Terry Scales, Painter
Terry Scales
Terry Scales has lived for more than half a century 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
At The Pet Cemetery
I discovered a curiosity to view the garden of remembrance in Ilford where more three thousand of our fellow creatures lie interred and see how they have been memorialised by adoring owners as a means to assuage their sense of loss.
It is a commonplace to observe the peace that prevails in a cemetery yet this was my first impression, provoked by the thought of the cacophonous din that would result if all these dogs, cats, pigeons and budgies were confined together within this space while they were alive. On closer examination, the collective emotionalism of so many affectionate elegies upon the gravestones expressing both gratitude and grief for dead pets is overwhelming. Especially as most of the owners who placed these monuments are dead too – including Sir Bruce Forsyth whose beloved collie Rusty is interred here.
Between the twenties and the sixties, animals were buried continuously in this quiet corner of Redbridge but then the cemetery was closed and fell into neglect until 2007, when it was reopened with a celebratory fly-past of racing pigeons and a military ceremony by the King’s Rifle Corps. Especially noticeable today are the white marble headstones for heroic animals, carrier pigeons that delivered vital wartime messages, dogs that rescued survivors from buildings in the Blitz and ships’ cats that killed rats on naval vessels.
Yet in spite of the heroism of animals in war and the depth of feeling evinced by domestic pets, the cemetery is quite a modest affair, just the corner of a field hidden behind the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. Curiously, many of the owners attribute themselves as ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ on the gravestones, declaring a relationship to their pets that was parental and a bereavement which registered as the loss of a member of the family.
Animals surprise us by discovering and occupying a particular intimate emotional space close to our hearts that we did not realise existed until they came along. They forge an unspoken yet eternal bond, entering our psyche irrevocably, and thus while we consider ourselves their custodians, they become out spiritual guardians.
In memory of Binkie, an Adorable Little Budgie Who Died
In Memory of our Dumb Friend, the Dog that God gave us, Trixie
Peter the Home Office Cat – Payment for Peter’s food was authorised by the Treasury thus, ‘I see no objection to your office keeper being allowed 1d a day from petty cash towards the maintenance of an efficient office cat.’ It seems that the money was requested not because Peter was underfed, but rather that he was overfed because of all the titbits that staff provided. It was felt that this ‘interfered with the mousing’, so if food was provided officially, the office keeper could tell staff not to give Peter any food.
In Loving memory of Our Boxers, Gremlin Gunner, Bramcote Badenia, Bramcote Blaise, Bramcote Benightful & Panfield Rhapsody
Be-Be, Our Little Dog So Loyal and True, Now He is in Peace God Bless You
In Loving Memory of our Darling Sally & Our Greyhound Swan & Our Cat Brandy Ball
In Loving Memory of Benny, a Brave Little Cat and Constant Companion to Those he Loved
Mary of Exeter, Awarded Dicken Medal for Outstanding War Service – A pigeon that made four flights carrying messages back from wartime France, returning seriously injured each time. On her last return, shrapnel damaged her neck muscles but her owner, Charlie Brewer an Exeter cobbler, made her a leather collar which held her head up and kept her going for another 10 years.
In Memory of Our Dear Pal Wolf
Mickey Callaghan, Here Lies Our Darling and You Always Will Be
In Memory of Simon, Served as ship’s cat on HMS Amethyst – Simon’s heroic ratting saving the crew from starvation during the hundred days the ship spent trapped by Communists on the Yangtze River in 1949. Simon was originally the Captain’s cat, a privileged creature who fished ice cubes out of his water jug and crunched them, but after he survived being blown up along with the Captain’s cabin, he was promoted to ‘Able Seacat’ and became pet of the whole crew. Unfortunately, the decision to bring the feline hero back to Britain proved the end of him as he caught cat flu in quarantine and died.
In Memory of Good Old Brownie
Memories of Our Faithful Doggie Pal Sally
My Babies Always In My Heart, Dede, Nicky, Sophie & Scruffy
In Memory of Rip DM, for Bravery in Locating Victims Trapped Under Blitzed Buildings – Rip was a stray who became the first search and rescue dog
In Memory of Jill who Adopted Us and Gave Us 15 Years of Loving Companionship
Shane, Bobby & Tina
In Loving Memory of Whisky, We Loved Him So, Mummy & Aunty Flo
Rusty, A Magnificent Irish Setter, We Were Better For Having Known Him, He Died with More Dignity Than That Most of Us Live – Rusty lived with Sir Bruce Forsyth in his touring caravan and performed on stage at the London Palladium. Rusty was a truly lovely fellow who performed all sorts of fantastic tricks, his favourite was to flip a biscuit off his nose and catch it in his mouth,’ recalled Sir Bruce, ‘But one day his back legs gave up on him. It was awful to witness – almost overnight he had become this pathetic, helpless animal. The only way I could take him outside for exercise was to grab hold of his tail and lift his back legs up, allowing him to walk on his front legs with his back end gliding along. This didn’t hurt him at all and he loved to be outside, but people in the street gave me filthy looks.’
