At Clapton Beauty Parlour
Celebrating the seventh anniversary of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
Marcia Manning
Marcia believes that Clapton Beauty Parlour, opened by her parents in 1930, is London’s oldest family-run salon and I have no reason to doubt her. For me, it was the perfect excuse to take another trip to the hairdresser and the ideal opportunity to learn more of Hackney’s hidden hairdressing heritage. And Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie came along to capture Clapton’s celebrated coiffeuses.
“Both my grandparents’ families lived in Chatsworth Rd, my mother’s family lived in 104 and my father’s family lived at 83. He had his eye on my mother for a year until he got his opportunity to speak to her when the Prince of Wales visited Hackney. The route took him along Chatsworth Rd, so my father positioned himself behind my mother in the crowd and tapped her on the shoulder and asked to take her to the cinema. My aunt went as a chaperone, that’s what good class people did that in those days. My mother was maybe sixteen or seventeen and they started a courtship, and got married when mother was twenty-one in 1930. She was five months older than my father so, when they took the lease on this salon, it had to be in her name. She was already twenty-one but he was still twenty and they opened at Easter to catch the business.
My father’s family were all barbers. They lived above the shop at 83 Chatsworth Rd and the younger four brothers were all taught barbering by the eldest. Originally, the family came over from Russia where they were lumberjacks – none of them were barbers, it started here with the eldest brother. My father began when he left school at twelve and had to go out to work, he was a natural hairdresser. I recall him saying that hairdressing is a young man’s trade, because physically you cannot stand all day after the age of forty or fifty and because it’s the youngsters who dictate fashion.
When they opened this salon, it was ladies’ hairdressing. It was men’s barbering in Chatsworth Rd but when they opened this shop it was ladies only. He switched because he was a very futuristic man and he saw the future was in ladies’ hairdressing. After my parents opened up the salon, they were very often short of money and they would go to my grandmother in Chatsworth Rd who gave them money to keep them going. She would pawn her rings and reclaim them later. They used to worked until midnight. My mother made sandwiches for the girls who were working all day until 10:00 or 11:00pm. I remember them telling me that customers queued up outside from 6.30 or 7:00am to have their hair done before work.
My father was the hairdresser and my mother was very good at beauty and make up. Father took in fancy goods like gloves, handbags and they sold a lot of jewellery. He bought it and she sold it. Father sent her to Revlon and Max Factor to learn to do make up, so she knew all about that, and we sold all Max Factor and Revlon products here and also Leichner theatrical make up.
They lived above the salon at first and used Hackney Baths to wash. In 1936, when they had enough money, they bought a house in Upper Clapton. Father was a very advanced man. He learnt to drive and they were the first amongst their friends to have a fridge and a freezer and a mangle for wringing the washing. I loved using the mangle!
In the thirties, Vidal Sassoon was working in Whitechapel where he did his apprenticeship and then had his salon. He was only seventeen but in those days, you left school earlier – you were a man at fifteen or sixteen. His life was disrupted by the war when his salon was bombed out. The Sassoon family knew my parents and he came to see my father and asked, ‘I’ve got a few customers and I don’t want to lose them, can I work in your salon?’ My father replied, ‘Yes you can, here are the keys.’ Our salon was closed during the war because my father was in the fire service and he was injured and, after he recovered, he was stationed in Victoria Park on the anti-aircaft guns in the Home Guard. So he said to Vidal, ‘Here are the keys. Keep the salon clean. Use any products. Make sure you lock up.’
I first came here in 1974. I was never going into hairdressing. I went to Woodberry Down school in the year it opened and, when we had a careers evening, the headmistress said to my father ‘Well now Mr Manning, we’ve got to discuss Marcia’s future.’ She saw me as a model pupil. Although I had failed the scholarship exam, it was my luck that Woodberry Down opened that year so I became a model pupil and got six O levels and three A levels. Yet my father told her that I would be going into the family business. Well, that was all I needed to hear and I gritted my teeth against it. I went on to become a linguist and I studied at Holborn College of Languages but – low and behold – here I am today.
I’ve never done hairdressing but I’ve been running the place. The fact that I never learnt hairdressing has held me back, so I took myself off to Weller to do some short courses, even though you can’t just ‘do hairdressing,’ it’s a four-to-five year apprenticeship. I did colouring and that gave me a certain respect here among the staff. Before that, it was like running a plumbing business without being a plumber yourself, you can’t do it. Here, I’ve been a secretary with languages trying to keep these girls in order. My brother gave me a pat on the back and said, ‘Mum and dad would be really proud of you.’ I’ve managed to bring the salon into its eighty-fifth year.
About thirty years ago, there was a big thing about sunbeds, so I decided to go the Hair & Beauty Show at Olympia where they were displaying them. I had some empty rooms upstairs and I got a loan from the bank, and – my goodness it took off – I repaid the loan very quickly. You had to wait for an appointment, it was that busy, and I think this is also what my father found when he started, it took off.
