Spitalfields Life

In 2018 I met Dr Kaori O’Connor who rescued these paintings by East End artist Cecil Osborne (1909-96) and she asked me to help her get them reinstated in Camden Town Hall. 

The attention that Spitalfields Life brought to the panels persuaded Camden Council to reacquire them in 2019. But Dr O’Connor died in 2022 and did not live to see her wish fulfilled, so it was a poignant pilgrimage I made yesterday to see the paintings, newly cleaned and framed, hung in the Registrar’s Office at the Town Hall.

St Pancras & Kings Cross, 1956 (Click to enlarge)

Camden, Highgate & Hampstead, 1958 (Click to enlarge)

Bloomsbury & Fitzrovia, 1965 (Click to enlarge)

In 2016, David Buckman author of From Bow to Biennale, the history of the East London Group of painters, took me to meet anthropologist Dr Kaori O’Connor at her flat on the top floor of an old mansion block near Bedford Sq.

There was an air of mystery about David’s invitation and I was excited because he promised to show me three important lost murals by East End artist Cecil Osborne illustrating the history of the former London Borough of St Pancras. Let me confess, I was not disappointed to encounter this splendid triptych.

Cecil Osborne was born in Poplar in 1909 and, after studying at a commercial college, sought clerical work. Yet he had artistic talent and educated himself in art by reading books and visiting galleries. After viewing the East London Group exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1928, Cecil presented his work to the leader of the Group, John Cooper, and joined Cooper’s art classes at the Bow & Bromley Institute. As a consequence, Cecil exhibited around thirty of his paintings in East London Group exhibitions from 1929 until 1936, as well as supplying his clerical skills as secretary and treasurer of the Group.

In writing his book, David Buckman spent more that twenty years researching the lost history of the East London Group which had become dispersed after the Second World War. When David corresponded with Cecil in the last years of his life, after he had retired to Spain, David learnt of three murals which Cecil had painted for St Pancras Town Hall – now Camden Town Hall – that had been removed from their original location and subsequently lost.

Cecil’s son Dorian Osborne supplied this description:

“The offer was from my father to supply three pictures painted in oils depicting the history of the Borough on canvases to be hung in the small Assembly Room at St Pancras Town Hall in Euston Rd. The council supplied the materials and father designed and painted the series which are six feet by six feet square.

We were living at 46 Belsize Sq at the time and that is where the first was painted, the work commencing in, I seem to recall, 1956 or thereabouts.  My brother and I were used as artist’s models for some of the children depicted. Also there are two rather ragged children shown in some sections which were based on the Bisto advertisement – for example, in one panel, pushing a hand-cart. The motorcar depicted in the illustration of the Doric Arch at Euston Station is a Triumph Gloria.

In 1958, we moved to 7 Redston Rd, N8, and that is where the second panel was completed and the third executed.  It is the third which shows the Post Office Tower, as it was in progress when Mary and I married in 1965 and she remembers seeing this panel in the house. At a later date, the council moved all three to the public lending library in Brecknock Rd near Kentish Town from where they were moved into storage.”

After David’s book was published, Dr Kaori O’Connor contacted him to say she had the murals, as she explained to me:

“I did not acquire the paintings so much as rescue them. They turned up in a weekly sale at the old Phillips auction rooms in Bayswater in the nineteen-nineties. Not a picture sale, but a general one, thrown in with furniture and oddments.

I saw one of the canvas panels poking out from behind a fridge. The Phillips staff knew nothing about their background and did not know what to make of them. I realised that some of the places featured in the paintings were near to where I live in Bloomsbury and knew I had to save them. If they had failed to sell, they would have been scrapped. As I recall, there were no other bidders.

Once I got them home, I realised they were a unique social history of a part of London that is rapidly changing out of recognition, while also acquiring a new cultural and artistic life today. Only recently, when I met David Buckman, I learned about the artist Cecil Osborne, his life and how the panels came to be painted for the old St Pancras Borough Council which no longer exists.

I had the panels for some twenty years, and they were as fresh and fascinating as the day I first saw them. They have a unique presence with a very strong sense of time and place, and tell their many stories eloquently. They are also very good company.

They were painted for a public space, intended to be seen by many people, so I would like them to find a new home where they can be widely appreciated as the remarkable artworks they are. I believe the past they depict can only enrich the present and future.“

St Pancras Town Hall, now Camden Town Hall, where Cecil Osborne’s murals originally hung and where they are now displayed once more.