In Fond Memory of Tops & Tiny Tim
In Loving Memory of Scottie Tailwaggger & Muffin
Our Buster, Faithful Intelligent Beautiful Golden Labrador
In Memory of Our Little Dog Sonny & Our Beloved Shandy, Quietly You Fell Asleep Without a Last Goodbye
In Loving Memory of Our Darling Poppet
Our Most Precious Snoopy
In Loving Memory of Perdix Crough Patrick, Bulldog
To the Dear Memory of Patch
In Loving Memory of Dinky & Dee-Dee
Beautiful Memories of Binkie, Golden Cocker Spaniel & Tender Memories of Joey, Blue Budgie
Nanoo, Sally & Rags
In Memory of Punch for Saving the Lives of Two British Officers in Israel by Attacked An Armed Terrorist
In Memory of Tiger & Rosie, Two Dear Old Strays
Peter, Loved by Everyone
Tim, Out Little Darling
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The Weathervanes Of The City
There is no more magical sight to glimpse in a London street on a bright spring morning than that of a gilded weathervane, glinting in sunlight high above the rooftops. At once – in spite of all the changes that time has wrought – you know you are sharing in a visual delight enjoyed by three centuries of Londoners before you and it makes your heart leap.
Consequently, I am grateful to Angelo Hornak who photographed this gallery of magnificent weathervanes for his book AFTER THE FIRE, London Churches in the Age of Wren, Hawksmoor & Gibbs.
Spire of St Mary-Le-Bow, Cheapside, by Christopher Wren
Dragon upon St Mary-Le-Bow, representing the City of London
Arrow & pennant on St Augustine, Watling St
Spire of St Bride’s Fleet St by Christopher Wren
Gridiron on St Lawrence Jewry, symbol of the martyrdom of St Lawrence
Weathervane on St Magnus the Martyr by Christopher Wren
Weathervane on St Michael Paternoster Royal, College St
Galleon on St Nicholas Cole Abbey, moved from St Michael Queenhithe after demolition
Weathervane on St James Garlickhythe
Crown on St Edmund King & Martyr, Lombard St
Key on the Tower of St Peter Cornhill
Cockerell on St Dunstan-in-the-East by Christopher Wren
Comet on St Mary-Le-Strand
Spire of St Martin in the Fields by James Gibbs
Square-rigged ship on St Olave Old Jewry
Flaming red-eyed dragon on St Luke, Old St, described as a flea in popular lore
Weathervane on St Stephen Walbrook by Nicholas Hawksmoor
‘Flame’ on the top of the Monument by Christopher Wren
Photographs copyright © Angelo Hornak
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Alan Shipp, Hyacinth Grower
‘I could not imagine what my life would have been like without hyacinths’
One blustery day, I took the train up to Waterbeach outside Cambridge to visit Alan Shipp, Hyacinth Grower who cultivates two hundred and forty-three different varieties of this favourite flower, which are in bloom now. I stood in the rain, inhaling the fragrance of the gentle breeze wafting over Alan’s field of hyacinths, flourishing in the rich soil of the silted water-meadows of the River Cam.
Alan Shipp is Britain’s only Hyacinth Grower and is also the Custodian of the National Collection of Hyacinths. He has the world’s largest collection of varieties and knows more about this intriguing plant than anyone else alive. In other years, Alan has opened his hyacinth nursery to the public at peak flowering time, drawing international press attention to the tiny village of Waterbeach for this celebrated event in the horticultural calendar, which can attract over a thousand enthusiasts – travelling from far and wide to gawp at this incomparable hyacinth spectacle.
The lines of multicoloured hyacinths stretch to horizon. They seem to sing against the black soil. The rain makes them shine and then the sun makes them glow, luminous with light beneath a dark East Anglian sky. Alan Shipp & I stood alone together in the field contemplating the hyacinths in silent pleasure – until the storm broke, when we took shelter in Alan’s greenhouse where he told me the astonishing story of his life in hyacinths, as the rain hammered on the glass and the wind rattled the panes around us.
“In the eighteen-eighties my grandfather, Thomas Shipp, won a pony and whip in a raffle. To put it to some use, he managed to borrow a harness and cart, and went round door to door selling vegetables. Then he bought a piece of ground and started growing his own, and that is this piece of ground. That was how it all started, growing fruit and vegetables.
Eventually when my father, Kenneth Shipp, got involved, he started wholesaling the produce we grew ourselves. In the fifties, we started selling imported fruit too which we used to bring up from Spitalfields Market on Monday and Wednesday each week.