We have one customer who is a hundred years old, Mrs Goodman. She is so alert, she comes on Wednesdays and we have lovely chats about the early days. She remembers my father and he has been dead for forty-two years. She must have been coming here for between fifty to sixty years. I have many customers who remember my father doing their hair for their weddings.
From the age of three or four, I was put on the counter and told that I had an important job, to watch. As far as I can remember, I’ve always been here. I love being here because this is where Mother and Father are, I feel the closeness. I just feel a bond with this place – this is my home.”
Once Marcia had told her story and given me a tour of the premises, from the former basement kitchen to the water tank in the roof, it was time for a word with Dawn Hammond, Marcia’s protégé and proud successor.
“It was my Saturday day job and I am the owner now. I took over seven years ago but Marcia still comes in two days a week and helps out. I lived just across the road when I was fifteen or sixteen and I saw there was a Saturday girl wanted. My mum used to do our neighbours’ hair and her own hair at home, she wanted to be a hairdresser but became a machinist. It was convenient for me, I didn’t have to fork out for bus fares and then Marcia took me on as an apprentice. I wanted to be an architect, but I haven’t got the brains for that. In architecture, you have to draw lines but in hair you have to draw angles, 180 and 360 degrees. If you hold the hair up, you just get a short back and side but, if you do an inverted bob. It’s all to do with angles.
Customers are different today. They see these models in the papers with black hair one week and blonde the next, they might be wigs. They say, ‘I want my hair like this’ – they have got black hair and they want it blonde, it ain’t gonna happen! When customers come in we turn into psychologists and, once we get to know them, they tell us their problems. I’ve got a customer who used to live near Victoria Park and now she has moved to Hove, but she still comes back to get her hair done. I ask her about her children and she asks about mine. With customers that we have been doing for years, we have a strong bond.”
Dawn Hammond
Marcia enjoys a blow dry
The shrine to Clapton Beauty Parlour’s history
Marcia in the seventies
Marcia stands on the left and her mother sits in the centre at the salon in the eighties
Customers and coiffeuses in Clapton
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Transcript by Simon Scott
Book your appointment at CLAPTON BEAUTY PARLOUR, 21 Lower Clapton Rd, Hackney, E5 0NS
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Aaron Biber, London’s Oldest Barber
Frank Foster, Shirt Maker
Celebrating the seventh anniversary of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
Frank Foster, a legend in shirting
There is an anonymous door in Pall Mall on the opposite side of the road from the line of grandiose clubs of St James. Go through this door, walk down to the low-ceilinged basement and you will discover Frank Foster and his wife Mary, who have been working since 1958 in two small rooms that barely add up to any space at all. Yet this modest workshop contains Frank’s entire world of experience as a cosmopolitan conjurer of cotton and silk, who made shirts for anyone-who-was-anyone in the latter half of the twentieth century and is now in his ninety-third year.
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I found Frank parked behind a crowded desk of presidential scale in the front room, overlooked by a line of large brass scissors mounted upon the wall, gleaming like badges of office. This is where Frank clasps his nimble fingers and ruminates upon the changing world, cogitating his long life and the insights granted to him uniquely as shirt maker to the rich and famous.
‘When I look at my hand, the fourth finger is like mum’s and other fingers are like dad,’ Frank admitted to me in tender recollection, ‘The way the nails grow, I can see their hands even though they are dead.’
Born in Shadwell in 1923 into a family where his father struggled even to raise three shillings a week rent, as a boy Frank was the last person in the East End to catch typhoid in forty-seven years – which he ascribes to eating food scraped off the pavement in Watney St Market. ‘I know it’s true because they came to find me forty-seven years later to see if I was a carrier,’ he confessed to me, ‘Which I’m not.’
‘You have to remember, poor people never had shirts years ago and that’s also why tails were put on shirts because they never wore pants. I didn’t have shirts growing up until some discarded ones came from uncles. I had discarded trousers from uncles too, but when you had grown-ups’ trousers altered, the legs were very wide so you had to be careful not show your three piece when wearing them. We were very poor and I was always embarrassed about that, especially wearing altered shirts that looked ghastly.
I was a youngster when war broke and they evacuated me from Shadwell because the Docks were badly bombed – it was set alight. As a consequence, I went to live with an aunt in Brent, Hendon, which I thought was the country. That’s how I broke away from Shadwell. I was a natural artist. When I was at school, I used to draw and the other kids gathered round to watch. It’s in my soul. I had some success and exhibited portraits in five galleries when I was fourteen – including The Whitechapel Gallery, East End Academy and Coolings Gallery in Bond St. My paintings were sent to Moscow as an aid to Russia and never came back. But, being a young lad, I had to get a measly job with Bernstein, a printing company in Aldersgate. They produced rubbish – they weren’t fine lithographers. I was a printers’ boy, I earned the princely sum of seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, and I was there on one occasion when Aldersgate St was set alight.
