Smithfield’s Bloody Past
Novelist & Historian of London Gillian Tindall takes over as guest author this week in celebration of the publication of her new book, A Tunnel Through Time, A New Route for an Old London Journey by Chatto & Windus.
As Crossrail advances from Farringdon towards Moorgate and Liverpool St, it crosses one of the oldest of London’s play-spaces. Smithfield means ‘smooth field’ and, though the Romans called it by a different name, they recognised that this green expanse was too useful to be covered in houses.
By the twelfth century, there was a fair held on Smithfield every Friday for the buying and selling of horses, and a growing market for oxen, cows and – by-and-by – sheep as well. An annual fair was held every August around St Bartholmew’s Day, in front of Bartholomew’s Hospital which had been founded in 1123. This open ground was also much in demand for tournaments – sometimes involving royalty – as well as jousts and other sports, demonstrations, riots, and public entertainments, including executions.
Some of these uses survived into the nineteenth century, long after the walls enclosing the City were reduced to isolated fragments and London itself had swelled and swelled, crossing the river Fleet, covering Holborn, St Giles and Soho with streets, running up through Clerkenwell and swallowing Islington. Moo-ing, snorting and baa-ing herds were still driven on the hoof by men and dogs through these busy streets towards Smithfield, sometimes from hundred of miles away. Similarly, geese and ducks were hustled along in great flocks, their delicate feet encased in cloth for protection. They were all going to their deaths, though they did not know it – till the stench of blood and the sounds of other animals inspired noisy fear in them, as they were driven across the bridges over the Fleet and along lanes whose names already marked their destiny – Cow Lane, Cowcross, Chick Lane and Cock Lane. For seven hundred years, Smithfield was a place of open-air slaughter, ankle deep each market-day in mud, manure and blood. In Great Expectations (written in the eighteen-sixties but set back in time to Dickens’ youth in the eighteen-twenties) young Pip comes across the market and refers to it as ‘the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam [which] seemed to stick to me.’
Others besides Dickens were aware, by the early decades of the century, that this chaotic scene was out of place in up-to-date, heart-of-the-Empire, Victorian London. People wrote pamphlets, raised the matter in Parliament and wheels began to turn. By the eighteen-fifties, a modern slaughterhouse was established on one of the last remaining bits of open land between Kentish Town and Islington, and Smithfield was reconstructed as a wholesale meat depot of covered pavilions in iron and glass. This is the Market that is still in use today. Recently, an attempt by the Corporation of London to redevelop the Smithfield General Market for high-rise offices was fought off, successfully making the point that, with the new Farringdon Crossrail station just around the corner, a far livelier use is appropriate. Small shops, workshops and cafés are planned, and the Museum of London is going to be moved there to a much more suitable location than its present ill-designed roundabout.
Yet it was not just beasts who were driven to their deaths in old London. For hundreds of years, until the late eighteenth century, London’s main place of execution was Tyburn, a lonely crossroads along the Oxford road, approximately where Marble Arch is today. At times, the cart carrying its load of manacled prisoners out to these gallows must have crossed paths with unruly crowds of cattle coming in. The main difference was that, unlike the beasts, the men and women in the cart knew what their journey’s end would be.
Long before it was decided to hold hangings in an isolated spot, the obvious place had always been Smithfield, with lots of room for crowds to watch the spectacle and learn the message that disobedience did not pay. One of the first to be made an example in Smithfield was the Scotsman William Wallace, who was hung, drawn and quartered there in 1305, before he was sent north in bits to be exhibited as if he were, indeed, meat from the market. Subsequently, Wallace has been elevated, on shaky evidence, into a national hero and a plangent memorial stands today in front of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Later in the same century, Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt marched his men to Smithfield to parley with the king, but after a quarrel he was stabbed and then decapitated.
Common criminals were routinely hanged at Smithfield, a little further to the west ‘under the elms,’ but the best remembered executions are of those who were burned alive for heresy in the Reformation. These are usually called the ‘Marian burnings’, since the great number were Protestants targeted by Queen Mary, the fervently Catholic daughter of Henry VIII’s first discarded wife. But, even before Mary came to the throne and started her crusade to return England to the Old Faith, a few paid the extreme penalty under Henry VIII and his son Edward VI for being too Protestant.
One of these was Joan Bocher, a devout Annabaptist from Kent, who was sent to the stake in Smithfield in 1550. The Vicar of nearby St Sepulcre church was one John Rogers, who was himself a follower of William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English. Nevertheless, he found Bocher and several others too fanatical for his taste, condoning their burning by order of Edward with the remark that it was a punishment ‘sufficiently mild, for heresy.’ One wonders if he felt the same, five years later, when he was summarily rounded up and sent to the stake for preaching what the new Queen Mary thought was heresy. It is recorded that he went ‘almost gaily’ to his fate, accompanied on his way by his wife and ten children, one a babe in arms. The literal belief, held by almost all such victims of every religious persuasion, that heaven was very near and that their moment of extreme suffering would assure them a privileged place, was clearly an effective morale-booster – as it appears to be for suicide bombers in the our own time.
Burning alive as a punishment for having the wrong ideas died out early in the seventeenth century and the exact location of these deaths at Smithfield was forgotten until one day in March 1849, when a new sewer was being dug across the market not far from the church of St Bartholomew the Great. About three feet down, the workmen discovered stones blackened by fire, ashes, and fragments of charred human bones. Passersby gathered and some took away bits of bone as relics or mementoes, but quickly the site was covered and forgotten again in the reigning spirit of Victorian modernity and what was generally known as Progress.
