 19th May, showing some favourite images of CRIES OF LONDON that portray street life in Covent Garden, as illustrated by artists who lived in Covent Garden. Click here for more details
Images by John Thomas Smith courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Abdul Chowdry In Camden Square
Photographer Abdul Chowdry‘s lively pictures of Camden Sq Adventure Playground are currently on display at Holborn Library. The playground operated from the early seventies until the mid-eighties and Abdul Chowdry was Playleader throughout this period, taking the pictures you see below in 1978 and 1979. Initially created in response to a petition by over 900 local people in 1971, the playground was temporarily relocated to Maiden Lane in the mid-eighties never to return, and now these photographs recall a lost era.
‘I had a camera and I was interested in photography, so it was nice to keep a snapshot of what people were doing and look back on it. It was more to show the kids what they looked like – I did not think I was taking pictures for history or anything – I simply happened to be in an environment that was conducive to taking lovely photographs. It is only looking back that you realise it is a snapshot of the time.
The kids used to take pictures as well. Nowadays, everybody has a camera on their phone but not everyone had one then. A couple of youngsters wanted to be photographers and we were blessed because we had brilliant people doing all sorts of things: candle-making, silk-screen printing, enamelling – and photography was one of all those things.
When you look at something through a lens, you look at it with an entirely new perspective, and you can see from the pictures how the kids were interacting with their environment. Photography was a way for them to converse about what was going on, to develop and to build confidence. I used photography because I was interested in it and, when we were developing the pictures, the kids could be part of that and they could learn the skill of it for themselves. ‘– Abdul Chowdry
Photographs copyright © Abdul Chowdry
With grateful thanks to Maisie Rowe
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Peta Bridle’s River Etchings
It has been a year since we heard from Peta Bridle, but this week she sent me her latest drypoint etchings, all inspired by the presence of the River Thames – to add to her growing portfolio of London, its culture, people and places
The Old Rose, The Highway, E1 – ‘The Old Rose sits alone on a corner of Chigwell Hill, facing the thunder of the traffic along The Highway. A small plaque reads ‘This is the corner of Chigwell Streate 1678’ and at the foot of the hill is Tobacco Dock. The Old Rose closed in 2011 and remains boarded up, but it is a lovely building so I hope it survives.’
Mission House Steps, Gravesend – ‘These worn steps draped in weed belong to the Mission House. Once ‘The Spread Eagle’ a pub, the Mission was set up by a local reverend to cater for the spiritual needs of Gravesend’s waterside and emigrant population in the days families waited here on boats for weeks, preparing to sail to Canada or Australia for a better life.’
Alderman Stairs, E1 – ‘Hidden between two former warehouses lies Alderman Stairs. A narrow passageway leads down to the Thames and out onto a stone pavement. Once a place to hail a boat, the shore is now a quiet place – quite different to the London on land.’
Gallions’ Reach Wreck, North Woolwich – ‘When the docks closed down in the sixties many Thames sailing barges were abandoned along the river. This wreck lies bare to the sky near the mouth of the Royal Albert Dock. Once used to carry building materials, it now holds only quivering grass.’
Gallions’ Reach Wreck, North Woolwich – ‘Close up with twisted nails and timbers shaped by the Thames’
The Devil & Two Women, St Katharine’s Chapel, Limehouse – ‘St Katherine’s Chapel once stood on the riverbank near the Tower of London, but it is now located in Limehouse. Inside the chapel are medieval choir stalls with misericords and this one is of the Devil eavesdropping on two women chatting – the sculptor has captured beautiful detail in their clothing and faces.’ Drawn with kind permission from St Katherines Chapel
Queen Philippa, St Katherine’s Chapel, Limehouse – ‘This carving is of Queen Philippa, who was married to King Edward III. The sculptor has given her a beautiful smile and vivid face. I wonder if the woodcarver found a model or is it a portrait of Queen Philippa?’ Drawn with kind permission from St Katherines Chapel
Finds from the Tower of London beach – ‘Me and my children found these objects on the beach when it was open to the public. Top row, left to right – Medieval camel or sheep on part of a large medieval dish, medieval red pottery with zig-zag design, medieval red London stoneware from a large dish with a rose design. I can fit my thumb exactly into the thumbprint of the potter who made it centuries ago and their fingertips were tiny! Maybe it was a child? Centre row, left to right – Gold, green and blue glaze is still bright on a fragment of pottery, carved bone mount in a tulip design from a box, bearded face from a bartman jug. Bottom row, left to right – Corner of a seventeenth century Dutch tile in gold, white and blue, clay pipe with milled detail around the bowl, London redware storage jar rim from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, part of an earthenware vessel used in brewing.’