At the same time, I was learning to be a cartographer with the Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries, but it was very boring and I didn’t like it. I was only about seventeen at the time, so after three weeks I just left. Then, like an idiot, I volunteered for the RAF in the Euston Rd for a lovely job which was to be a rear gunner. The life expectancy was about three weeks. When I told my dad, I said, ‘I’m going to be called up so I volunteered.’ I shan’t tell you what he called me. He said, ‘ You f**king mug!’ He went to Euston Rd and told them my real age and they cancelled it all, but nevertheless I did have to go into the army. They called me up as a driver with the Royal Army Service Corps. I was rubbish at all that stuff!
I made my first shirt over sixty years ago, I was art school trained as a textile printer at Central, which was in Kingsway. At first, I made ties and I thought of looking up the Huguenot silk weavers in Spitalfields. So I went there and I found one Huguenot – I couldn’t pronounce his name – who wove some silk for me for ties. He introduced me to what is called ‘crying’ or ‘weeping’ silk. I said, ‘I don’t quite understand what that is,’ so he showed me silk that he had woven and when you squashed it together it made a beautiful noise of sobbing, the yarn was so fine. I bought that silk and made ties of it. A little while after, that stopped and you won’t hear anything of it because it is something specifically done by Huguenots.
I first had a new shirt of my own when I was eighteen. I got it because I had already started printing the scarves and I was earning a great deal of money. I went to Hilditch & Key in Jermyn St. They were a French company then, so my shirt was made in Paris. It was a silk shirt and I paid fifteen guineas which I could hardly afford. It was striped, nothing plain – fancy, trying to show off!
I’m not an expensive shirt maker although I am a good shirt maker. When I first went into business as a young lad, I was making silk squares for scarves that were printed by me by with rubber blocks. The silks I printed were picked up by people who loved the stuff including the royal family and, when I was discovered by them, it gave me a very good income for a while. You’ve heard of Princess Marina? This was 1947, just after the war. I supplied my scarves to Harrods and all the other stores and, while I was out selling, people were asking me if I could supply them with other things.
In those days, I had the Carmelite nuns working for me. They are a closed order but I was in contact with these people. You have to treat them fairly and not exploit them. If you are not honest they will find out. If they think you are making too much profit on their labour, that is also not allowed. Anyway, I conformed and we got on very well. Consequently, I was able to provide other things that the Carmelites could make for me and one of those things was ladies’ underwear, but they wouldn’t make ladies underwear that was black because they considered it not a nice thing, although men think it is a nice thing nuns don’t. Making other things, I discovered they were able to make shirts all by hand with hand-finished button holes. So that’s how I became a scarf maker, an underwear maker and a shirt maker. Not a very good title, is it?
My price when I started making shirts was four pounds, four shillings and that was tough, so I started doing shirt recutting and recollaring for laundries. My first place was 37 Bond St next to Sotheby’s – I make shirts now for the boss. In those days, I was sharing premises with a tailor and paid seven pounds a week, that was in 1956. But I didn’t get on with the tailor so I found a place of my own at 10 Clifford St.
An old boy I made shirts for, he financed me. He asked me, ‘Where do you live?’ and I said, ‘I live a long way out, I can’t afford a flat.’ So he said, ‘Can you afford £12 a week?’ I said, ‘Yes, I think so but I’d also like a workplace.’ So he said,’ Have you £5 a week?’ and he introduced me here in Pall Mall and I signed a lease for twenty-one years for five pounds a week – now it’s four hundred a week, it’s not easy.
I’ve made shirts for almost everybody you can think about. All the Shakespearian actors – John Gielgud, the Redgraves, Lawrence Olivier, everybody. You mention a name and I’ll tell you if I’ve made shirts for them – Marlon Brando and Orson Welles, when they were still slim, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Junior, Cary Grant, Ray Milland, I could go on and on. I’ve done the Bond films for over thirty years.
Orson Welles phoned me from the Ritz one day to ask if I would go round with samples because the designs could only be sanctioned by the Art Director of the film he was in. I said, ‘No, there are hundreds of samples here and I’m just round the corner,’ but he wouldn’t come. He was as far from me as I am from you, pretty much, so eventually we had a stand-off and the studio, they did all the running and fetching. He was making life awkward and that’s what some of these stars are like. They want to tell me about their fathers who are tailors and give me some competition. They want to be know-alls.
Tony Curtis, I didn’t like him at all. I went round to the Dorchester and he didn’t offer me a cup of coffee when I was spending hours with him. Then his kinky wife came out of the bathroom stark naked and said, ‘Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were here.’ These people are not humble, they are used to being applauded, they are in the limelight – it’s all false. But Gregory Peck was a gentlemen and Robert Mitchum, although he was tough guy, was a gentlemen too. You have to go through a lot of people before you find the genuine ones.