Paintings photographed by Lucinda Douglas Menzies

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The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, shuttered since 2017

November 2022

March 2023

July 2023

February 2024

These photos record the ongoing degradation, decay, disregard and disrespect of the world’s most famous bell foundry without any check from those authorities who have the power to do something.

Meanwhile, the London Bell Foundry is offering to acquire the former Whitechapel Bell Foundry at market value but the owners of the grade-II*-listed building refuse to engage, even though their hotel scheme is dead and they have been trying to sell it for several years unsuccessfully. The judgement of the Secretary of State’s Public Inquiry into the future of the foundry in 2020 obligates any owner to ensure foundry activity continues at this site.

The London Bell Foundry is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee set up with the purpose of operating a bell foundry in Whitechapel, combining traditional bell founding with the use of digital technology.

When I posted my most recent photograph on social media last week, it received an astonishing reaction – over eight hundred reposts, hundreds of comments, shared by over one hundred and twenty thousand people – indicative of the extent of public feeling on this issue.

In response to the hullabaloo, Historic England issued this statement –

“Whitechapel Bell Foundry played a vital role in the long history of bell-making in this country and is an important landmark for London. Whilst the historic buildings are no longer in use as a foundry, planning permission was granted for a scheme for its re-use which we accepted would be sensitive to its significance and provide a level of public access.

We share concerns about the vulnerable condition of the building and a worrying increase in graffiti. We are monitoring the situation, but responsibility for the site lies with the owner. Tower Hamlets Council has formal powers if it considers that urgent works are required to preserve the building. We would support the London Bell Foundry’s alternative vision for the site, should they take ownership and apply for the necessary planning consents.”

THE LONDON BELL FOUNDRY

The London Bell Foundry seeks to acquire the Grade II* listed buildings as a permanent home for the London Bell Foundry. They want to open it as a fully-working foundry, re-establishing the world’s most famous bell foundry that operated in Whitechapel for five hundred years from the reign of Elizabeth I to the reign of Elizabeth II.

Their mission is to reinvigorate the art and science of bell founding through a marriage of new and old technology, casting church bells, artists’ bell, ceremonial bells, and bells for all occasions.

They are working with Nigel Taylor, foreman at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry for forty years, alongside artists of international stature and a team of the foremost experts in the technology of casting.

They plan to maximise the educational potential through apprenticeships for local people and work with schools and colleges in East London.

Their first commission was the Covid Bell in 2021, designed by Grayson Perry in support of their mission, which debuted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2022. The Covid Bell will tour NHS hospitals, enabling those have been bereaved to toll the bell in remembrance.

The London Bell Foundry has demonstrated a proven financial model that can ensure the tradition of bell founding continues in this country in perpetuity.

SUPPORTERS

“I fully support the proposal by the London Bell Foundry to establish a working foundry at the historic Whitechapel site. It is tragic that the bell foundry has been shuttered up since 2017. The presence of a rejuvenated modern bell foundry will once again assert Whitechapel as a place of creative innovation and restore the international reputation of the place where Big Ben and the Liberty Bell were made.”

Lutfur Rahman, Mayor of Tower Hamlets

“The Whitechapel Bell Foundry is one of the East End’s most treasured institutions, with a history stretching back to the 16th century. The foundry made Big Ben, America’s Liberty Bell and more locally the Bow Bells. So many people in the community are campaigning to save as much of the original building as possible, and to keep it as a working foundry. I am proud to support the Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry campaign, and encourage everyone to join in. Together we can save this important feature of East End life.”

Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green & Bow

“The East London Mosque & London Muslim Centre welcomes the proposal from the London Bell Foundry to reestablish a working foundry in Whitechapel. This will provide apprenticeships and work experience in traditional and digital crafts for the local community.”

Sufia Alam, East London Mosque & London Muslim Centre

“The re-established Whitechapel Bell Foundry would add significantly to the creative offer in East London. As the V&A East establishes a substantial presence at Stratford and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and develops particular links with the adjacent boroughs, we would welcome the opportunity to promote the Whitechapel-based art and bell foundry. Combining traditional skills with innovative technology and the offer of apprenticeship and further training in this specialised field will enhance the interpretation of the V&A’s important collection of works of art in bronze. Continuing the centuries-old tradition of bell founding in London with its global outreach will enrich the cultural presence and attract national, regional and international interest.”

