Spitalfields Life

At The Royal Oak, Bethnal Green

These pictures are a selection from those taken in the five years between 1973 and 1978, when Tony Bock lived in the East End working as a photographer for the East London Advertiser. “Britain in the nineteen seventies never seemed comfortable with itself,” Tony admitted to me, “caught between the post-war years that hung on too long and the late twentieth century that seemed late in arriving.”

Although he was brought up in Canada where his parents emigrated in 1952, Tony was born in Paddington and, after being thrown out of photography school in Toronto in 1972, he decided to return to his country of birth and the East End where his mother’s family came from. “My grandfather was a docker his entire working life, working at Hay’s Wharf near London Bridge in the nineteen twenties then moving on to ‘The Royals’ (as the Royal Docks were known) until he retired.” he explained.

Yet Tony’s return was destined to be short-lived and there is an ambivalence which runs through these eloquent photographs. While he had a personal connection to the world that he portrayed, equally Tony was a stranger to it. In many of these pictures a dramatic tension exists between the empathy of the photographer and an underlying sense of dislocation – though it was not simply the dislocation of an outsider, but that of a world undergoing transition and fragmentation. In these photographs, Tony explored his relationship to the culture of his own origin, yet he discovered it was a troubled society in which he could never feel at home.

“I lived in Wapping for several years and met Lyn, my wife-to-be, who was also a journalist at the East London Advertiser.” Tony recalled, “But in 1978, I was offered work at The Toronto Star, the largest paper in Canada.  The racism and pollution in the East End were getting me down and when Maggie Thatcher was elected – well – that was enough to send me back home.”

Tony’s spell at photography school granted him an awareness of the work of the great international photographers of the twentieth century and this knowledge informed the confident aesthetic of his East End pictures, with their strong compositions and deftly-balanced multiple points of focus within a single frame. For Tony Bock, his sojourn in the East End delivered the opportunity he needed to take a clear-eyed look at his roots before returning to pursue a career as a photojournalist in Toronto. Today, these pictures from the mid-seventies offer us an invaluable personal vision of a not-so-distant world that is rapidly fading from memory.

“I worked at The Star for over thirty years, it was a great place to be a photojournalist. It was a paper that cared about photography, had the budget to undertake long term projects, sent staff around the world, and dealt with social issues.” he told me, “Oddly, my life in East London followed the route my mother’s family had taken years earlier.”

Saturday night out, Dagenham

Children playing in Poplar

Clown at Stratford Broadway

At J.Kelly, Pie & Mash, Bethnal Green

At The White Swan, Poplar

At the E1 Festival, Stepney

Train departing Liverpool St Station

In Watney Market

Corner Shop, Sidney St

Boy with a gun and his sister, Pearl St, Wapping

Wapping Stairs

Demolition at Tiller Rd, Isle of Dogs

Commercial Docks, Rotherhithe

No remuneration to Place-keepers.

Photographs copyright © Tony Bock

I am talking about Horace Warner’s SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS at 6:30pm on Thursday 16th March at the V&A’s Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. Click here for tickets

Wakefield Sisters

In his Spitalfields albums, Horace Warner collected together the portraits that he made of the people who lived in Quaker St around 1900 and, because he captioned some of them with their names, we have been able to trace the biographies of his subjects in the public records.

When you see this tender portrait of Jessica Wakefield in her clean apron and her younger sister Rosalie in her check dress, it is impossible not to wonder what happened to these two and thus it imbues the photograph with an even greater resonance to discover that they lived to the ages of ninety-four and eighty-four respectively. I can no longer look at this picture without seeing it as an image of Jessica & Rosalie poised upon the threshold of life itself.

Observe how Jessica places her arm protectively around her little sister who was four years and half years younger than she. Jessica had been born in Camden on January 16th 1891 and Rosalie at 47 Hamilton Buildings, Great Eastern St, Shoreditch on July 4th 1895. They were the second and last of four children born to William, a printer’s assistant, and Alice, a housewife.It seems likely they were living in Great Eastern St at the time Horace Warner photographed them, when Jessica was ten or eleven and Rosalie was five or six.

Jessica married Stanley Taylor in 1915 and they lived in Wandsworth, where she died in 1985, aged ninety-four. On July 31st 1918 at the age of twenty-three, Rosalie married Ewart Osborne, a typewriter dealer, who was also twenty-three years old, at St Mary, Balham. After five years of marriage, they had a son named Robert, in 1923, but Ewart left her and she was reported as being deaf. Eventually the couple divorced in 1927 and both married again. Rosalie died aged eighty-four in 1979, six years before her elder sister Jessica, in Waltham Forest.

Once we know what life had in store for the Wakefield Sisters, these bare facts deliver a poignant dramatic irony to their photograph. We hope they remained close and were able to support each other through the travails and joys of existence. Once Jessica & Rosalie come alive to us as individuals, we are left to contemplate the moment of stillness that was captured for eternity by Horace Warner in 1900.

[youtube WOJlJ0qfFrs nolink]

Click here to order a copy of SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS by Horace Warner

You may also like to read about

An Astonishing Photographic Discovery

In Search of Horace Warner

Upon the Subject of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers

An Old Tin Badge