At the entrance to the Floral Market on Lamb St in Spitalfields was the Floral Cafe and I can still remember the bacon sarnies. It was a whole slice of fried gammon between two pieces of bread. We used to try and get there at four-thirty or five – it was a wonderful atmosphere. The owner was a chap called Leonard Swindley. I said to him once, ‘I’ve seen the porters just walk behind the counter, make themselves a jug of tea and disappear. You can’t carry on like that, you’re being robbed!’ He replied, ‘Can you think of a happier way of losing money?’ I left the argument defeated.
We stopped selling produce after one of our salesmen left and set up on his own in opposition. We had been growing acres and acres ourselves but the method of vegetable production changed out of all recognition. We would have a little plot of a couple of hundred square metres of leeks that we would plant by hand but today, two miles away, there is a field of one hundred and forty-five acres of leeks. To get a reasonable living, we needed a larger farm but I know of no land that has come up for rent in Waterbeach in the last thirty years.
So in 1985, I decided I could best increase the output per acre by becoming a hyacinth grower. It was just sheer chance. There was a clearance sale at a bulb nursery at the the other side of Cambridge, including hyacinth bulbs. So I bought one hundred, twenty each of five different varieties, and planted them because I had always been a very keen gardener. After the leaves died down, I dug them up and moved them elsewhere but there was one that I missed. It had rolled under a shrub. When I found it next summer, it had put its roots down but the rest of the bulb had been eaten away where it was exposed and, upon this surface, small bulbs had formed. The slugs had actually illustrated for me the method of propagating hyacinths.
I thought, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing this,’ so I got a planting stock from Taylors Bulbs of Holbeach. Their general manager gave me advice, he said, ‘Alan, don’t grow many varieties.’ I didn’t really heed his advice because I now have two hundred and forty-three. And that’s how I got started!
I discovered there was a National Collection of Hyacinths at Barnard Castle and I got in touch to say that, as I was the only hyacinth grower in the country, I was willing to propagate for them free of charge. They brought me two bulbs each of fifty varieties that I propagated and which became the nucleus of my collection. I seemed to come up against a wall, regarding getting more varieties, after one hundred and eight varieties. Then I got a letter from a lady in Lithuania who had a collection of hyacinths that she had assembled from all over the former Soviet Union – things I’ve never heard of, things that we thought were extinct! She’d got the names but knew nothing but about them so I sent her my research and we exchanged bulbs.
I thought I had missed double-flowered yellow hyacinths by one hundred years but lo-and-behold she had got two – one with a name and one unidentified. The one with the name was in catalogues from 1897 and the other I grew as ‘unidentified double-yellow hyacinth.’ Then in 2013, by sheer chance, a friend of mine came across an illustration of it by Mary Delany in the British Library. That was the world’s first double-yellow hyacinth, introduced in 1770! When it was introduced, it was £800 a bulb yet Mary Delany had painted it, so I wondered how she got access. But it was reported she had contact with Court and it was George III’s bulb that she illustrated at the time he was at Kew Palace in Kew Gardens. So that was a breakthrough.
I am on the Royal Horticultural Society’s Bulb Committee. It was the ‘Daffodil & Tulip Committee’ but, in 2012, the remit embraced all bulbs and we had an intake of other specialists. One of them was Alan Street from Avon Bulbs who regularly wins a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. ‘Alan,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an unusual hyacinth, it’s red and white. I can tell you’ve heard of it by the look on your face.’ It was Gloria Mundi.
Hyacinth Mania was a hundred years after Tulip Mania. It was started by the Scottish Horticulturalist Peter Voorhelm who found a white double hyacinth with a rosy coloured centre in 1708. Previously, all double hyacinths had been discarded as inferior because they are deformed by extra petals in the middle, but he so liked this one that he propagated it and called it Konig Van Groot-Brettanje in honour of William of Orange – and that started Hyacinth Mania for white doubles with coloured centres.
Gloria Mundi was a lost variety of white double with a coloured centre in the catalogues in 1767. Alan Street had a friend in Switzerland called Ingrid Dingwell and Ingrid had a gardening friend who was a lorry driver called Theo, who took a load of humanitarian aid to Romania during the Ceaucescu era to a remote village with a population of three hundred and seventy-odd souls. Theo’s friend fell in love with a local girl and married her, and Theo was given hospitality by the bride’s father at the wedding. To show his gratitude, Theo gave the bride’s father a pocket watch and the old man asked Theo to help himself to any plant growing in the garden, including bulbs of a hyacinth called Gloria Mundi. Theo gave them to Ingrid who sent them to Alan Street who grew them for fifteen years, oblivious of what he had. The year after I identified them, Alan took a pot to the RHS and they were given an award, two hundred and fifty years after the variety had been lost.