Dr Tristram Hunt, Director of Victoria & Albert Museum

“The Whitechapel Bell Foundry is a crucial component of historic Whitechapel. That it has survived for so long on this site, and in such fascinating and evocative buildings, is nothing short of a miracle. Its survival as a working site is vital both for future generations and for Whitechapel.”

Heloise Palin, Spitalfields Historic Buildings Preservation Trust

Learn more at our  THE LONDON BELL FOUNDRY website

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In The Cockney Yiddish Podcast, launching today, Professor Nadia Valman, professor of urban literature and Dr Vivi Lachs, performer, researcher & translator of Yiddish culture, explore the unknown popular culture of the Yiddish East End. 

Mr Mendel, the Gramophone Man, by Alfred Daniels

The East End was transformed by the arrival in the late nineteenth century of tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Russia and eastern Europe, among them our great grandparents. They spoke Yiddish, a hybrid language based on old German, incorporating words from biblical Hebrew and local languages. When we were growing up, hearing stories of the old East End from our relatives, we were also learning bits and pieces of this language. Years later, when we had both become researchers of the Jewish East End, we asked ourselves: How did the English language turn Yiddish into Cockney Yiddish and how did Yiddish infiltrate Cockney? How did English and Yiddish cultures converge in the music halls, markets and newspapers of the East End?

Even before the major immigration of the late nineteenth century, Yiddish words could be heard on the London streets. Henry Mayhew, who published his encyclopaedic account of the poor in 1851, recorded the word ‘gonaff’ being used among thieves to mean a young pickpocket, and around the same time other writers of lowlife used the word ‘gelt’, meaning money. 

But from the 1880s Yiddish culture flourished and the Yiddish language began to absorb many English words, spoken with a strong Yiddish accent. We can see an example in the terminology of the East End sweatshop industries: bizi taym (busy time) and slek taym (slack time), which denoted the seasonal fluctuation of employment. Shifts in everyday language reflected the ways that Jewish immigrants and native Londoners were increasingly mixing in work and social life.

These changes are also visible in the popular writing and entertainment culture of the Yiddish East End. In The Cockney Yiddish Podcast we listen to Yiddish music hall songs and urban sketches, which Vivi discovered in archives and translated as part of her research with Nadia over the past few years. The songs were performed in the Yiddish music halls which thrived in the East End and they reflect the experience of immigrants in London with humour and pathos. The sketches and stories were published in the London Yiddish press, such as Der idisher ekspres (The Jewish Express) and Di tsayt (The Jewish Times) as commentary on the diversity of East End Jewish life, generational conflict, and the relationships between Jews and Cockneys.

Yiddish music halls were enormously popular with their local audiences, whether they were part of the roaring crowd in the vast Wonderland theatre in Whitechapel Rd or crowded into the back room of a pub in Philpot St (better known as the York Minster Yiddish Music Hall). What a thrill it must have been to listen to the Edwardian comic music hall song “Vos geyst nisht aheym sore gitl” (Won’t You Come Home Sarah-Gitl), which parodies the popular ragtime song “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”! The original song is sung by the hapless wife of a philandering husband. The Yiddish version, however, is sung by a hapless husband, lamenting the shenanigans of his feisty wife, Sarah-Gitl, who has run off to explore the charms of gentile men in the gin palaces of the West End. The gender switch in the Yiddish version came at a time when women’s roles were being challenged in both public and private life, and we think audiences would have relished the irony of the performance.

A more poignant expression of social change is the story that we discuss in Episode 1, ‘A London Girl’s Secret’, which you can hear read by Miriam Margolyes. The story tells of a young Jewish woman going out walking in the glittering metropolis with her non-Jewish boyfriend, whom she has met in the East End tailoring workshop where they are both employed. She lives at the intersection of two cultures: her home life with her dour Yiddish-speaking grandmother and her work life in the thrumming city.

The emotional core of the story is the young woman’s impossible struggle to make these two worlds meet. She can only speak English and the Yiddish language has become a barrier to communication with her grandmother’s immigrant generation. ‘A London Girl’s Secret’ was published in 1931 by the Yiddish short story writer and socialist I A Lisky and it looks back to the great Victorian Anglo-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill, who in his novel Children of the Ghetto (1892) also wrote of a female protagonist, the child of immigrants, who is alienated from her past and confronting the question of her future. Like Zangwill’s novel, Lisky’s bittersweet story of the Jewish East End is also a universal tale of the challenges facing second-generation immigrants.