Progress had its effect upon hangings, which were now restricted to murderers and moved from Tyburn back to the City, outside Newgate Gaol. On hanging days, the bell of St Sepulcre (‘the bell of Old Bailey’ in the traditional song) would toll and the condemned man or woman would be brought out to a crowd of spectators. But, by the mid-century, a number including Charles Dickens – who made sure of seeing several executions himself – declared that the spectacle was degrading and did not act as a deterrent. From 1868, a dozen years after the slaughter of animals had been moved off to the new premises in Islington, hangings took place only within Newgate. The riotous Bartholomew Fair was already a thing of the past and Smithfield’s centuries of bloody history were at an end too.
A burning at Smithfield
Archbishop Cranmer remonstrates with Joan Bocher, subsequently burnt at Smithfield for heresy
Momument to William Wallace outside Bart’s Hospital
Gateway to St Bartholomew the Great, once the entrance to the Augustinian priory
Poor box at Bart’s Hospital
Henry VIII gate to Bart’s Hospital
Golden boy on the corner of Cock Lane
Cupola at Smithfield Market by Horace Jones 1866
Arcade at Smithfield Market by Horace Jones 1866
Smithfield General Market of 1868 was recently saved from demolition
Bartholomew Fair by Augustus Pugin & Thomas Rowlandson, courtesy Bishopsgate Institute (Click to enlarge this image)
On Thursday 15th September at 8pm, Gillian Tindall discusses her work and reads from ‘The Tunnel Through Time’ at Libreria, 65 Hanbury St, E1 5JP, which is positioned – appropriately enough – directly over a Crossrail tunnel. In her new book, Gillian explores the history of the new Crossrail route which turns out to be only the latest scheme to traverse an ancient path across London’s buried secrets and former fields. Click here to book your free ticket
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Smithfield Christmas Eve Meat Auction
The Tunnel Through Time
It is my delight to welcome the distinguished Novelist & Historian of London Gillian Tindall as guest author for the next week in celebration of the publication of her new book, A Tunnel Through Time, A New Route for an Old London Journey by Chatto & Windus. And thus I leave you in Gillian’s capable hands until my return on Monday 12th September.
The Crossrail-Elizabeth line, through the heart of Central London and out a long way on both sides, should be fully open by the summer after next. Thus, with its promise of streamlined trains and light-filled stations, one more chapter will be added to the saga of London’s subterranean passageways – yet even this part of the story is already over a hundred and fifty years old.
London’s first Underground railway had its ceremonial opening early in 1863. A party of top-hatted movers-&-shakers went on a trip in open wagons, and to a grand dinner on tables laid out next to the tunnel at Farringdon where the line terminated. The very same month, the first manuscript version of what became Alice in Wonderland was produced, illustrated by the Lewis Carroll himself and called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Carroll, for all that he appeared to be a shy and unworldly academic, had tapped directly into the feeling of the times. For this first Underground – arriving long before New York’s Subway or the Paris Métro – aroused not just a lot of public interest but also anxiety.
Tales of secret underground passages as routes for smugglers, criminals or escaping members of persecuted royal families, had always been the stuff of romantic and scary stories, yet railways themselves had only arrived in London over the previous twenty-five years, so they still seemed new and invasive. They also made the capital a dirtier place. Consequently, it was not surprising the the City Corporation refused to let any of the train companies build a main station right in the centre, which is why Euston and Kings Cross, soon to be joined by St Pancras, stood glaring wistfully across the main road that separated them from Bloomsbury. Twenty years before, a railway line to and from the docks had been allowed to insert itself into Fenchurch St in the far eastern corner of the City, near the Tower, but nothing had yet been allowed in from the north. Broad St Station was soon to be built, well outside old London wall, but in 1863 no Liverpool St Station was there yet, just a terminus up at Shoreditch where the contested Bishopsgate Viaduct still stands.
So the point of the new Underground line, snaking from Paddington along to Kings Cross and then down the path of the Fleet river to what became Farrington Station, was to bring trains as near as possible to the City without actually entering its fiercely-guarded square mile. This first Metropolitan Railway was the brain-child of the City’s official Solicitor, Charles Pearson, a man of advanced ideas. Its trains were, of course, to be pulled by steam engines – it would be thirty-odd years before the electric tube became a possibility – so there was no difference in kind between trains shuttling back and forth along the new line and the ones carrying passengers much further out to the north and west. The idea of City workers being able to ‘commute’ (then an unknown word) from homes in the country began as an idealistic notion in Pearson’s active imagination.
The new line functioned like a branch of the main lines, diving down into a tunnel, or rather into a series of tunnels interrupted by openings to let the steam out and the air in. Unlike a modern tube, which is constructed by deep boring, it was built by cut-and-cover, with the whole area of each section laid bare for the track-laying and then roofed over again when complete. These hugely disruptive works were sited wherever possible along existing roadways, mainly along the Marylebone-Euston Rd.