I cannot say that what I do is much of a business, it is more a hobby that gives a little bit of income and the selling of the bulbs has financed the conservation scheme. Without my work, the National Collection of Hyacinths would have just disappeared. I have saved well over a hundred varieties of hyacinths from extinction.
I love hyacinths. There is their fragrance, there is their beauty. There is no other flower that can give you this range of colours at the end of March. If someone gave me a paint chart, I could match every colour on it with hyacinths. I would have a job to get black but I could get pretty close to it.
They are so fascinating. They are all evolved from just the one wild species growing from eight hundred to a thousand metres in the hills at the border of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. It is believed that the Romans may have brought them to Europe because there is a sub-species which grows on the Mediterranean coast of France. How did hyacinths get from the Levant to there, unless they were taken as bulbs by the Romans and gone feral?
The first recorded introduction of hyacinths to Europe was by the Flemish Botanist Carolus Clusius who was appointed Prefect of the imperial gardens in Vienna in 1573 by Ferdinand II. Ferdinand’s ambassador to Turkey was Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq and he brought back tulips, crocuses, cyclamen and hyacinths to the palace gardens – all the bulbs from the Levant. Unfortunately, Ferdinand died that year but Clusius got a job at the botanic garden in Leyden and took the bulbs with him. That was the start of the Dutch bulb industry.
Clusius may have introduced hyacinths to Britain when he visited in 1590 and John Gerard records growing them in his garden in London in 1597. Hyacinths would undoubtably have been included among the ‘florists’ flowers,’ along with tulips, carnations, auriculas and roses, grown competitively in the East End during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Victorian era, florists’ competitions were rampant up and down the country, and hyacinths always featured.
Hyacinths have formed my life. They have got me onto the RHS Bulb Committee, brought me lots of friends and won me worldwide recognition – probably got me into the Rotary Club too. To be honest, I could not imagine what my life would have been like without hyacinths. How did I ever live without them?”
Alan Shipp, National Hyacinth Collection, Waterbeach, Cambridge, CB25 9NB.
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Caroline Gilfillan & Andrew Scott’s East End
It is my pleasure to present these poems by Caroline Gilfillan with photographs by Andrew Scott – dating from the early seventies and encapsulating that era when Caroline & Andrew were squatters in the East End
Spitalfields Street Sweepers
Council issue donkey jackets slung over saggy suits,
the street sweepers get to work,
broom heads shooshing over concrete and tar,
herding paper and peel and fag ends into heaps,
strong fingers grasping the broom handles,
knuckles big and smooth as weathered stones
moving easy in their bags of skin, watchful eyes
on you, your finger-clicks, your lens.
Aldgate Gent
Shoes shined, trilby brushed, ears scrubbed
clean as a baby’s back, he chugs through the
sun drops and diesel clag of Aldgate.
No crumbs in his turn-ups, no fluff in his pockets:
the wife, at home in one of the new flats
over by Mile End, keeps him spruce.
He’s on his way to meet Solly at Bloom’s
for gefilte fish and a chinwag. We flew
past him in a dented van, croaky from
last night’s pints, hair in need of a good cut
and ears a good wash behind. And No,
we didn’t notice him, but he was a good
father to his sons, if inclined to sound off.
His wife went first but his sister cooked for him
after, and the nurses at the London
did him proud when the time came.
Us? We played our gigs and tumbled on,
leaving scraps of quavers and clefs
scattered across the pavement, the kerb,
the bang, rattle and clank of Aldgate East.
Stoneyard Lane Prefabs
Two ticks and the fixer of the Squatters Union
has done the break-in, courtesy of a jemmy.
The door creaks in the fish-mud breeze blowing up
from Shadwell docks. Here you are girls.
Faces poke, glint through curtain cracks.
A man comes back for his hobnailed boots. Stands lit up
by orange street lights, his meek face
breathing beer. We got behind with the rent, he says,
muddy laces spilling over knuckles.
Thought we’d leave before the council chucked us out.
The next morning two hoods from the council break the lock,
bawl through the drunken door, Clear out or we’ll
board you in. Bump-clang of an Audi brings bailiffs.
The fixer flies in, fists up to his chin.
Has words. We hunch on the kerb with our carrier bags.
Mile End Automatic Laundry
Natter chat, neat fold, wheel carts of nets, sheets, blankets, undies, pillow-slips,
feed the steel drum, twirl and swoosh, dose of froth, soaping out the Stepney dirt.