I worked for Berman’s film costumiers for fifteen years and made shirts for Norman Wisdom at thirty-five shillings each and never made any money but was introduced to lots of film stars. So Norman Wisdom, being a mate of mine, we shared a flat. We both bought food and when I was buying Nescafe he was buying Camp Coffee. I said to Norman, ‘Why do you buy this crap?’ ‘You’ve got to remember Frank, I was a boy soldier,’ he replied. Norman was badly treated by his father who used to throw him up in the air as a child and drop him, and that’s how Norman learnt to fall. He always took me to a restaurant in Tottenham Court Rd called Olivelli’s. It was all theatricals. The ones that went there were down and out, yet they were lovely people. I never had money to eat there but Norman had plenty, he generated more money than the Bond films. He liked the ladies but he was married, that’s the reason he shared a flat with me.
My production of shirts is very small, I’m a top grade shirt maker. My shirts you can turn them inside out and the insides are better than the top side of many so-called famous shirt makers. Nowadays I am very limited how many I can make because I can’t get people to do it. People don’t want to come into trades where they they have to use their hands, they don’t want to make things by hand, they don’t want to cut things by hand. They want to do everything with modern machinery. We still use a button hole machine that is a hundred years old. It’s an antique but works beautifully.
The secret of making a good shirt is skill, patience and knowing about textiles. Every piece of cloth we sell is high quality. We charge £175 per shirt. If you want a silk shirt made out of fine quality Macclesfield silk, we charge you the same money as a cotton one. We’re not a greedy company – I’d like to be greedy but it’s not in my nature. Coming from a poor family, I know what money means.
I love making shirts, I can look at an individual and when I measure him, I can see all the problems and the build. So when you leave here, I’ll remember your build and how you stand and hold your head. That’s not me trying, it comes – I can’t tell you how. I remember fine details about people, their eye colour, and their hair, how it grows. It’s a strange thing, I suppose the eye becomes accustomed to noticing these things.
When someone comes in, first you measure the neck. You have to notice the space between the shoulder and the bottom of the ear. People with thin necks can take a deeper collar. People who are fat with a short neck need a collar that balances with the shirt. You then measure the front shoulder to see how wide that is and from there you go down to the half-chest, across the top of the chest. From there you go to the abdomen and then to the hips and then to the waist. We don’t use shirt tails, we cut shirts with square bottoms and side vents. Our shirt tails are very smart, especially when men like to disrobe in front of their females. Then you have to do the cuffs, and cuffs have to be measured according to wrists. Where watches are concerned, you have to make allowances for rich people who have bulky complicated watches. We then do what is called a ‘button gauntlet’ to enable rich men to have the choice – if need be – to have the choice of rolling their sleeves up. Workers don’t have button gauntlets because no-one gives them the choice or option to roll their sleeves.’
Frank as a young man
Frank at his desk – ‘I’d like to be greedy but it’s not in my nature’
Frank demonstrates his hundred-year-old buttonhole machine he acquired sixty years ago
Mary Foster
Frank’s parents and grandparents
‘That’s what some of these stars are like – they want to tell me about their fathers who are tailors and give me some competition…’
Frank Foster – ‘I love making shirts’
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
FRANK FOSTER SHIRTS, 40 Pall Mall, St James’, SW1Y 5JG
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Roman Ruin At The Hairdresser
Celebrating the seventh anniversary of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
Nicholson & Griffin, Hairdresser & Barber
The reasons why people go the hairdresser are various and complex – but this week Jane Sidell, Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and I visited a salon in the City of London for a purpose quite beyond the usual.
There is a hairdresser in Gracechurch St at the entrance to Leadenhall Market that is like no other. It appears unremarkable until you step through the tiny salon with room only for one customer and descend the staircase to find yourself in an enormous basement lined with mirrors and chairs, where busy hairdressers tend their clients’ coiffure.
At the far corner of this chamber, there is a discreet glass door which leads to another space entirely. Upon first sight, there is undefined darkness on the other side of the door, as if it opened upon the infinite universe of space and time. At the centre, sits an ancient structure of stone and brick. You are standing at ground level of Roman London and purpose of the visit is to inspect this fragmentary ruin of the basilica and forum built here in the first century and uncovered in 1881.
Once the largest building in Europe north of the Alps, the structure originally extended as far west as Cornhill, as far north as Leadenhall St, as far east as Lime St and as far south as Lombard St. The basilica was the location of judicial and financial administration while the forum served as a public meeting place and market. With astonishing continuity, two millennia later, the Roman ruins lie beneath Leadenhall Market and the surrounding offices of today’s legal and financial industries.
In the dark vault beneath the salon, you confront a neatly-constructed piece of wall consisting of fifteen courses of locally-made square clay bricks sitting upon a footing of shaped sandstone. Clay bricks were commonly included to mark string courses, such as you may find in the Roman City wall but this usage as an architectural feature is unusual, suggesting it is a piece of design rather than mere utility.