Naturally, people living near the route fussed that all this digging might make their houses unstable. When Crossrail was first announced, the very same anxieties surfaced, though Crossrail, like the other deep tube lines, is unlikely to cause a tremor even in the deepest foundations. The real losers in the eighteen-sixties were the poor living in ancient and ramshackle houses alongside the Fleet. At the time, Punch was full of jokes about slum dwellers gleefully leasing out their cellars for the trains, but – in fact – these houses were demolished and only the landlords got any compensation. It would be many years before anyone showed concern about dispossessed tenants, although one journalist, John Hollingshead, wrote more imaginatively – “the ancient ways upon which our forefathers stood, made bargains, drank, feasted, and trained their children, are to be deserted, closed, built upon, transformed or utterly destroyed… plastered over with the bills of some authorised auctioneer to be sold as ‘old rubbish’… carted off in a hundred wagons leaving not a trace behind.”
Most of the criticism of the line, before it opened, centred on the issue of smoke. Surely, it was said, people would be asphyxiated in the tunnels, and chemists’ shops along the route would be besieged by white-facing, gasping travellers seeking restoratives? There was also a more fundamental criticism of digging down into the earth, traditionally regarded as the domain of the Underworld. Even some clergymen joined in this fear, suggesting that the Almighty might be minded to punish both railway developers and users for such feckless, Devil-tempting behaviour. And when a shored-up embankment gave way near Farringdon six months before the line was due to open, spewing out Fleet waters mixed with dead bodies from a pauper graveyard, the religious constituency felt entirely justified.
However, once more money was raised, the line opened almost on time, ran without a hitch and was a success with customers from the beginning. The Illustrated London News wrote – “the tunnels, instead of being close, dark, damp and offensive, are wide, spacious, clean and luminous, and more like a well-kept street at night than a subterranean passage.”
London took the Metropolitan line to its heart and, within a couple of years, the network was expanding – into what became the Circle line round inner London, and eastwards to Moorgate and Liverpool St on the same trajectory that Crossrail is taking today. It also linked up with the London, Chatham & Dover line, London’s first ever railway, via an obtrusive viaduct across Ludgate Hill obscuring the view of St Paul’s – the viaduct remained there till 1990. The City fathers do not seem to have realised that by keeping railway stations at a distance from the sacred heart of the capital they might be creating other eyesores.
Charles Pearson died just before his great project opened but, if he came back now, I think he would be delighted to see that his dream of a central interchange is at last being realised in Farringdon. For a long time, it was an old-fashioned and little-regarded station on an ageing minor line, with buddleia sprouting from its sooty walls as if the Fleet river were trying to reclaim its lost bed. Now Farringdon Station is being doubled in size to carry Crossrail as well as the north-south railway line through London to Brighton. When complete, it will offer a direct route to five different international airports – Stansted & Luton in the north, City Airport to the east, Gatwick in the south and Heathrow in the west. The narrow rabbit-hole really has turned into Wonderland, of a kind.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Underground tapped into the fascination with subterrannea
The Fleet seen from the back of the Red Lion
Back of the Red Lion seen from the Fleet
Works on the Fleet tunnel February 1862
Collapse of the Fleet tunnel, June 1862
The first trip on the Underground, 1863
The railway viaduct that obstructed the view of St Paul’s Cathedral until 1990
On Thursday 15th September at 8pm, Gillian Tindall discusses her work and reads from ‘The Tunnel Through Time’ at Libreria, 65 Hanbury St, E1 5JP, which is positioned – appropriately enough – directly over a Crossrail tunnel. In her new book, Gillian explores the history of the new Crossrail route which turns out to be only the latest scheme to traverse an ancient path across London’s buried secrets and former fields. Click here to book your free ticket
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Richard Lee, Bicycle Spares Seller
Celebrating the seventh anniversary of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
Richard Lee
You need to be at Sclater St Market at dawn when the sunlight arrives horizontally from the east, and traders greet you and bid you good morning like one of their own. At six o’clock, I was awaiting the arrival of Richard Lee whose grandfather Henry William Lee started trading bicycles in this market in the eighteen-eighties, initiating a tradition continued through two world wars by his son Henry George Lee, and culminating in Richard Lee who was there every Sunday for over sixty years. Yet the time had come for Richard’s departure from Sclater St and I was there to record his final Sunday, after one hundred and thirty years of his family trading in bicycles and bicycle parts in the market.
In this time, three generations of Lees saw the street change beyond all recognition and that morning Richard parked his van at the foot of a tower block, built upon a former bomb site where nineteenth century terraces once stood. In fact, as he set to work with stoic good humour, unpacking his battered van and assembling the stall – in recognition of his responsibility as custodian of the history of the market – Richard passed me some black and white photographs, showing the heaving market crowds of yesteryear enfolded by rows of small shops and proud Victorian pubs. Most remarkably, Richard’s father and grandfather are visible to the left of one of the pictures beside a stall hung with tyres and inner tubes which looks just as it does today.
Richard had been down there each Sunday since he was five years old and began working in the stall at thirteen. Over seventy and of robust stature, he could still assemble his stall by slotting metal poles together with limber ease, informing me with satisfaction that this particular incarnation was manufactured to his specification fifty years ago at the cost of fifty pounds. ‘We used to wheel a barrow from Islington and my father pushed a bicycle and carried another over his shoulder,’ he admitted, recalling the arduous labour of former times.
