Spitalfields Life

When the late and greatly-missed photographer Colin O’Brien & I visited Denmark St last summer, Colin took these portraits of guitar maker & repairer, Tim Marten – so recently I went back to interview Tim and today I publish his story accompanied by Colin’s pictures.

Tim Marten by Colin O’Brien

Guitars have been manufactured in Denmark St since the days of Queen Anne but now – thanks to the redevelopment of the neighbourhood – Tim Marten is one of the very last to make and repair instruments in this corner of Soho. I visited Tim in the tiny panelled workshop in the beautiful sixteen-nineties house where he pursues his trade, pending three months’ notice to quit at any time.

“When I was a teenager I wanted to learn to play guitar, and I couldn’t afford to buy one and I was reasonably good at woodwork, so I made one. It was horrible! As soon as I’d finished it, I began to understand where I’d gone wrong, so I embarked on my second one and I cured some of the mistakes I’d made the first time round. After about eighteen months – maybe longer – with the help of various other people, I’d finished my third, curing the mistakes I’d made the second time round. I refined it down and down, until I had a guitar I could actually go out and play. It held its own against factory-made bought guitars. That was quite a reasonable instrument, and I went from there!

I came from an engineering background. My father and my uncle were both very good engineers and I used to build Airfix kits and fly model aeroplanes. I was always interested in mechanics and quite good at understanding how things worked. I was one of those small boys whose immediate reaction after Christmas lunch was to start taking their toys apart to see how they worked.

I spent my late teens and early twenties playing in bands round London and Bristol and, if anyone had problems, I’d fix their guitars. It just escalated from there. I was fortunate to meet someone who worked behind the counter at Andy’s Guitar Workshop in Denmark St, just across the road from where I am now. It was the first specific guitar repair workshop in Central London. That was in 1979.

It was run by Andy Preston but it was called ‘Andy’s‘ because that was the name of the Greek greengrocers on the ground floor and we were in the basement. There were quite a few music shops in the street but Andy’s had flats above and a greengrocer at street level. Our customers had to go round the back and down the stairs to our workshop below. I was twenty-two and I had some ideas I was working on for designs for guitars, and my friend who was the counter hand said, ‘Why don’t you come down and speak to the guys I work with?’ So I did and we had a long chat, and I was offered my first job and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Then I joined Led Zeppelin as a guitar technician and went off touring for ten years. I worked for various other bands and had a shop of my own up in Church Lane, Hornsey, just underneath The Kinks‘ studio. So I got to know Ray Davies and did a lot of touring with The Kinks. I played guitar professionally and found I earned more money gigging three nights a week than I did mending guitars in my little workshop, so it became a necessity to go out each Thursday, Friday and Saturday and play. Back in those days, it was quite a lucrative thing to do.

Things went spectacularly wrong in 2000, and I lost the shop and my business. But within a couple of days of realising that was going to happen and wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself, Andy Preston rang up from his hugely-expanded guitar shop which had become internationally known and taken over the whole building. He asked me to come back and run his repair department because they needed somebody with experience. So the door opened and I walked into it.

I stayed there until Andy went bust and sold his shop onto Rick Harrison, when I started working independently and I’ve been independent ever since. I’ve had my workshop in this room for about six years, before that it was Central Sound recording studios. I have no proof but I have been told that David Gray recorded Babylon in this very room. The building has listed status and is as it was constructed after the Great Fire of London, one of four remaining buildings in Denmark St from that time.  This was originally intended as housing and it is slated to be returned to housing. I am going to be booted out and this is going to be turned into luxury flats.  I am on two months’ notice, so that could happen as soon as six months from now.

I don’t think the ethos of Denmark St has changed very much at all since I first came here in 1979. Up until four or five years ago, when Cliff Cooper sold out the leases to the current owners who are property developers, there was very little change in the street apart from the signs above the shops as businesses came and went. Denmark St has always been a bit of a shabby sideshow in very nice way.

From the fifties, it was always the centre for music, when the music publishers started moving in and then the recording studios followed. There were three recording studios here in the sixties. From the eighties, shops came and went but they were always music shops, and the place was in need of a lick of paint. It has always been like that and, to a certain extent, that is its charm. Now restaurants are moving in, the developers are taking over and we are being moved out. It’s coming to an end despite our loudest protests.