Say hello to the scruffs from the squats off Commercial Road, more of them now,
breaking the GLC doors off their hinges, and I don’t stick my nose
where it’s not wanted, though you can tell a lot by a person’s laundry,
can’t you? That girl with the hacked-off hair, no bras in her bag, and no
fancy knickers, though the boy brings in shirts, must go to work
somewhere smarter than the street where they live and that
pond-life pub on the corner. Speaking of which,
walking home the other night I heard music,
a group, with drums, guitars, the lot,
so I peeped in and there was
the girl, earnest as a nun, singing
You can get it if you really want
and I thought
just you wait
and see.
Poems copyright © Caroline Gilfillan
Photographs copyright © Andrew Scott
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Robert Green In Sclater St Market
One quiet afternoon, over a couple of drinks in the back bar at The Carpenters Arms in Cheshire St, Robert Green told The Gentle Author the epic story of his family’s involvement in the market through three generations and over a century
Robert Green – My connection to the Sclater St Market goes right back to my father’s father, Edward Green, who started down here in the twenties. He used to sell bird seed. In those days, it was a big animal market and pigeons were the number one thing. Every man in the East End used to levitate his way down towards Club Row, as it was known then. So my grandfather ended up down here selling bird seed on a regular basis and, as soon as he was old enough, Ronald, my father – who was born in 1921 – started coming down here with him too. My grandfather was in the Coldstream Guards. He got wounded and sent to the military hospital at Woolwich. After he came out of there, he began trading down the market on Sundays.
In the thirties, my father started thinking about market trading himself but he did not join the animal market, he decided to go into clothing – which we are still doing today, selling a few socks and things like. He traded all through the war and I remember him telling me about the first time they had an air raid siren – he said he had never seen the market pack up so fast, everyone was gone in about ten minutes.
After the war, a lot of buildings had gone. That plot behind my stall where the ‘Avant Garde’ Tower is now was one big wasteland. A lot of people set up stalls on that piece of ground. The owners of the properties had not got any war damage compensation, so no one really planned to do anything. It was just left as wasteland and people started trading there, which was how my father ended up on a bomb site. He traded there from 1948 until the mid-fifties, which is when we got the licence in the market. He had been applying for the licence all that time while he was working in a menswear shop in Green St during the week and trading on Sundays, until he got prosecuted for illegal trading– a five pound fine and ten shillings cost. Finally in 1955 – just before I was born – he managed to get a licence. A pitch became available and the council offered him a permanent licence, so he took that.
The Gentle Author – Why did it take so long to get a licence?
Robert Green – You simply could not get a licence in those days, it was such a busy market that there was literally no space. All the pitches were taken. Nowadays it is easy to forget, but relatively recently – from pre-war days up to the fifties, even the early seventies – on a Sunday, you go could down your local high street and hear a pin drop. There was nothing open. If you wanted to go anywhere and do any shopping or look around, the only place to go on a Sunday morning was down the market. In Tower Hamlets, on Sunday there was Petticoat Lane, Club Row and Columbia Rd. Virtually all the men in the local area used to make their way towards Club Row Market because it was the place to be on a Sunday morning. It was always known as a local market, whereas Petticoat Lane was a bit touristy, attracting people from far and wide.
The Gentle Author – My parents went to Petticoat Lane on their honeymoon in 1958.
Robert Green – Imagine someone saying that now! “I’m taking you to Petticoat Lane for your honeymoon,” I do not think it would go down too well. Incredible when you think how times have changed. Down here in Club Row, it was mostly pets and birds in particular. If you look at any photos from the fifties and sixties or earlier, nine out of every ten people would be men. Very few women used to come down, it was always known as a man’s market mostly because of the association with birds, which were an exclusively masculine interest in those days.
Originally we had one pitch from which we traded all through the forties and fifties. By the late fifties, my father had made a little bit of money in the market so he managed to acquire the shop in Upton Park which acted as a base.
The Gentle Author – Your grandfather was dealing in bird seed, why do you think your father switched to shirts?
Robert Green – When my father left school, he started working in a pawnbrokers at Canning Town and they used to deal in a certain amount of clothing. Then he got a job in a department store near Canning Town called ‘Stabbings’ and he worked in menswear. Then he transferred to another one at Upton Park – ‘Woodmanses,’ which had a menswear department too. Finally, he ended up working in a menswear shop next to the Odeon at Upton Park. It was called ‘Finkles’ and my dad worked for the Jewish man that ran it for ten years, so he built up a background in clothing. When he eventually got his own shop in Green St, it took off because he became an agency for a lot of big firms – Fred Perry, Raelbrooks – all the top names of the time. That enabled him to have a fantastic trade because a lot of shops could not even get those brands, so having them in a market put him streets ahead of everybody else. By the sixties, we had two stalls in the market. We had two vans and two drivers – on an average Sunday we had about six people working on our stalls.
The Gentle Author – Was a lot of this clothing manufactured locally?