Once the stalls were in place yet before the stock was unpacked, Richard Green and Clive Brown, stallholders at the western end of the market, convened with Richard over a cup of tea made from water boiled on a primus stove and Richard broke the news that he had sold his house in Essex and cancelled the debit for his weekly market licence. Only if the exchange of contracts upon his house did not go ahead would he return for another week. ‘My kids have flown and I can’t afford to keep a four bedroom house,’ he confessed in sober realism, ‘You can’t live on a pension anymore.’ Richard’s solution was to return to the north of England – whence his grandfather came to London in the nineteenth century – and buy a small house, leaving him enough money to live out his days.
Yet, before this could happen, another day’s trading awaited. Richard’s assistant ‘Steady Eddie’ arrived to hang up the tyres and inner tubes that are the long-recognised symbol and sign of the Lees’ stall, thereby completing the four hour process of setting up.
Through the passage of the day, Richard stood at the front while Eddie sat at the rear undertaking repairs and their dialogue consisted of ‘Eddie, got a left-handed pedal?’ and ‘Richard, got a new inner tube?’ Recycled inner tubes repaired by Richard were priced at only one-pound-fifty compared to five pounds for a new one, yet customers could not resist offering just a pound. And when Richard fitted that left-handed pedal, the customer offered him five pounds, refused the ten pound charge asked for both the replacement pedal and the service. ‘I’ll take it off again!’ threatened Richard rolling his eyes, ‘I can’t do it for £5,’ – before he let it go for five pounds. ‘You see why I’m leaving,’ he confided to me in a whisper, catching my eye in weary resignation. ‘I like it when they offer you more than you ask,’ he added with a grin, summoning his humour again, ‘that doesn’t happen very often.’
‘When I was a kid down the waste, there’d be a rag and bone man who left stuff behind and, when he’d gone, I used to sell it,’ Richard continued, warming at the tender reminiscence. He cast his eyes to the left of his stall where he had spread out boxes of his grown-up children’s unwanted toys, cleared out in anticipation of his house sale, yet drawing a lot of interest in the market. ‘It’s a lot of old junk,’ he confessed apologetically, ‘it’s all stuff I’d throw away, but there’s more money in it than the proper stuff.’
The weather was kind for Richard’s last day of trading and a spell of unbroken sunshine brought out large crowds onto Brick Lane and into Sclater St but, by three o’clock as he started to pack up, dark clouds were gathering over Spitalfields. I asked Eddie what he would do without Richard. ‘I’m not a lazy man, I’m going to volunteer at a charity shop,’ he explained, ‘It’s Monday to Friday and there’s no lifting. I came to this country in 1978 but after thirty-five years working for British Rail, my back is gone.’
Old friends and regular customers came to pay their respects to Richard as the descending sun reached the western end of Sclater St. All appeared as usual, everyone packing up as they do each week at that time, yet Richard was packing up for ever. Unknown to all but a few that afternoon, something remarkable was passing into history.
Robert Green helped Richard carry his boxes to the van and told me he would wait until he was ready to go. Leaving them to their task, I paid my respects to Richard, shook hands and handed him the bottle of champagne I had secreted in my bag. But as I turned to go, he called me back. Richard brought out a spanner which had belonged to his grandfather, was used by his father and served Richard too. In use in this place all this time. After more than a century, it had become bent into a subtle curve that fitted the hand. Richard held up his cherished talisman to show me, glowing with pride and delight.
To my mind, the meaning of Sclater St as a place will always be bound up with the human qualities of Richard Lee and his fellow market stalwarts. Whatever architectural changes arrive in this contested site, I shall never be able to walk through Sclater St without thinking of Richard and the hardworking endeavours of his colleagues and their forebears, week after week, in all weathers and through centuries.
Henry George Lee (as a boy) is to be seen on the extreme left of this photo and his father Henry William (with hat and moustache) is the fifth from the left in this picture taken in the twenties
Unpacking the van at 6am
Tossing a tyre
‘Steady Eddie’ arrives to lend a helping hand
“I first came down here when I was five and I was thirteen when I started working on the stall.”
Clive Brown, stallholder opposite Richard Lee, shows off a case of vintage Leica cameras
Patricia & Robert Green, stallholders next to Richard Lee
Clive serenades the market, mid-afternoon
Richard with Gary Aspey, wheel truer
Packing up at 5pm
Packing the van at 6pm
Richard shows off his grandfather’s spanner ‘King Dick’- in use in this market by three generations over more than a century
Henry Wiliam Lee started trading in the market in the eighteen-eighties
Henry George Lee shows the proper way to fold a bicycle tyre in the Daily Mirror, 1979 (Click image to enlarge)
Richard Lee meets Edward Heath in the seventies
Richard Lee’s account of his family history
Richard Lee with Robert Green, old friend and long-term holder of the next pitch in Sclater St, celebrating the culmination of 130 years of the Lee family trading in the market
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Doreen Fletcher, Artist
Celebrating the seventh anniversary of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
Turner’s Rd, 1998
Doreen Fletcher – Looking back, I suppose I was very spoiled. From a young age I liked painting and my dad used to take me to the toy shop and we had to buy the best, most expensive paints. I was an only child, born into a working class family, and my parents, Colin & Alice, were semi-literate, I guess you would say.
I was a bit of a loner, I liked going for long walks. I passed the eleven-plus but I had a very difficult time at Grammar School because, although I was clever, I came from the wrong side of the tracks. I used to have to wear this hat and every morning, as I was walking to school, the Secondary Modern kids would come and knock it off my head. When I got to school, I had to pretend I was from somewhere else, because all the other kids they came from families who were doctors, solicitors, and so I felt, you know… odd.