We got hit very hard by the internet and it took the industry a while to adapt. I think that was one of the reasons Andy got into financial difficulties. For the repair side of the business, the internet helps no end. I get a lot of work from people who have bought guitars online. They come in the door, I take one look at it and say, ‘You just got this on ebay, didn’t you?’ and they ask, ‘Yes, how did you know?’ and I say, ‘Because if you’d played it before you bought it, you’ never have bought it!’ I tell them, ‘Yes I can fix it for you but it’s going to cost more money than if you had bought it properly from a shop in the first place.’ So I view the internet as a mixed blessing, although I do make a lot of money out of people who buy stuff  and find that it is not as described. I end up sorting it out.

It’s the tinkering side of things, the satisfaction of getting things right, that I like. I do mostly repairs now and only a little design work. There’s a lot of satisfaction in getting something working properly and you give it back to the customer, and a big smile comes over them. ‘Oh wow, that’s brilliant! I’ve been fighting this thing for years – if only I’d known you ten years ago!’

Like any job, it can become repetitive. There are certain repairs you do in your sleep. That’s what I call the bread-and-butter work. It’s well paid, so – if I spend three days a week doing that – I know that I’ve made enough to sit down and do something a bit more creative.

In this industry, it’s a great way to spend a day but it’s a lousy way to make a living. Especially making guitars, because it is so time-consuming and you can’t compete with the guys who have got all the machinery and industrial spraying facilities. The quality of the stuff coming out of the far east now is so good that you have to be able to charge a disproportionate amount of money for a guitar because it is handmade. Or you do bespoke work, I enjoy making things that you couldn’t buy in a shop.

If you look around my workshop, you will see that I am surrounded by projects that I have got halfway through but never got around to finishing. It’s what I do in the quiet periods, but I’ve acquired a reputation for being good at repairs and it’s getting to the point where I have more work than I can do. If you look around, there’s thirty guitars here waiting to be repaired. They are numbered up to fifty-seven and I am working on number twenty-six at the moment. Some of them will take five minutes but others will take me three weeks to fix.

I’ve always got three or four jobs on the go at once and, as you can see, there there are guitars lying around in various stages of repair. While I am waiting for glue or lacquer to dry, I will put it on one side and return to it tomorrow. Repairing instruments is a job where you don’t work on one at a time and finish it.

When I was running the repair department at Andy’s Guitar Workshop, I had four people working under my supervision and I enjoyed the responsibility and the teaching and the social life as well. Now it’s just me yet I am not alone because I have a constant stream of customers and the phone never stops ringing.”

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien

Tim Marten, Guitar Repairs, 9 Denmark Street, London, WC2H 8LS

You may also like to read about

At Denmark St

Gillian Tindall, author of THE TUNNEL THROUGH TIME recently published by Chatto, tells the story of Leonard Fenton, an East End boy from Stepney Green better known as ‘Dr Legg’

Leonard Fenton as Dr Legg in East Enders

When Dr Legg, the GP in East Enders, finally ‘retired’ in 1997, there was universal regret among viewers – even though they could see he was already older than any real-life GP would be. Afterwards, he continued to be referred to as an off-stage presence, like a benign Scarlet Pimpernel, and he made occasional informal reappearances – most notably for the stage-funeral of Mark Fowler in 2004, with whom he had once had ferocious doctorly words about heroin addiction and, in 2010, to counsel Dot Branning about a supposed Romanian foundling.

In real life, Dr Legg was the actor Leonard Fenton. Although his East Enders‘ role has been the one for which he has been widely celebrated (and even accosted in the street and the Underground by people so convinced of the reality of soaps that they ask for friendly medical advice) he has a life-time of other roles to his credit. One of those actors who never quite reach the very top of the theatrical tree but are nearly always in work and much esteemed by other professionals, Len has done seasons with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, worked with Orson Welles, with Jonathan Miller and Samuel Beckett – who personally chose him in 1979 to play opposite Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days at the Royal Court.