Once upon a time, countless people walked from the forum into the basilica and noticed this layer of bricks at the base of the wall which eventually became so familiar as to be invisible. They did not expect anyone in future to gaze in awe at this fragment from the deep recess of the past, any more than we might imagine a random section of the city of our own time being scrutinised by those yet to come, when we have long departed and London has been erased.
Yet there will have been hairdressers in the Roman forum and this essential human requirement is unlikely ever to be redundant, which left me wondering if, in this instance, the continuum of history resides in the human activity in the salon as much as in the ruin beneath it.
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William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker Of Bermondsey
Celebrating the seventh anniversary of Spitalfields Life with a week of favourite posts from the past year
William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker of Bermondsey
Everyone knows Cheddar, Stilton, Wensleydale and Caerphilly, but now there is an unexpected new location on the cheese map of Great Britain. It is Bermondsey and the man responsible is William Oglethorpe – seen here bearing his curd cutter as a proud symbol of his domain, like a medieval king wielding a mace of divine authority.
Photographer Tom Bunning & I went along to Kappacasein Dairy under the railway arches beneath the main line out of London Bridge early last Tuesday morning to investigate this astonishing phenomenon. As we stepped from the chill of the autumn morning, we entered the humid warmth of the dairy and encountered a line of empty milk churns.
Already Bill had been awake since quarter to four. He had woken in Streatham then driven to Chiddingstone in Kent and collected six hundred litres of milk. Beyond us, in a separate room with a red floor and a large glass window sat a hundred-year-old copper vat containing that morning’s delivery of milk, which was still warm. Bill with his fellow cheesemakers Jem and Agustin, dressed all in white, worked purposefully in this chamber, officiating like priests over the holy process of conjuring cheese into existence. I stood mesmerised by the sight of the pale buttery liquid swirling against the gleaming copper as Bill employed his curd cutter, manoeuvring it through the milk as you might turn an oar in a river.
Taking a narrow flexible strip of metal, he wrapped a cloth around it so that the rest extended behind like a flag. Holding each end of the strip and grasping the corners of the cloth, Bill leaned over the vat plunging his arms deep down into the whey. When he lifted the cloth again, Agustin reached over with practised ease to take two corners of the cloth as Bill removed the sliver of metal and – hey presto! – they were holding a bundle of cheese, dredged from the mysterious depth of the vat. It was as spellbinding as any piece of magic I have ever seen.
“Cheesemaking is easy, it’s life that is hard,” Bill admitted to me with a disarming grin, when I joined the cheesemakers for their breakfast at a long table and he revealed the long journey he had travelled to arrive in Bermondsey. “I grew up in Zambia,” he explained, “And one day a Swiss missionary came to see my father and asked if I’d like to go to agricultural school in Switzerland.”
“I earned a certificate of competence,” he added proudly, assuring me with a wink, “I’m a qualified peasant.” Bill learnt to make cheese while working on a farm in Provence with a friend from agricultural college. “It was simply a way to sell all the milk from the goats, we made a cheese the same way the other farmers did,” he informed me, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”
Bill took me through to the next railway arch where his cheeses are stored while they mature for up to a year. He cast his eyes lovingly over the neat flat cylinders each impressed with word ‘Bermondsey’ on the side. Every Wednesday, the cheeses are attended to. According to their type, they are either washed or stroked, to spread the mould evenly, and they are all turned before being left to slumber in the chilly darkness for another week.
It was while working for Neals Yard Dairy that Bill decided to set up on his own as cheese maker. Today, Kappacasein is one of handful of newly-established dairies in London producing distinctive cheeses and bypassing the chain of mass production and supermarkets to distribute on their own terms and sell direct to customers. Yet Bill chooses to be self-deprecating in his explanation of why he is making cheese in London. “It’s just because I can’t buy a farm,” he claims, shrugging in enactment of his role of the peasant in exile, cast out from the rural into the urban environment.
“I’m interested in transformation,” Bill confided to me, turning serious as he reached his hand gently down into the vat and lifted up a handful of curds, squeezing out the whey. These would form the second cheese to come from the vat that morning, a ricotta. All across the surface, nodules of cheese were forming, coming into existence as if from primordial matter. “I don’t want to interfere,” Bill continued, thinking out loud and growing philosophical as he became absorbed in observing the cheese form, “Nature’s that much more complicated – if you let it do its own thing that’s much interesting to me than trying to impose anything. It’s about finding an equilibrium with Nature.”
Let me confess I had an ulterior motive for being there. A few weeks ago, I ate a slice of Bill’s Bermondsey cheese and became hooked. It was a flavour that was tangy and complex. One piece was not enough for me. Two pieces were not enough for me. Eventually, I had to seek the source of this wonder and there it was in front of me at last – the Holy Grail of London cheese in Bermondsey.