The Gentle Author – What was the first landscape that you knew?
Doreen Fletcher – It was grey. Grey, brown streets with sparrows, lots of sparrows and pigeons. I used to long for colour. I grew up in a two-up, two-down terrace in Stoke-on-Trent, but every Sunday my parents used to take me on a bus into the country and I just loved colour.
I remember, when I was five, I was bought a set of encyclopaedias from the guy who came round knocking on street doors and it had colour pictures in it – paintings – and I thought they were wonderful. And I suppose that was when I started to be interested in visual things – plus at Grammar School, when we were doing Art, I did not have to talk and my accent in those days was quite broad. All the other girls spoke with posh accents, so I would paint in silence and it was something I was good at, so I got praise for that.
The Gentle Author – What work did your parents do?
Doreen Fletcher – Oh Alice, my mother, she was a servant. She worked in a munitions factory during the war and then she became a servant afterwards. It gave her ideas about not having the newspaper on the table and no tomato ketchup, and healthy eating. So in her case, there was a slight social mobility. She was very very fussy about the front step being clean. Colin, my dad, started off as a farm worker, he had wanted to be a vet but the fact that he did not like school – could hardly read or write – stood in the way.
After I was born, they moved to the town because he could earn more money and, in the late fifties, when they started putting up pylons he worked on that, and then later he worked putting in pipes for North Sea Gas too. When he was fifty-seven, he had a brain haemorrhage when he was working, probably because of the pneumatic drills, and he did not work again after that.
The Gentle Author – So what took you away from the Potteries?
Doreen Fletcher – I did not like living in a small town. I hated the constrictions and the pettiness. I wanted to go to Art School in London, and I met a boy who got a place in one and I moved with him to London.
The Gentle Author– But did you apply to Art School yourself?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I did a Foundation Course in Newcastle but after that I became a model. I did that for a long time.
The Gentle Author – Where did you live when you came to London?
Doreen Fletcher – I moved to Colliers Wood in South West London and I got a job at an Art School as a model. Gradually, I started taking photographs and doing drawings but – at that point – I did not really know what I wanted to paint, except that it was almost a compulsive activity.
I did quite a lot of self portraits and still lives. It was only when I moved to Bayswater in 1976 that I developed a strong interest in urban landscape. For me, it was a very exciting place to be – having come from this small town – and it was close to the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Rd. I started painting the local streets – the Electric Cinema, the Serpentine Boathouse – and then I became interested in Underground stations at night – Bayswater, Paddington – and this continued when I moved to the East End.
The Gentle Author – What brought you to the East End?
Doreen Fletcher – Simply that the relationship I was in broke up and I met someone new and the housing was cheap in the East End. It was relatively cheap to rent at that time because lots of people were moving away, so artists were still moving in to places like Bow and Mile End.
The Gentle Author – How do you remember the East End as it was then?
Doreen Fletcher – There was corrugated iron everywhere! I loved it here because I had had enough of the sophistication of the West End. It seemed to me like coming back home here – lots of corner shops and tiny pubs. There was a community but, after a couple of years, I realised that they were not staying, and the corner shops and pubs were closing.
Bus Stop, Mile End, 1983
The Gentle Author – Why did you start painting the East End?
Doreen Fletcher – I was visually excited by being somewhere new. The first painting I did in the East End was the bus stop in Mile End in 1983, and then I think I did Renee’s Café next. Once I realised they were going, it triggered this idea of painting the pubs and the shops.
The Gentle Author – Was this your full time occupation?
Doreen Fletcher – No, I was working as a model. It was the most boring job you could imagine but I just stuck at it during term time, so I would have periods of full-time painting and I could keep myself by working three days a week as model.
The Gentle Author – How central to your life were your paintings at that time?
Doreen Fletcher – Very. That was my focal point. My studio was a small room at the top of a run-down three-storey house in Clements St. It faced north so the lighting was good in the day time.
I spent a lot of time just walking around at all times of day and in different weather conditions. Eventually a specific scene imprinted itself on my mind which I felt could have potential as a painting. I would make thumbnail sketches sketches on the spot and take a picture with my camera.
Once I had gathered as much information as I could, I would make a highly detailed drawing which acted as a basis for the painting. This might evolve gradually over a period of months or even years, as a tension built up between my need to represent reality and the demands made by the painting itself. I always struggled to resolve it in an abstract and objective way as well as recording a recognisable subject.
I used to try and work twenty-eight hours a week, I never wanted to become a Sunday painter.
The Gentle Author – Did you have ambition for this work?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes and I did have some limited success in the eighties. I had a show at Spitalfields Health Centre on Brick Lane and then at Tower Hamlets Library in Bancroft Rd. Local people loved my paintings but there was limited interest from any critics.
The Gentle Author – Did you pursue other avenues to get recognition for your work?
Doreen Fletcher – Once a month, I used to send off for lots of slides in response to competitions and requests for submissions in Artists’ Newsletter but it never seemed to go anywhere.
The Gentle Author – How did you maintain morale through that twenty year period?
Doreen Fletcher – I have an optimistic nature and I remained optimistic up until the late nineties when my interest in the genre waned and I think it affected the quality of what I was doing. I realised I was coming to the end of the series I was doing of the East End.
The Gentle Author – What told you that you were coming to the end?