Fly Fishing Flies – ‘A selection of fishing flies tied by my Dad and brother’
Prints copyright © Peta Bridle
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At Stephen Walters & Sons, Silkweavers
The Huguenots of Spitalfields have organised a visit to Stephen Walters & Sons, Silkweavers, in Sudbury on 18th July. For details email bookings@huguenotsofspitalfields.org
Joseph Walters of Spitalfields by Thomas Gainsborough
When Julius Walters of Stephen Walters & Sons says, “I am just a weaver,” it is a masterpiece of understatement, because he is a ninth generation weaver and the custodian of the venerable family business founded by his ancestor Joseph Walters in Spitalfields in 1720, which was moved to Suffolk by his great-great-great-great-grandfather Stephen Walters in the nineteenth century – where today they continue to weave exemplary silk for the most discerning clients internationally, building upon the expertise and knowledge that has been accumulated over all this time. This is the company that wove the silk for the Queen’s coronation robes and for Princess Diana’s wedding dress.
Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Joseph Walters was there to greet us when I arrived at the long finely-proportioned brick silk mill overlooking the green water meadows at the edge of Sudbury, where his ninth generation descendant Julius came down the stairs to shake my hand. Blushing to deny any awareness of the family resemblance, that his proud secretary was at pains to emphasise, he chose instead to point out to me the willows nearby that had been felled recently – as a couple are each year – for the manufacture of cricket bats.
We convened around a long wooden counter in a first floor room where the luxuriously coloured strike offs – as the samples are called – were laid out, glowing in the soft East Anglian light. There is such exquisite intricacy in these cloths that have tiny delicate patterns woven into their very construction, drawing the daylight and delighting the eye with their sensuous tones. Yet lifting my gaze, I could not resist my attention straying to the pigeon holes that lined the room, each one stacked with patterned silks of every hue and design. A curious silence resided here, yet somewhere close by there was a centre of loud industry.
“Everything we do comes from somewhere…” interposed Julius Walters enigmatically, as he swung open a door and that unmistakeably-appealing smell of old leather bindings met my nostrils. There were hundreds of volumes of silk samples from the last two centuries stacked up in there, comprising thousands upon thousands of unique jewel-like swatches still fresh and bright as the day they were made. Some of these books, often painstakingly annotated with technical details in italic script, comprised the life’s work of a weaver and all now bear panoramic witness to the true colours of our predecessors’ clothing. A vast memory bank woven in cloth, all available to be reworked for the present day and brought back to new life.
Spellbound by this perspective in time, I awoke to the clamour of the mill as we descended a staircase, passing through two glass doors and collecting ear plugs, before entering the huge workshop filled with looms clattering where new silk cloths were flying into existence. Here I stood watching the lush flourishes of acanthus brocades and tiny complex patterns for ties appear in magical perfection as if they had always existed, yet created by the simple principle of selecting how the weft crosses each thread of the warp, whether above or below. Although looms are mechanised now, each still retains its Jacquard above, the card that designates the path of every thread – named after Joseph Marie Jacquard who invented this device in 1804, which became so ubiquitous that his name has now also become both the term for the loom and for any silk cloth that has a pattern integrated into the weave.
With the bravura of a showman and the relish of an enthusiast, Julius led us on through more and more chambers and passages, into a silk store with countless coloured spools immaculately sorted and named – crocus and rose and mud. Then into a vaporous dye plant where bobbins of white thread came out strawberry after immersion in bubbling vats of colour. Then into a steaming plant where rollers soften the cloth to any consistency. Then into the checking office where every inch is checked by eye, and finally into the despatch office where the precious silken goods are wrapped in brown paper and weighed upon a fine red scales.
There are so many variables in silk weaving, so many different skills and so much that could go wrong, yet all have become managed into a harmonious process by Stephen Walters & Sons over nine generations. In his time, Julius has introduced computers to track every specification of ten of thousands of orders a year – one every five minutes – created by so may short runs. New technology has provided a purifier which uses diamonds to cleanse dye from the water that eventually returns to the water meadows, renewing the water course that brought his ancestors from Spitalfields to Suffolk one hundred and fifty years ago.
“All my school holidays and spare time were spent at the mill – but then I went away, and came back again.” confided Julius quietly as we made our farewells, “With eight generations behind you, it changes the way you approach your life. It’s not about this year, it’s about managing the company from one generation to the next, so you deal with your employees and your customers differently.”
Now you know what it means when Julius Walters says, “I am just a weaver.”
Dobby Weaving, 1900.
Aaron Offord, Machine Operator
Warping in the early twentieth century
Vikki Meuser, Warping in the early twenty-first century
Employees in 1966
Weaving umbrella silk in the nineteen fifties
Preparing skeins of silk for weaving the coronation robes, 1952
Weaving the silk for the coronation robes, 1952
Staff photograph 1949, Bernard Walters (grandfather of Julius Walters) sits second from right in front row, with his sister Winnie on his left and Mill Manager, Bill Parsons on his right
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