His last stage roles were the Duke in The Merchant of Venice at Stratford-on-Avon in 2008 and the demanding part of Vincentio in The Taming of the Shrew at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 2009. By then Len was eighty-three years old, but you would never have guessed  it. He went on for several more years specialising  in ‘old rabbis’ and has only now  taken to retirement in the actors’ home at Denville Hall, because his diabetes needs more careful management than he can give it alone.

The kindly GP in East Enders was obviously Jewish and the early lives of the doctor and the actor paralleled each other. Dr Legg was supposed to have been born in the East End, a bright boy who got a scholarship to a Grammar School and then to medical school, but had preferred to remain close to his roots in the fictional East London district of `Walford’ rather than moving out to a polite suburb.

Similarly, Len Fenton was born (during the General Strike of 1926) in little house in Duckett St, Stepney Green, that his parents and elder sister shared with relatives. When he was eleven, he won a Junior County scholarship to Raines School for Boys in Arbour Sq.  A surviving school report, under the name Leonard Feinstein, describes him as “A quiet intelligent pupil. Gives no trouble and works well.” The same report shows that he was particularly good at drawing, singing and languages, but as he showed an aptitude for maths too, plus ‘satisfactory’ work at Chemistry and Physics, the headmaster urged him towards engineering – a destiny that took Len some years and quite a bit of enterprise to escape.

The heart of the Jewish East End in the twenties and thirties was in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Half a mile away, in Duckett St there was only one other Jewish household besides Len’s family, although Len recalls a big block of flats on Stepney Green itself that was “full of our lot. I would rather liked to have lived there.” Possibly it was the presence of this block that drew Mosleys’ Blackshirts down to Stepney Green for a series of threatening marches that were to culminate in the Battle of Cable Street. As a small boy, Len remembers his mother standing in the upstairs window of their house with a baby – one of Len’s younger sisters – in her arms, watching Mosley giving a speech at the corner about how all Jews had substantial bank balances. At this point, she yelled down at him “Sir Oswald, would you like to see my fucking bank balance?” Her husband worked in the garment trade and, like most people in their position, they lived hand to mouth. Various neighbours, who were inclined to side with Mosley in those uncertain times, hastily cried “No, no, Fanny, we don’t mean you!”

Len’s mother had arrived in London as a baby, circuitously, via New York, at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was working in a box factory when she met her husband. Both sets of grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, mother’s from Riga and father’s from Lithuania, and all that generation spoke Yiddish as their household tongue. The family name was originally, Len thinks, something like Resnik, a  Russian-Yiddish term to do with tailoring, but it just happened that the neighbour who helped Len’s grandfather to register in London when he arrived in the 1890s suggested ‘Feinstein’ as a suitable name and it was accepted. The change to Fenton happened during the Second World War, when Len’s elder sister Sylvie convinced their father that it would be a good idea. However, the cousins living on the ground floor of the same house, including little Arnold who was six months younger than Len and his constant playmate, did not change their name. Arnold Feinstein, another scholarship boy, grew up to be a distinguished academic scientist and the husband of Elaine Feinstein, the poet. There are many routes out of the ghetto, but the Fenton-Feinstein families have always remained close.

Grandparents and uncles were important too. Len’s mother’s mother, who had been widowed in New York with the baby, come to London and remarried, lived at Bow. Neighbours of theirs organised a synagogue in their front room where the family foregathered on Saturdays. It was from here that an uncle took Len, then aged ten or eleven, on a trip to Watford to hear Thomas Beecham conducting Bizet’s First Symphony in C – for Len, a revelatory experience about what music could be. But, sadly, this thoughtful relative later became known to Len and his sisters as ‘bad uncle’ because he tried to convince Len that he could neither draw and paint, nor sing well enough to envisage it as a career – both of which no-doubt-well-intentioned judgements were untrue.

Len was thirteen in 1939, at the point when the whole Jewish East End began to be swept away, first by war and then by the social changes that war brought. Raines School was evacuated to various places near the south coast: hardly the ideal location in view of the threat of invasion, but such a hasty re-location was common in those times. By the time Len returned to battered and blitzed Stepney towards the end of the war, he was a tall and handsome seventeen-year-old – and his feisty mother, with whom he had not lived since he was a child, was suffering with tuberculosis and possibly diabetes as well. There was no NHS yet but, even if there had been, not a great deal could have been done for her. She died in 1945 and it was the eldest sister Sylvie who took on the maternal role for their father, for Len, his younger brother Cyril (who also died young) and the two pretty and ambitious younger sisters, Corinne and Annie.