Doreen Fletcher – The East End was changing and I was not really interested any more. The new build made it very dense, taking away the individuality and the sense of community. At first, I was interested while it was being built – on the Isle of Dogs, for instance – but once it became functional there were just too many people.
The Gentle Author – At the time you concluded the series, were there changes in your life?
Doreen Fletcher – I became more involved in teaching Art to kids with special needs. I grew more interested too, because I appeared to be good at it and my work was successful. Gradually, I became involved in the tutorial side of it as well and supporting other lecturers.
The Gentle Author – Did you find that rewarding?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, I was earning money from it and it was rewarding working with other people, so I became more and more involved in that.
The Gentle Author – Once you had completed nearly twenty years of painting the East End, what were your feelings about that series of work?
Doreen Fletcher – I felt that I had tried very hard to be successful, to get my work out there and get it seen. I had hoped for some kind of recognition. I was never ambitious in terms of international recognition or anything like that, but I did feel that the work was good enough to be recognised more than it was
The Gentle Author – Were you disappointed?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes. I remember the day I made a conscious decision to pack away my paints. It was November 16th 2004. I said, ‘That’s it!’ I am not going to paint again.
The Gentle Author – Do you think your project reached its culmination?
Doreen Fletcher – At the time I thought not, but looking at the work again, I am very very glad I did it now – what I think was important was that I recorded something which has gone.
The Gentle Author – Do you think that you evolved as a painter by doing this work?
Doreen Fletcher – I think, if I had I been taken on by a gallery, I would have developed more as a painter. Instead, I think I found a method of working that suited what I was doing and I stayed with it. Maybe with a bit more encouragement I would have done what I am doing now – since I have come back to painting – which is pushing the boundaries?
The Gentle Author – Do you have a criterion for judging if one of your paintings is successful?
Doreen Fletcher – Yes, a painting is successful for me when I believe I have captured a moment.
Transcript by Louisa Carpenter
Portrait of Doreen Fletcher by Lucinda Douglas Menzies
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Relics At St Paul’s From Before The Fire
Three hundred and fifty years ago today, on 2nd September 1666, the Great Fire of London started
Fragments of Old St Paul’s stored in the triforium at New St Paul’s
Sir Christopher Wren’s success at St Paul’s Cathedral is to have envisaged architecture of such absolute assurance that it is impossible to imagine it could ever have been any different than it is today. Yet Wren was once surveyor of Old St Paul’s, confronted daily with a tottering gothic pile and carrying the onerous responsibility for this vast medieval shambles upon his shoulders, until the Great Fire took it away three hundred and fifty years ago.
The spire of Old St Paul’s collapsed in 1561 and, in Wren’s, time wooden scaffolding was necessary to hold up the poorly-built Cathedral. Parts of the cloister were carried off to build Somerset House and even a fancy new portico designed in the classical style by Inigo Jones failed to ameliorate the general picture of decay and dereliction.
When the Great Fire of London began in September 1666, the Stationers Company stored their books and paper in the crypt of the Cathedral for safe-keeping and residents piled their precious furniture in the churchyard – one of the few open spaces in the City – so that it might be safe even if they lost their homes in the conflagration. These prudent measures only exacerbated the catastrophe when a spark set fire to the wooden roof of the Cathedral which collapsed into the crypt, sending a river of molten lead running down Ludgate Hill, igniting a violent inferno of paper that brought down the entire building and consumed all the furniture in the churchyard as well.
After the pyre of Old St Paul’s was at last extinguished in September, weeks after the Fire had been quenched elsewhere in the City, it became a popular pastime to scavenge through the ruins for souvenirs. You might assume nothing survived but, if you know where to look and what to look for, there are relics scattered throughout New St Paul’s.
Commemorating the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the destruction of Old St Paul’s, I thought I would make a photographic inventory of what is left. There are Roman tiles, an Anglo-Saxon hog’s back tomb, a Viking grave marker and multiple stone fragments of the Cathedral itself, catalogued in the nineteenth century – although I was most fascinated by seventeenth-century effigies that withstood the Fire.
Medieval monuments and statuary were destroyed in the Reformation, and Oliver Cromwell famously stabled his horses in the Cathedral at the time of the English Revolution, but there was a brief period when new monuments and figures were installed prior to the Great Fire of London and a handful of these remain today.
John Donne would have conjured an astute sonnet upon the metaphysical irony of his monument being the only one surviving intact. In his last days, he insisted upon modelling for his own effigy, wrapped in a shroud, and the resultant sculpture is distinguished by remarkably naturalistic drapery. Yet, in spite of this, I can only see it as an image of a flame in which the great poet glimmers eternally.
A small collection of seventeenth-century human effigies rest down in the crypt, burnt black by the Fire. Carved from pale marble or alabaster, they have been transfigured by the furnace-like temperature of the conflagration and emerged charcoal-black, glistening and broken, as if they had been excavated like coal – as if they were creatures of another time, as remote as prehistoric creatures. But, even as they were ravaged by apocalyptic lfire and damaged beyond recognition, some have retained fine detail of armour and clothing, and all have acquired presence. These compelling fragmentary forms are worthy of Henry Moore, charmed stones that manifest an eternal spirit forged in fire.