Robert Green – In those days, it was all manufactured in England and a lot of them were London-based firms. Raelbrooks was in Walthamstow and Fred Perry’s factory was up in Tottenham. Double Two was a Wakefield shirt company, they had two factories – Barnsley and Cleckheaton – up in Yorkshire. We used to go there two or three times a year, once we could buy a lot of stock. In the market, it used to be absolutely phenomenal. During the sixties, when I was still at school, I was down here every Sunday and I spent all morning wandering round the market. Then I came back and spent a few hours sitting under the stall in a cardboard car, eating sweets.
The Gentle Author – What were your first impressions of the market?
Robert Green – I thought it was incredibly exciting, I could not wait to get down here every Sunday even though I was only about ten years old. You could find stalls for everything under the sun.
In those days, every Sunday was like Wembley at Cup Final – you had to push your way through the crowd, shoulder to shoulder. We used to have them about five or six deep round our stall. If you walked away from the stall, you could not get back, it was be so crowded. It was an absolute magnet. I have seen people fighting over a yard of space because they did not have enough room for their stall. It was so crowded you would not believe it. Now you could drive a bus through here and it would not touch anything.
There were so many characters too. Going to the market in the fifties and sixties was like street theatre. Even if you did not want to buy anything, you could spend the morning being entertained because all the stalls had characters who had their own routines.
Beside our pitch we had two brothers – they used to sell crockery, tea sets and china. They started off by spreading out this massive tea service, cups on top, saucers, and they would have the whole thing piled up with about fifty pieces of china. Eventually, they would throw the whole lot up in the air, crash it down onto the stall and shout out a price. I must have seen them do that thousands and thousands of times, but I never once saw them break anything. It was a real skill, there was an art to it. As a boy, I used to be fascinated, standing there for ages watching them over and over again, waiting for them to drop something, but they never did.
There was an elderly man with his daughter who stood one stall away from us, they sold that white paste you clean cookers with, which gets the grease off and grime. It was his own concoction because in those days there was no real consumer legislation. I remember his daughter. She was probably in her thirties and she looked like a film star, always very glamorous – the most unlikely person you could imagine on a market stall. She had bright blonde hair, always wore bright red lipstick and she dressed very smart.
They took it in turns to demonstrate and he would get these old grimy cooker pieces out, spread this stuff on, then give you the spiel and, after a few minutes, magically wipe all the dirt off and it would be beautiful and clean. Then, to demonstrate how safe it was, he would put his finger in the tin, scoop a dollop out and clean his teeth with it, to show that – no matter what you did – it was not going to do you any harm. I used to stand there for hours and hours watching. Almost every other stall had someone doing this type of thing. It was a day out.
On the other hand, I have mixed feelings about the animal market because I am a passionate supporter of animal welfare. There were genuine people but I would not dispute there were also a lot of unscrupulous people who attached themselves to it as well. You did get a lot of things going on that should not have been allowed and, during the eighties, the animal rights campaigners began arriving each week, so eventually it got outlawed and you could no longer trade in animals. It did have a massive effect on the market because probably a third of the people who used to go down there only went for the animals, so that was a real turning point.
In one way, I am glad the market changed but there were a lot of innocent victims who got pushed out at the same time. Palmers’ pet shop, for example, established over a hundred years. I knew Mr Palmer well, his father had been there since the turn of the nineteenth century. They spent all week bagging up birdseed and, on Sunday, the whole lot would go out in one morning. There used to be a queue of people outside right up until they closed at two o’clock in the afternoon. In the late eighties, Mr. Palmer retired and a West Indian who was running the place for him took over the business until redevelopment forced him out. I still keep in touch with him, he is back in Trinidad now but he phones up occasionally.
The Gentle Author – Do you remember the Bishopsgate goods yard fire?
Robert Green – It was on a Saturday night. We used to go out for walks after the shop closed and we had been out one Saturday night when we came home and it was on the newsreel. My father looked up and my mother said, “There’s a big fire up in Shoreditch somewhere, it’s on the news now.” My father said, “Ere, that’s the goods yard! What’s going to happen to the market? It’s coming up to one of the busiest times of the year – we won’t be able to trade tomorrow.” It was in the run up to Christmas 1964. My father said, “This is one of the busiest days of the year – it’s a disaster!” On Sunday morning, we set off as usual but we could not get anywhere near Sclater St. There were firemen everywhere. The whole of Sclater St was covered in fire hoses, they had the road blocked off. My father said, “Oh this is terrible, we’re going to lose a whole day’s trading.”
There were twice as many people there as normal, because you had all the usual market crowd plus a lot of others who had watched the news and come to see what had happened. By around ten o’clock, the fire was over apart from trails of smoke here and there, so the fire brigade decided to clear the hoses and the police let us down Sclater St.