National Service loomed at eighteen for all young men of Len’s generation yet, instead of joining the Army as a squaddie, Len was sent, on his head-master’s recommendation and Government approval, to do a two-year degree in Engineering at Kings’ College. He did not relish it at all, but it meant that, when the Army finally claimed him at age twenty, he was given a commission in the Royal Engineers – a new world for him. “I really enjoyed myself,” he recalled, “As an officer I could just oversee things and sign off the paper, while the NCOs did all the work!”

Len’s Army experience led him to five years in a civil engineering job in Westminster. This was still unsatisfying for Len, even though the firm in question seems to have been extraordinarily tolerant of their amiable but undevoted employee. Len found that he could take long, dreamy lunch hours walking round the London parks. By then he was living in Clapton and discovered, while changing from tube to bus at Aldgate on his evening commute, that Toynbee Hall ran courses in art and music. He started spending his evenings there, as many other aspirant East Enders had done before him – and a new life began. A starring role singing in a Christmas performance led to the offer of a place at the Webber-Douglas theatrel school, and the boy from Stepney was re-born as an actor and never  looked back.

“I was older than most people at drama school,” he explained, “That was useful and I soon learnt to age myself up – I loved making-up.” A Spotlight award in his final year set Len off on a career playing character roles – fulfilling even if he never achieved a minor ambition to take the part of Baron Hard-Up in pantomime. “Trouble is, people don’t associate Dr Legg with slapstick,” he confessed.

Did becoming a celebrity in such a long-running soap affect his chances of other roles? Len feels that it may have kept him out of the theatre, but one would hardly think so given the stage successes of his last years in the profession. Oddly, Dr Legg was almost the only role in Len’s career which was not a character part. “The character wasn’t written to any great depth,” says Len, “so inevitably what came over on TV was a lot of me. I sometimes used to slip in words of my own that weren’t in the script! I think they should have given me a proper wife, though, not just a dead one.” (Mrs Legg was supposed to have been a nurse, killed long ago by a land-mine).

In real life Len married, aged almost forty, to a professional cellist, Madeline Thorner, considerably younger than him. Three sons and a daughter arrived in quick time, in their house in Hampstead Garden Suburb that was a far cry from Duckett St. Although the marriage eventually foundered, Len and Madeline remain friends and it was she who managed to get him into Denville Hall.

Any regrets? “Well, if I’d know how well my voice would last,” he admitted, “I’d have been a singer.” Len does still sing beautifully, even in his ninth decade, and possesses an extraordinary ability to imitate dogs and cats well enough to fool the animals themselves. His ability to paint and aptitude for drawing that his headmaster and uncle dismissed long ago came to the fore during Len’s years as Dr Legg, and he continues to paint. The aura of cheerful interest in life, that stood him in such good stead as a small boy in Stepney, still surrounds Len today.

Leonard Fenton

Leonard’s mother and father with his elder sister Sylvie as a baby

Leonard and his sister Sylvie with their Uncle

Leonard Fenton’s publicity shot as a young actor

Leonard playing older than his years in the seventies

Leonard’s publicity shot in the eighties

Leonard in the West End

Leonard’s sketch of Samuel Beckett, done while rehearsing Happy Days at the Royal Court in 1979

Gillian Tindall’s The Tunnel Through Time, A New Route For An Old London Journey is published by Chatto & Windus

You may also like to read about

Harry Landis, Actor

Morris Goldstein, the Lost Whitechapel Boy

Charlie Chaplin in the East End

Bud Flanagan in Spitalfields

David Garrick at Goodman’s Fields Theatre

At the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel

Yesterday Paul Gardner, founder of the East End Trades Guild and fourth generation proprietor of Spitalfields oldest family business Gardners Market Sundriesmen led a contingent to 10 Downing St consisting of fellow traders Sarah Haque of Urban Species and Len Maloney of JC Motors, supported by John Biggs Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Philip Glanville Mayor of Hackney, and Meg Hiller MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch.