In The Cockney Yiddish Podcast we bring you many other forgotten gems from the Jewish East End including Shakespeare in Yiddish performed by the actor David Schneider, whose grandfather Abish Meisels haunted the wings of the New Yiddish Theatre in Adler St, Whitechapel as a playwright and prompter. We discuss how the Great Dock Strike of 1889 inspired Jewish trade union activism and the poetry of Morris Winchevsky (dubbed the ‘Grandfather of Jewish Socialism’). We mull over the long history of nostalgia for the Jewish East End, from Victorian Anglo-Jewish writing to sentimental Yiddish songs of the fifties. If you are a Yiddish speaker you will enjoy Episode 5, which is entirely in Yiddish and explores the popular Yiddish writer Katie Brown’s comic take on how immigrants negotiated celebrating Chanukah and/or Christmas. 

But perhaps our most unexpected journey into the world of Cockney Yiddish was our investigation of the story of Mr Mendel, the mysterious Gramophone Man whom Nadia’s father remembered playing old-fashioned Yiddish records on his battered gramophone in Petticoat Lane Market in the thirties. When we looked, we found him everywhere – in fiction, film and photographs. And in the memories of many elderly East Enders, most intriguingly, we found him in a little Yiddish ditty that had been echoing around the streets and playgrounds of the Jewish East End for decades…

Vivi Lachs and Nadia Valman (on the left) explore ‘East Street Market’ by Maurice Sochachevsky, edited by Vivi Lachs (courtesy Dave Skye)

Wentworth St Market by Maurice Sochachevsky (courtesy Dave Skye)

Morris Winchevsky, Socialist Writer & Editor 1880s (from ‘Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn’ vol 3, 1926)

‘Vos geyst nisht aheym sore-gitl’ (Won’t You Come Home Sarah-Gitl) by Aaron Nager, music hall song c.1900

Masthead of  Der Fonograf (The Phonograph), Yiddish newspaper, 1909 (courtesy Jewish Miscellanies)

Dockers and tailors staged successful strikes in 1912 – The tailors’ ‘victory’ cartoon in Der blofer, 1912 (courtesy National Library of Israel)

The temptations of Christmas – ‘Hanukkah and Christmas’, cartoon in Der blofer, 1912 (courtesy National Library of Israel)

Masthead of Di tsayt (The Jewish Times) Yiddish newspaper, 1919

I A Lisky, Socialist Yiddish Writer (courtesy Frances Fuchs)

Katie Brown, Popular Yiddish Writer c. 1930s (courtesy of Mazower collection)

Curb-side Concert, A B Levy (from East End Story 1951)

Dr Vivi Lachs and Professor Nadia Valman in Whitechapel

The Cockney Jewish Podcast © Jeremy Richardson

The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is available on all podcast platforms and at cockneyyiddish.org.

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Conceived in homage to Geoffrey Fletcher and “The London Nobody Knows,” artist Joanna Moore introduces you to lesser-known corners of Spitalfields. (You can click on these pictures to enlarge them if you wish.)

The Old St Patrick’s School in Buxton St, dating from the eighteen sixties, stands upon the grass of Allen Gardens beside the Georgian vicarage of the former All Saints church – the last survivors of the nineteenth century streets that once stood here, long before the park was laid out. Enfolded by its lofty garden wall, containing huge exotic shrubs and dripping with climbing plants, this finely proportioned cluster of buildings rises with tall attenuated chimneys, like some mysterious castle of romance. St Patrick’s School is a tantalising enigma to those who walk through here regularly and have heard tales of the secret tropical garden which is rumoured to exist behind these implacable walls.

The Watchhouse on the corner of St Matthew’s Churchyard in Wood St was built in 1754 and, with the growing trade in human corpses for dissection, in 1792 it was necessary to appoint a watchman who was paid ten shillings and sixpence a week to be on permanent guard against resurrectionists. A reward of two guineas was granted for the apprehension of any body-snatchers and the watchman was provided with a blunderbuss and permission to fire from an upper window, once a rattle had been sounded three times. The churchwarden who lives there today told me that, according to the terms of his lease, he still holds this right – and the blunderbuss and rattle are stored in the house to this day. The small structure at the rear originally housed the parish fire engine, in the days when it was just a narrow cart. In 1965, the Watchhouse gained notoriety of another kind when fascist leader Oswald Mosley stood upon the step to give his last open air public speech.