Cutting the curd
The curds
Squeezing the curds
Scooping out the cheese
The second batch of cheese from the whey is ricotta
Jem Kast, Cheese Maker
Ana Rojas, Yoghurt Maker
Agustin Cobo, Cheese Maker
The story of cheese
William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker of Bermondsey
Photographs copyright © Tom Bunning
Visit KAPPACASEIN DAIRY, 1 Voyager Industrial Estate, Bermondsey, SE16 4RP
Seventh Annual Report
Today, after publishing more than 2,600 posts and over 31,000 photographs in these pages, we arrive at the end of the seventh year of Spitalfields Life. Customarily I produce a celebratory annual report reflecting upon the anniversary of my starting to write in August 2009, but this year the moment is coloured with sadness by the unexpected death of my good friend and long-term contributing photographer Colin O’Brien a week ago.
My deepest sympathies are with Jan O’Brien, his widow after thirty-five years of married life. We plan to organise a memorial service for Colin and the date will be announced in the autumn, so that you may join us in paying your respects.
Foolishly, when I set out to write Spitalfields Life every day, it never occurred to me that the people I wrote about and whom I worked with might die, or that the acknowledgement of their passing would become part of the project. I have discovered that my ambition to pursue stories no-one else would write carries a certain responsibility, causing me to recognise that if my account is perhaps the only written record of a person’s life then I have a singular duty to do them justice.
Inevitably, many of the people whose stories you read in these pages become friends and, like others in Spitalfields, I feel the tragic loss of Rodney Archer who was such a popular figure in our community. Equally, I was alarmed to get the call from Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green the night her flat was burgled and I found myself wedging a broom handle across her kitchen window, where the thieves had entered, to prevent further criminal ingress. Readers will no doubt all be relieved to hear that the reports from Uttoxeter are good and the Viscountess assures me she is settling in well, up in Staffordshire.
The act of producing a story every day makes me very conscious of time passing, of the transient nature of the world and of the rapidity of change. Yet writing is both a consolation and a bulwark against all these things, a means to preserve, record and cherish the fleeting brilliance of life. Consequently, I have never had cause to regret my promise that I made seven years ago to publish a story every day, because it has filled my life with such richness of experience. Undertaking this work has introduced me to so many people that I should never have met in any other circumstances, while the constant search for subject matter forces me to explore the world more conscientiously, uncovering wonders that would otherwise pass me by.
Publishing books is another means to cherish pictures and stories that deserve permanence, and I am very proud of the three Spitalfields Life Books publications for which I was responsible as publisher in the past year – Baddeley Brothers, Cries of London & John Claridge’s East End. Baddeley Brothers tells the story of London’s oldest-established specialist printers, Cries of London celebrates four centuries of artists’ images of street traders and John Claridge’s East End is a candid insider’s portrait of an entire society observed by a distinctive photographic talent.
This November, Spitalfields Life Books is taking the bold step of publishing its first biography. The Boss of Bethnal Green is Julian Woodford’s shrewd account of the breathtakingly-appalling life of Joseph Merceron, Huguenot, gangster and corrupt magistrate, who ruled Bethnal Green & Spitalfields from his house in Brick Lane through violence and intimidation for half a century.
More recent criminals and political miscreants in the East End pale by comparison with Joseph Merceron’s staggering violence and ruthlessness, and Julian Woodford’s eloquent biography – the first on this subject – makes compelling reading for all those interested in eighteenth century London, anyone fascinated by the capital’s criminal history and everyone who loves an exciting true story well told.
And thus, with all these thoughts in mind, I come to the end of this seventh year of Spitalfields Life.
I am your loyal servant
The Gentle Author
The Gentle Author’s cat, Mr Pussy, fifteen years old and still thirsty
Published October 2015
Published November 2015
Published June 2016
For the next week, I shall be publishing favourite stories from the past year and I am delighted to announce that the distinguished Novelist & Historian of London, Gillian Tindall will then take over for the week commencing Monday 5th September to celebrate the publication of her new book The Tunnel Through Time, until my return on Monday 12th September.
You may like to read my earlier Annual Reports
Save The Royal Exchange Murals!
Alfred the Great repairing the walls of the City of London by Sir Frank Salisbury, 1912
The Foundation of St Paul’s School, 1509, by William F Yeames, 1905
Reconciliation of the Skinners & Merchant Taylors’ Companies by Lord Mayor Billesden, 1484, by Edwin A Abbey, 1904
Nelson leaving Portsmouth, 18th May 1803, by Andrew C Gow, 1903
King John sealing Magna Carta by Ernest Normand, 1900
A developer proposes inserting a new mezzanine in the Royal Exchange which will bisect London’s greatest murals and mask a 25cm section across most of the pictures with a silicon seal where the new floor touches the surface of the paintings.
So I asked designer Adam Tuck to create the montages at the top of this feature as an illustration of how this intervention may affect the composition of these pictures. I do not think it will be an improvement. The top strip with the words ‘Mezzanine Floor Here’ represents the depth of the floor, while the lower strip gives an indication of how the bulk of the floor is likely to mask the picture for a viewer.