In those days, the market inspectors were very strict. They came round at one o’clock and that was the end of trading. They all looked like Blakey out of ‘On the Buses,’ they had long trenchcoats and peaked caps and they would come round with a clipboard, very stern. “One o’clock, stop trading, stop serving, start packing up!” So at ten o’clock we only had three hours to trade, yet that turned out to be one of the busiest Sundays we ever had. I remember my father telling me we were so busy that he had to send one of the drivers back in the van to the shop to get more stock. Yet, although it was a disaster that turned out to be an amazing success from a business point of view, I cannot forget the people who lost their lives in that fire – a customs officer and a railway worker.
That fire transformed the place and it never really got back to normal. Thousands and thousands of people used to be in and out of the goods yard all the time but, after the fire, it made the area desolate during the week. From Monday to Saturday, you would see nobody you knew. Eventually they pulled the goods yard down but in the meantime the market had got to the stage where, over thirty years after the war, it was the same as it had been since the bombs dropped. I remember there were old burnt out cars abandoned on the bomb site and, where the cellars once were and they had levelled it off, the ground dipped down. I used to play and lark about over there. All through the seventies, the bomb site was full of stalls, there was literally hundreds and hundreds of stalls, and that created a massive uplift in the market because it had almost gone to four times its size. It all merged into one and we probably did more trade in the seventies than during the fifties and sixties.
The Gentle Author – By this point, you were running the family pitches?
Robert Green – I was coming up to leaving school and my father did not even ask me, he just assumed that I would start working for him, so in 1971 when I left at the end of the summer term, he said, “You have a couple of weeks off and then you can start working for me.” So I had two weeks’ holiday – I did not go anywhere, I was just loafing about – and then I started working in the shop and, from then on, I was in the market every Sunday serving on the stalls with my sister Pat.
I was only a teenager but I had new ideas and, after a year or two, when I had found my ground, I started to put more and more into the business and we began to build it up, so by the mid-seventies we were doing more trade than ever. We drove down here with two big vanloads and came back with virtually nothing. We used to have a little crowd of people waiting for us when we arrived at the stall. People used to come up and say, “Give us one of them in white, blue, cream, in this size,” and that was it, a dozen at a time.
In the late seventies, there was a period of rapid inflation. We were putting up prices four or five times a year and that was reflected in lower sales, and we got into a vicious spiral. Then the animal market went and there was a 50% drop in our business. By then the trading laws had changed, so the market was no longer the place to be on a Sunday morning because the high streets shops were open too and there were car boot sales opening all over the place.
We kept going because it is what we do but we got rid of one of the pitches. We were back to where started yet, although the trade was not there and we were not making money any more, I do not ever remember my father even vaguely suggesting that we might not be there. Whether the trade was there or not, he still had the same attitude.
Since 1971, I have only missed seven Sundays. Six of those were in 1976 when I broke my leg and could not walk, and the other one I had to miss because the licence was being changed into my name and the council stopped me trading for a week. I ignored it and went down there but, the following week, they came up and said, “If you’re here next week, we’re going to prosecute you because you’re not allowed to be here.” I still went down there actually but I was not trading.
In 1996, my father went to hospital and they said, “You’ve got cancer and there’s nothing we can do about it,” and they gave him six months to live. As it happens he went on for just over a year. He still kept going down the market but, when it came to the last few months, he got pretty bad and he could not. He had been here every Christmas since the nineteen-twenties when he used to come down with his father. He was very sick but he said to me, “I want to go down there for the last Sunday’s trading.” I told him, “You can’t go down there dad, you can’t hardly walk ,” but he said, “I want to go down there.”
So, on the last Sunday’s trading before Christmas, me and Pat came down here and traded as we always do and packed up a little bit early and went back. By the time I got back to the shop it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I brought him downstairs and into the car. I drove him back up there to market and I said, “Well come on then, obviously you’ve missed the day, but you can still say you’ve actually been here for the last Sunday.”
By the time I got him here and parked up near our pitch, everybody had gone. It was raining, so it was wet, cold and windy and he was in a terrible state. I got him out of the car and walked him over and he stood on the pitch. We both stood there and neither of us said anything but I knew he was thinking the same as me, he was running through in his mind all the years he had been standing there. We stood for about ten or fifteen minutes looking up and down the road. Neither of us said a word, and then eventually I said, “Come on dad, you can’t stay here now, it’s cold and it’s wet.”
I walked him back and got him into the car and then, after almost seventy years of being down here every Sunday, he left Sclater St for the last time and two weeks after that he was dead, just after Christmas.