Gibraltar Walk off the Bethnal Green Rd is a handsome terrace of red brick nineteenth century artisans’ workshops that once served the furniture trade when it was the primary industry in this area. Of modest construction, yet designed with careful proportions, the terrace curls subtly along Gibraltar Walk, turning a corner and extending the length of Padbury Court, to create one long “L” shaped structure. These appealing back streets still retain their cobbles and there are even a couple of signs left from the days of furniture factories, but, most encouragingly, the majority of these premises are still in use today as workshops for small industries, keeping the place alive.

In Emanuel Litvinoff’s memoir, “Journey Through a Small Planet” describing his childhood in Cheshire St in the nineteen twenties, he recalls the feared Pedley St Arches where, “Couples grappled against the dripping walls and tramps lay around parcelled in old newspaper. The evil of the place was in its gloom, its putrid stench, in the industrial grime of half a century with which it was impregnated.” And today, with a gut-wrenching reek of urine, graced by a profusion of graffiti and scattered with piles of burnt rubbish, the place retains its authentic insalubrious atmosphere – a rare quality now, that is in demand by the numerous street fashion photo shoots, crime dramas and pop videos which regularly use this location. There is a scheme to turn the Great Eastern Railway Viaduct into a raised park – like the High Line in New York – but in the meantime wildlife flourishes peaceably upon these graceful decaying structures dating from the earliest days of the railway, constructed between 1836 and 1840 to bring the Eastern Counties Line from Romford to the terminus at Shoreditch High St.

Nestling at the base of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s monumental spire for Christ Church, Spitalfields, is the tiny private roof garden on the top of 3 Fournier St, where what was once planted as a camomile lawn has grown to become a wildflower meadow with pink campions, oxe-eye daisies and sorrel abounding. The pitched roofs on three sides entirely conceal this verdant arbor from the street and create a favoured climate where freesias, carnations, honeysuckle, wallflowers, foxgloves, wild strawberries and lettuces flourish, surrounded by espalier fruit trees and rambling roses, all unknown to those who tread the dusty pavements of Commercial St far below. Built in 1754 by Peter Le Keux, a silkweaver, this elegant old house follows the same Tuscan order of architecture that was Hawksmoor’s guiding principle, and as you ascend the staircase endlessly winding up to the roof garden, you come upon subtle intricate details, like banisters with square capitals, that match those across the road at the church.

The Worrall House of 1720 is the quintessence of the Spitalfields nobody knows – built in a secret courtyard between Fournier St and Princelet St by Samuel Worrall, the builder responsible for many of the surrounding houses, it can only be approached through a narrow passage behind a heavily-encrusted door. When you step through this door, into the dark cobbled alley lined with ancient planks covered with paint and tar that has not been renewed in over a century, you feel – more than anywhere in Spitalfields – that you have stepped back in time. Here Samuel Worrall built a handsomely proportioned yet modest house for himself in his own builders’ yard. Just one room deep with a pedimented door and stone balls atop the gateposts, it resembles a perfect lifesize dolls’ house. Facing East and constructed of a single layer of bricks, it only receives sunlight in the morning and is not a warm building in winter, yet there is an irresistible grace and mystery about this shadowy house of enchantment, presiding silently upon a quiet courtyard that is outside time.

Joanna Moore’s drawing of Victoria Cottages in Deal St was done upon the spot where Geoffrey Fletcher, author of “The London Nobody Knows,”sat and drew the same view in May 1977, when this terrace was threatened by bulldozers. Built in 1855 by the Metropolitan Association for Dwellings for Housing the Industrious Poor, after the design of Prince Albert’s Model Cottages for the Great Exhibition of 1851, these are one of the earliest examples of two storey cottage apartments. Scheduled for demolition in a slum clearance scheme, they were saved in 1978 through the intervention of Peter Shore who was both local MP and Environment Minister. If Geoffrey Fletcher came back today he would be delighted to step through the old iron gate and discover well-tended cottage gardens where the fragrance of flowers hangs in the air. Pairs of neat white front doors lead either to the ground or first floor dwellings, which, although designed as the minimum in the nineteenth century, appear generous and sympathetic by contemporary standards.

Drawings copyright © Joanna Moore

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