Unsurprisingly, Christopher Wren had little interest in the relics of Old St Paul’s because he was looking to the future. Wary of medieval foundations, he had his New St Paul’s re-aligned to avoid them. Yet, although Wren had most of the ancient stone broken up to use as infill for New St Paul’s, there are a couple of spots in the crypt where you can see fragments of detailed Romanesque carving sticking out from the wall, hidden in plain sight, to remind us that – even though Old St Paul’s has gone – it is still with us.
Roman tiles and Anglo-Saxon grave cover in the triforium
Hogback grave cover, dating from 1000-1050 AD, possibly from the grave of King Athelstan
Viking grave marker, dating from 1125-50AD, dug up in 1852 in the churchyard
Twelfth century Romanesque carving of foliage in the wall of the crypt
Twelfth century Romanesque carving of foliage in the wall of the crypt
Ledger stone of Brian Walton, Bishop of Chester, died 1661
Sir John & Eliza Wolley
Sir John Wolley, Latin Secretary to Elizabeth I, died 1596
Eliza Wolley, Lady of the Privy Chamber to Elizabeth I, died 1600
Sir Thomas Heneage Vice-Chamberlain to Elizabeth I, died 1594, & Anna Heneage, died 1592
Unknown effigy
Unknown effigy
William Cokain, Mayor of London 1619, died 1626
William Cokain, Mayor of London 1619, died 1626
John Donne, Poet & Dean of St Paul’s (1572-1631), monument by Nicholas Stone
Caen & Reigate stones from Old St Paul’s (1180-1666 AD) excavated by Francis Penrose, Cathedral Surveyor in the nineteenth century
This lion is a fragment of Inigo Jones portal to St Paul’s which inspired Christopher Wren
Click to enlarge this comparative plan of 1872 which superimposes the outlines of Old and New St Paul’s (Reproduced courtesy of St Paul’s)
A programme of walks, talks and tours, special sermons & debates to mark the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London is runs at St Paul’s until April 2017. Click here to learn more about the Fire at St Paul’s
You may also like to read my other stories of St Paul’s Cathedral
Charles Keeping, Artist
Celebrating the seventh anniversary of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
The illustrations of Charles Keeping (1924–1988) burned themselves into my consciousness as a child and I have loved his work ever since. A major figure in British publishing in the last century, Keeping illustrated over one hundred books (including the entire novels of Dickens) and won the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie Medals for his superlative talent.
In 1975, Keeping published ‘Cockney Ding Dong,’ in which he collected songs he remembered sung at home as a child. Illustrated with tender portraits of his extended family, the book is an unusual form of autobiography, recreating an entire cultural world through drawing and popular song.
Recently, I visited the Keeping Gallery at Shortlands in Kent to meet Vicky and Sean Keeping who talked to me about their father’s work, as we sat in the family home where they grew up and where much of his work is now preserved and displayed for visitors. You can read my interview at the end of this selection of illustrations from ‘Cockney Ding Dong.’
Illustrations copyright © Estate of Charles Keeping
The Gentle Author – So why did your father create ‘Cockney Ding Dong’ ?
Vicky Keeping – We come from a family – he came from a family – where they all got together. They’d have their beer, they enjoyed their beer, and their Guinness – some of the women drank Guinness – and they would all sing and his Uncle Jack would play the piano. And everybody had their own song, so people would give their song and Dad loved that. We still know them all still, because we loved it, and people didn’t say, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to do it!’ They just got up and sang, and it was lovely and the songs were all from the music hall.
The Gentle Author – But he wasn’t a Cockney – where was he was from?
Vicky Keeping – He was from Vauxhall and he was born in Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth. He was very much brought up by the female side of his family. His father passed away when he was ten, he had a burst ulcer. He was a driver on the Daily Star.
Sean Keeping – Before that, his father had been a professional boxer between about 1912 and 1922. He had many professional fights. I know he definitely fought the British champion at the time and won! A chap called Ernie Rice.
His father came from a very poor family and he was orphaned. They had a watercress stall in Lambeth Walk but they died in the workhouse. His mother’s family were also Londoners from Lambeth who came from a nautical background – his grandfather had been a sailor in the Merchant Navy. In the eighteenth century, they had come up to London from the West Country. Like many families, they had not originated in London.
Vicky Keeping – His grandfather was very important to Dad, because he was a great storyteller and would tell stories from his voyages and the different people he met and he was – I suppose – a bit ahead of his time because he was welcoming to all and would speak very positively about the people he met around the world. Dad loved hearing his stories, so he learnt from his grandfather that storytelling was important. That came through to us as well – when we sat round the family tea table we were encouraged to tell stories.
Very sadly, Dad’s dad and Dad’s grandfather passed away in the same year – in 1934 – when Dad was ten. It left Dad and his sister Grace and their mum Eliza very poorly off, but they lived in this extended family with Dad’s granny who was a very strong influence. Dad idolised her and his aunties, and they thought he was the blonde blue-eyed boy and they loved him dearly.
Sean Keeping – They lived in a small terraced house in 74 Vauxhall Walk, which was right alongside the market, and Dad’s early influences were not just his family but also the characters in Vauxhall Market – those often crop up in his books.
Vicky Keeping – One of the things that Dad loved to do in the garden was to look through a little knot hole to see the Schweppes bottling plant and the workhorses and that was something that never left him, that memory of horses.
There was no obvious creativeness in his background, but Dad said his father used to come home – because he worked in print – and bring home paper, and Dad’s sister Grace used to write a story and Dad would illustrate it.