The purpose was to deliver his petition of 10,562 signatures to Theresa May in advance of today’s budget, demanding a reduction in the excessive business rate increases proposed in London which threaten to wipe out independent shops and small businesses across the East End.

When Gardners Market Sundriesmen was selected as one of Britain’s Top 100 Small Businesses last year, Paul Gardner was invited to a reception at Downing St to meet Margot James, Minister for Small Businesses in December. On that day, Paul delivered a letter to Theresa May asking her to intervene on the issue of excessive increases in business rates for small businesses in London but he received no reply, so he organised a petition with the East End Trades Guild as a means to indicate the level of concern to the Prime Minister.

When I first interviewed Paul Gardner at his shop seven years ago, I do not think either of us ever imagined the outcome would be Paul becoming the spokesman for his fellow traders through founding the East End Trades Guild. Or that his natural integrity and moral authority might draw the support of the Mayors of both Tower Hamlets and Hackney, accompanying him to deliver his petition to Downing St on behalf of all the traders in the East End.

After he delivered the petition yesterday morning, it was business as usual for Paul Gardner as he went back to open his shop in Commercial St where I discovered him behind the counter. Unusually dapper in a suit and tie, and with his unruly locks newly trimmed, he was still flushed from his trip to Whitehall.

“It was exciting going to Downing St. You feel that you are doing something. Some people might say that it’s not really worthwhile, but it is always better to do something than nothing and I am quietly optimistic something will happen in the next day or two. We raised over ten-thousand-five-hundred signatures and I know we could easily have got more if we had time. We had a table in Columbia Rd Market last Sunday and I think if we had also gone to Brick Lane we would have got quite a lot more signatures.

When you arrive at Downing St, you have to show them your passport before you go through security, then you walk a hundred yards up the path and number ten is on your right hand side. You are allowed to take photos outside but, once you knock on the door, you have to hand over the petition. I knocked on the door but I didn’t give the man the petition right away, I had a conversation with him and I held onto it so that we got quite a few pictures of him taking the petition. He said it was going to go straight to Theresa May’s desk.

I am very pleased we did this. I am very proud to represent the East End Trades Guild and the more-than-ten-thousand people who signed the petition. Before the East End Trades Guild existed we all suffered in silence and didn’t know who to talk to, but the Guild has provided a sounding board for traders to speak with one another and it has given us a sense of community.

I’m hoping our petition makes a difference and people will realise that the East End of London – Hackney and Tower Hamlets in particular – will be dramatically hit if these business rates come into force. For me, it’s a 120% increase which is massive but there are others worse off. The majority are still unaware because they haven’t had their rates bill yet.

It is going to be pretty hard for a lot of businesses. I deal with people in Hackney and Tower Hamlets and I know what a tough time they are having to survive. Nobody can afford 100% increase in business rates.

If we don’t get adequate relief from the government, I can see closure of 20% of businesses – maybe more than that – in the next five years. In the first year, the increase is not too much but after that it builds up more and more. Combined with escalating rents round here, it will alter the landscape in Columbia Rd, Brick Lane, Broadway Market and Dalston.

It’s mad – business will no longer be tenable for a lot of people. It will kill the area in some respects because everywhere will become exactly the same as everywhere else, whereas round here there are quite a lot of independent shops which bring people to the East End.

The rateable value of my shop was £18,000 and now it’s going up to £40,000. If this happens, it will mean the end of the line for my business after nearly one hundred and fifty years, and four generations. At the moment I pay about £190 a week business rates but there’s no way I could carry on if I have to pay over £400 a week just on business rates before anything else, so there wouldn’t be any longevity in the shop.

I’m hopefully optimistic that something will be done to help us in the budget.”

Paul Gardner delivers his petition to Theresa May

Paul Gardner, Paper bag seller and founder of the East End Trades Guild

Paul Gardner with fellow traders Sarah Haque and Len Moloney

A jubilant moment after the delivery of the petition

Notice in the window of Gardners Market Sundriesmen yesterday

Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Baron delivers his petition to Downing St on behalf of East End traders

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

You may also like to read about

The Founding of The East End Trades Guild

A Petition to Save Our Shopkeepers

Paul Gardner Goes To Downing St

Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Seller

At JC Motors in Hackney