I thought to myself, “What he would want me to do? He would want me to prove myself, prove my own worth, that I could do just as much as he did.” So I threw myself into the work wholeheartedly. I was working twenty hours a day in the shop. I was there until one o’clock in the morning unpacking stock. I was out all the time going round wholesalers and suppliers. For a year or two it paid off. We ended up doing as much trade as we used to do years ago but then, because I was successful at it, I found did not want to do it anymore. I had proved that I could, I had been as successful as he had. I had fought against adversity but I did not see any point in carrying on and I started to get a few health problems.
I went to my doctor and he said to me,“You’re going to have to make radical changes because you’re heading for catastrophe.” I had never had a holiday since I was ten years old when my father took me to Torquay. That was the only holiday I ever had, but even then it was only Monday to Saturday, because we had to go on Monday and come back on Saturday so we did not miss the market on Sunday. My doctor said to me, “You’re not that young any more” – by that stage I was nearly fifty – “You can’t do a hundred hours a week.”
We were getting a lot of problems in the shop – burglaries and robberies all the time – things had totally transformed in Upton Park. We had to keep the door locked during the day even though the shop was open. So it was a choice – either the market or the shop. There was no way I could lose the market, so I discussed it with my sister and we decided to sell the shop. Since fifty, I have gone into sort of semi-retirement and at the end of this year I will be sixty. I do not think I would be here now if I had not taken my doctor’s advice because I could not have carried on like that. After I sold my father’s shop, I was wracked with guilt for three or four years but I am sure I made the right choice.
We have not made any money in the market for the last four or five years and most weeks it costs me money to be here, but I do not care. I am coming down here because it is where we have always been, it is tradition. I know everybody down here – it is like a social club more than anything.
To a lot of people, the market is like a family, they feel comfortable down here. You get those who are on the fringe of society, they do not really fit in elsewhere, these people seem to levitate towards it because they feel comfortable here. These days you hear so much about community spirit but they do not know what they are talking about. Having a shiny block of flats is not generating community spirit, it is completely missing the point. What is going on down here in the market and what has happened in the past, that really is a community spirit. People feel comfortable, they feel that they are part of something and when they are not here they feel as if they are on the outside looking in at everybody else but they love it in the market because they really feel this is where they belong, you know.
Transcript by Rachel Blaylock
Ronald Green trading in shirts in the fifties
Ronald sells shirts on a bomb site in Sclater St in the fifties
Ronald Green’s shop in Upton Park
Robert Green outside L&S Bird Stores in Sclater St in the seventies
Robert minds the stall as a youngster in the seventies
Ronald & Robert Green in Sclater St in the eighties
Robert & Patricia Green in the eighties
Patricia & Robert Green selling shirts on Sclater St
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The River Thames Of Old London
There is a dark and glistening river that flows through my dreams – it is the old river Thames, carrying away the filth and debris of the city and, in return, delivering the riches of the world upon the flood tide rising. How much I should like to have known London as it is recorded in these photographs – with a strong current of maritime life at its heart.
The broad expanse of water in Central London is curiously empty today, yet a century ago when many of these magic lantern slides from the Bishopsgate Institute were taken for the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, it was a teeming thoroughfare with wharves and jetties lining the banks. In the (reversed) glass slide above, you see barges unloading their cargo next to the Houses of Parliament and you might deduce that this method of transport could provide an answer to the congestion problems of our own era, if it were not for the fact that all the wharves have gone long ago.
Each day the tide goes up and down by twenty feet. For half the day, the water flows in one direction and for the other half in the other direction, with a strange moment of stillness in between while the tide turns. Such is the surge engendered that the force of the current at the centre presents a formidable challenge to a lone rower and would defeat any swimmer. In spite of our attempt to tame it with the flood barrier, the Thames manifests a force of nature that deserves our respect, especially as the water level rises year by year.
You might think that the river has become merely a conduit for drainage and an itinerary for tourist trips these days, yet do not forget that this mighty river is the very reason for the location of London, here on the banks of the Thames.
Shipping near Tower Bridge, c. 1910
St Paul’s Cathedral from the river, c. 1920
Tower of London from the river, c. 1910
Wandsworth Creek, c, 1920
Off Woolwich, c.1920
Greenwich pier, c. 1920
Steamboat pier at Chelsea, c. 1870
St Paul’s Cathedral from Bankside, c. 1920
Billingsgate Market, c. 1910
Houses of Parliament from South Bank, c. 1910
Tower of London from the Thames, c.1910
Ice floes on the Thames, c. 1920
St Paul’s Cathedral from Bankside, c. 1910
Victoria Embankment, c. 1920
Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race at Putney Bridge, c. 1910
St Paul’s Cathedral from Waterloo Bridge, c. 1920
London Docks, c. 1920
Customs House, c. 1910
Lots Rd and Battersea Bridge, c. 1910
Somerset House was on the riverfront until the Victoria Embankment was constructed in 1870.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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