Sean Keeping – He was not a child who would have gone running around the streets, they were children who would sit at home writing a story and drawing. From a very young age, Dad showed a fantastic aptitude for drawing and we’ve got some drawings of his from when he was twelve and thirteen, and they are really fantastic – showing a London of working horses and working people, that’s what he was trying to depict in his drawings.
Vicky Keeping – He was called up in the Second World War but he worked for Clowes the printers when he left school at thirteen. He was not a particularly great scholar at school. One of the things was that he found difficult was that he was left-handed and the teachers would try to get him to write with his right hand.
Sean Keeping – Working for Clowes the printers, he would go around on a horse & cart delivering paper, and that was where he met one of the characters who had a great influence on him – Tom Cherry. Many of the burly-looking men driving a horse through London in Dad’s pictures – they’re Tom Cherry, and usually he drew a little boy sitting next to him which was Dad. Tom had a great influence, telling him stories about London and the people of London.
Vicky Keeping – Dad became a Telegrapher on a frigate and he was on the boat at D-Day. After the war, he tried to get into Art College but that was very difficult, so he worked collecting pennies from gas meters. He worked for the Gas Light & Coke Company and he would go around on a bicycle, with a big sack on his shoulder with all the pennies in it, going from door to door in North Kensington. He used to tell us funny stories. At that time, North Kensington was a poor area and I think he got a lot out of the characters he met there, but he hated working for a company, for a boss, and he decided he wanted to do something better.
He went to night classes at the Regent St Polytechnic but, because he left school at thirteen with no formal qualifications and had been through the war, it was very difficult for him to get in at first. He tried and tried, and eventually he spent time in a psychiatric hospital due to his experiences in the War. I think it was also to do with his father. When his father and his grandfather died in the same year, they were laid out in the front room and – as a ten year old – Dad had to go and kiss them. That had a profound effect on him. He spent six months in a psychiatric hospital and two weeks of those were in a deep sleep. Yet he talked about the great characters he met there and there was a Psychiatrist, Dr Sargent, who knew Dad should go to Art College and he supported him in writing letters – and eventually that’s what happened.
Sean Keeping – When Dad went to Art College, he had to fight hard to get a grant because, at that stage, his mother had been widowed for a number of years and she had a job cleaning, so there was not a lot of money around. But eventually, he got a grant to go to Regent St Polytechnic. Right after the war, there were two types of students – those that had just come out of the forces who were much more mature and those who had come directly from school. So it was an interesting mix of people and mix of cultures.
The Gentle Author – How did he set out to make an income as an illustrator?
Sean Keeping – Dad was not motivated by making a career or making money or even motivated – I think – by success. Dad was motivated by one thing and that was doing what he wanted to do – drawing pictures of things that he wanted to draw pictures of – so he never really thought about a career. But then he got a job on the Daily Herald, drawing the strip cartoon and that started to pay very well, and from that he was able to move out of the council flat that he lived in with his mother in Kennington and buy a small terraced house in Crystal Palace.
When they were looking for houses, once he was making money from the strip cartoon, they looked in two areas – one was Crystal Palace and the other was Chelsea. Now the idea that you might choose Crystal Palace or Chelsea to look for a house nowadays is an strange idea, but they decided on Crystal Palace!
(Transcription by Rachel Blaylock)
Visit The Keeping Gallery at Shortlands in Kent where you can see the work of both Charles & Renate Keeping preserved in their family home. Visits are by appointment arranged through the website and Shortlands is a short train ride from Victoria.
Schrödinger, Church Cat
Celebrating the seventh anniversary of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
Schrödinger, the incumbent feline
At the end of last summer, Robin Gore-Hatton, Verger of St Leonard’s in Shoreditch, noticed a skinny cat hanging around the portico and gave him food and water. “He was thin and hungry, so I took pity on him,” Robin admitted to me.
A lithe and limber creature, Schrödinger disposed of the church’s mouse problem with alacrity, thus earning his keep in exchange for services in pest control. “Like most cats, I realise he adopted his owner rather than the other way around,” Robin added, acknowledging that Schrödinger has now established himself as a permanent fixture at the church.
Conscientious in his duties, Schrödinger may usually be found at his customary position sitting discreetly beneath a table just inside the door where he observes the constant flow of visitors, retreating under the pews when crowds arrive. “He’s shy,” confirmed Robin, “but it’s like he’s biding his time to assert his presence.” Certainly, frayed corners of two hessian-covered notice boards in the side aisle attest to Schrödinger marking his territory.
“It does feel like he’s the boss,” Robin confessed to me with a helpless grin, as we strolled around the church with Schrödinger following close at his ankles in expectation of dinner time. “Only I feed him,” Robin whispered in covert explanation,“otherwise everyone would give him food and he’d grow fat.”
Yet in spite of his usual feline qualities, there is also an air of mystery to this implacable creature that is capable of vanishing and reappearing without explanation. “Sometimes at night, he disappears,” Robin confided, “and then I find him in the morning asleep in the crypt – I think he feels at home down there, which is something we share in common.”
Schrödinger and Robin Hatton-Gore, Verger at St Leonard’s – “It does feel like he’s the boss”
You may also like to read about
The Cats of Spitalfields (Part One)
The Cats of Spitalfields (Part Two)
Blackie, the Last Spitalfields Market Cat
and read about