It was a greivous error when obstacles were first placed in front of these paintings in the eighties, yet the existing shops do not touch the murals and it has always been possible to walk around the restaurant on the first floor and view the sequence of paintings from above. The developer claims that their new proposal will make the murals more visible, when it actually chops most of them in two, making it impossible to view them in their entirety.
The justification for turning the interior of William Tite’s Grade I listed Royal Exchange of 1844 into a Duty-Free-type shopping mall selling glitzy gifts is that this is necessary to make it ‘sustainable,’ when revenues earned by the City’s other properties are more than sufficient to sustain the Exchange.
It is a disappointing course of action, especially since the Royal Exchange is essentially a public building and, in my opinion, the City has a moral duty to maintain it as an unobstructed showcase for all to see these important murals telling the story of our capital.
Below you can view the full sequence of paintings in their glory. Arnold Bennett saw them and wrote, ‘You have to pinch yourself in order to be sure that you have not fallen into a tranced vision.’
You can view the planning application and object on the City of London Planning website
You can read the Victorian Society’s letter of objection by clicking here
The developer’s proposal
The murals as they were intended to be viewed, without obstacles
Phoenicians trading with early Britons on the coast of Cornwall by Lord Frederick Leighton, 1895
Alfred the Great repairing the walls of the City of London by Sir Frank Salisbury, 1912
William the Conqueror granting a Charter to the Citizens of London by John Seymour Lucas, 1898
William II building the Tower of London by Charles Goldsborough Anderson, 1911
King John sealing Magna Carta by Ernest Normand, 1900
Sir Henry Picard, Master of the Vinters’ Company entertaining Kings of England, France, Scotland Denmark & Cyprus by Albert Chevallier Tayler, 1903
Sir Richard Whittington dispensing his Charities by Henrietta Rae, 1900
Philip the Good presenting the charter to the Merchant Adventurers by Elija A Cox, 1916
Henry VI Battle of Barnet 1471, the Trained Bands marching to the support of Edward IV by John H Amschewitz, 1911
Reconciliation of the Skinners & Merchant Taylors’ Companies by Lord Mayor Billesden, 1484, by Edwin A Abbey, 1904
The Crown offered to Richard III at Baynard’s Castle by Sigismund Goetze, 1898
The Foundation of St Paul’s School, 1509, by William F Yeames, 1905
The Opening the first Royal Exchange by Queen Elizabeth I by Ernest Crofts, 1899
Charles I demanding the Five Members at the Guildhall, 1641-42, by Solomon J Solomon, 1897
The Great Fire of London, 1666, by Stanhope Forbes, 1899
Founding of the Bank of England, 27th July 1694, by George Harcourt, 1904
Nelson leaving Portsmouth, 18th May 1803, by Andrew C Gow, 1903
Destruction of the Second Royal Exchange in 1838 by Stanhope Forbes, 1899
Opening of the Royal Exchange by Her Majesty Queen Victoria, 28th October 1844, by Robert W Macbeth, 1895
Women’s Work in the Great War, 1914-1918, by Lucy Kemp-Welch, 1922
Blocking of Zeebrugge Waterway, St George’s Day, 23rd April 1918, by W L Wyllie, 1920
Their Majesties King George V & Queen Mary visiting the Battle Districts in France, 1917, by Sir Frank Salisbury, 1917
National Peace Thanksgiving Service on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, 6th July 1919, by Sir Frank Salisbury, 1919
Modern Commerce by Sir Frank Brangwyn, 1906
Images courtesy of the Mercers Company
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An Excursion To Tudeley
Today I publish an account of my last assignment with Photographer Colin O’Brien, who died last week, a day’s excursion with a coachload of East Enders picking blackcurrants in Kent organised by Company Drinks. Details of a Memorial Service for Colin O’Brien will be announced in the autumn.
Colin & I met at quarter-to-eight, in the cool of the morning, at Empress Coaches in Bethnal Green and were the driver’s only passengers until we reached Dagenham, where he pulled up on the pavement next to the library and eager blackcurrant pickers embarked clutching their pots and bags.
Mid-morning, the coach was winding down a Kentish farm lane and all seemed well until an autocratic landowner driving a four-by-four pulled up beside us, exasperated at being unable to pass. When it was explained that we were a coachload of blackcurrant gleaners, he feigned alarm as if had caught a gang of thieves red-handed and, after a tense conversation with various agricultural employees, it became clear that we were expected at a neighbouring farm. As the coach returned down the lane, Colin & I drew great amusement in imagining this ‘gentleman farmer,’ breathing a sigh of relief that no ‘dirty cockneys’ would get their hands on his blackcurrants this year.
Arriving at our destination, we passed through the tiny village of Tudeley, lined with twisted weather-boarded cottages, before we saw the field of blackcurrants, stretched out in long lines and harbouring their purple fruit beneath dense foliage. These rows had already been picked mechanically several times, as we could tell by the thousands of blackcurrants littering the ground, but since it was no longer viable to harvest the bushes again this season we were permitted to glean the remaining fruit that would otherwise go to waste.
With barely a word, everyone set to work, pleased to be in the fresh air after sitting on the coach and excited by the prospect of blackcurrants. Pulling back branches revealed purple fruit hanging in the shade, sharp on the tongue yet irresistibly tangy. A disparate bunch, we were all unified in our delight at blackcurrants and took the opportunity to taste as many as we could, occasionally whooping with joy to discover branches heavy with fruit concealed beneath the leaves.
Colin worked his way up and down the rows with his camera, and had no problem finding subjects who were eager to show off their precious harvest of blackcurrants, while I picked pint-sized cups of fruit which I donated to boost the haul of some younger pickers.
At lunchtime, while Colin & I took a break from the heat of the sun in the shade of a hedge, eating our sandwiches with the other pickers, I confessed to him that I had spied a beautiful country pub far away across the field and I could not resist the thought that it would be a very attractive prospect to pay a visit for refreshment. Colin confided that to me that the very same thought had occurred to him and confirmed that he had taken his set of portraits. Yet we both agreed that we felt uncomfortable admitting this idea to the other pickers, even though we had effectively completed our assignment.
Consulting the map of Tudeley, while munching my sandwiches, I noticed that there was a church at the centre of the village. ‘Why don’t we go for a walk up the road and visit the church?’ I suggested to Colin and then, with his assent, we made our departure from the group, explaining our purpose and sloping off down the lane. ‘Shall we go in and have a drink now or shall we visit the church first?’ I asked Colin once we arrived at the pub. ‘Let’s walk up to the church first,’ Colin decided, and I dutifully accompanied him up the hill, leaving the pub behind yet hopeful of a swift return.
The first wonder we encountered was Tudeley Hall, a charismatic half-timbered medieval pile with twisted brick chimneys and a line of old red roses blooming in the front garden. Tall trees lined our path upon either side, arching in a vault over the road and filtering the rays of the sun to spectacular effect. ‘You could wait for days for the light to be as it is now,’ said Colin, as he pressed his shutter to capture a picture of the lane shimmering in hazy sunlight.
Turning off the main road, we approached the church up a pathway lined by well-kept cottages with gardens in flower, arriving at the graveyard dignified by ancient yews, and sat there upon a bench to admire the view across the farmland of Kent in the stillness of the summer afternoon. We were ready to walk back down the hill to the pub, when we decided to go inside the church and take a look.
An unexpected revelation awaited us. Leaving the dazzling glare behind, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the low light inside, where coloured glass gleamed with rich hues illuminating the gloom of the shadowy interior. All Saints, Tudeley, is the only church in the world to have all the windows designed by Marc Chagall.
We learnt the poignant story behind these windows – how local landowners Sir Henry & Lady D’Avigdor-Goldsmid commissioned Chagall to create the east window as a memorial to their daughter Sarah, who drowned aged twenty-one in a sailing accident in 1963, and how, when Chagall came in 1967 to see his worked installed, he fell in love with this small bare church and said, ‘I will do them all.’
Spellbound by the vision, Colin photographed each of the windows, beginning on the north side with the creation of the world from the blue void and culminating in a pair of south-facing windows executed in the golden tones of the sun, with images dissolving into light. Realising that we had to leave if we were not to keep the blackcurrant pickers waiting or miss the coach back, I only persuaded Colin to go once I had taken some pictures of him standing beneath the large east window.
I checked my watch as we walked sharply back down the hill and, when we reached the pub, I realised it was too late for a drink but instead I went inside and asked if I could use the toilet. Once I emerged from the bathroom, Colin was holding two bottles of lemonade with straws in them and we sipped upon them as we walked up the lane to the coach.
The blackcurrant pickers were waiting for us, their lips and fingers stained with purple juice. ‘We know where you’ve been!’ they teased, as we climbed on board the coach, confronting us with the realisation of how transparent our departure from the field had appeared. Fortunately, Colin was able to show his photographs of the Marc Chagall windows, serving as both our alibi and as illustrations of our adventure.
I was thinking what a lesson the day had been – that the instinct to stray was one that should not be resisted because you never know what wonders you might discover – when I fell asleep. Colin & I woke up in London and he descended from the coach at Hackney Downs, where the days’ harvest was delivered to be cooked and bottled with lemon juice, prior to being made into blackcurrant soda. I stayed with the coach until it reached the depot off Mare St beside the canal and walked back from there to Spitalfields, with my plastic box of blackcurrants in my bag.
The excursion to Tudeley was our final assignment, our last day together and the last time I saw Colin O’Brien.
Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien
Movements, Deals & Drinks is a project by international artist group Myvillages, founded in 2003 by Kathrin Böhm, Wapke Feenstra & Antje Schiffers. The project was commissioned by Create and is registered as a Community Interest Company with the name Company Drinks. Company Drinks is supported by the Borough of Barking & Dagenham.
You may also like to read about these other Company Drinks projects photographed by Colin O’Brien
