At Smithfield On Christmas Eve
The eager carnivores of London converge upon the ancient Smithfield Market every year for the annual Christmas Eve meat auction at 11am staged by Harts the Butcher
At ten in the morning, the rainy streets were almost empty yet, as I came through Smithfield, butchers in white overalls were wheeling precarious trolleys top-heavy with meat and fowls over to the site of the auction where an expectant crowd of around a hundred had gathered, anxiously clutching wads of banknotes in one hand and bags to carry off their prospective haul in the other.
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien met me there. He grew up half a mile away in Clerkenwell during the nineteen forties and, although it was his first time at the auction, he remembered his father walking down to Smithfield to get a cheap turkey on Christmas Eve more than sixty years ago. Overhearing this reminiscence, a robust woman standing next to us in the crowd struck up a conversation as a means to relieve the growing tension before the start of the auction which is the highlight of the entire year for many of stalwarts that have been coming for decades.
“You can almost guarantee getting a turkey,” she reassured us with the authority of experience, revealing she had been in attendance for fifteen successive years. Then, growing visibly excited as a thought came into her mind, “Last year, I got thirty kilos of sirloin steak for free – I tossed for it!”, she confided to us, turning unexpectedly flirtatious. Colin and I stood in silent wonder at her good fortune with meat.“We start preparing in October by eating all the meat in the freezer,” she explained, to clarify the situation. “Last night we had steak,” she continued, rubbing her hands in gleeful anticipation, “and steak again tonight.”
Yet our acquaintance was terminated as quickly as it began when the caller appeared in a blood-stained white coat and red tie to introduce the auction. A stubby bullet-headed man, he raised his hands graciously to quell the crowd. “This is a proper English tradition,” he announced, “it has been going on for the last five hundred years. And I’m going to make sure everybody goes away with something and I’m here to take your money.”
His words drew an appreciative roar from the crowd as dozens of eager hands were thrust in the air waving banknotes, indicative of the collective blood lust that gripped the assembly. Standing there in the midst of the excitement, I realised that the sound I could hear was an echo. It was a reverberation of the famously uproarious Bartholomew Fair which flourished upon this site from the twelfth century until it was suppressed for public disorder in 1855. Yesterday, the simple word “Hush!” from the caller was enough to suppress the mob as he queried, “What are we going to start with?”
The answer to his question became manifest when several bright pink loins of pork appeared as if by magic in the hatch beside him, held by butchers beneath, and dancing jauntily above the heads of the delighted audience like hand puppets. These English loins of pork were soon dispatched into the crowd at twenty pounds each as the curtain warmer to the pantomime that was to come, followed by joints of beef for a tenner preceding the star attraction of day – the turkeys! – greeted with festive cheers by the hungry revellers. “Mind your heads, turkeys coming over…” warned the butcher as the turkeys in their red wrappers set out crowd-surfing to their grateful prospective owners as the cash was passed hand to hand back to the stand.
It would not be an understatement to say that mass hysteria had overtaken the crowd, yet there was another element to add to the chaos of the day. As the crowd had enlarged, it spilled over into the road with cars and vans weaving their through the overwrought gathering. “I love coming for the adventure of it,” declared one gentleman with hair awry, embracing a side of beef protectively as if it was the love of his life, “Everyone helps one another out here. You pass the money over and there’s no pickpockets.”
After the turkeys came the geese, the loins of lamb, the ribs of beef, the pork bellies, the racks of lamb, the fillet steaks and the green gammon to complete the bill of fare. As the energy rose, butchers began to throw pieces of red meat into the crowd to be caught by their purchasers and it was surreal to watch legs of lamb and even suckling pigs go flying into the tumultuous mass of people. Finally, came tossing for meat where customers had the chance of getting their steaks for free if they guessed the toss correctly, and each winning guess was greeted with an exultant cheer because by then the butchers and the crowd were as one, fellow participants in a boisterous party game.
Just ninety minutes after it began, the auction wrapped up, leaving the crowd to consolidate their proud purchases, tucking the meat and fowls up snugly in suitcases and backpacks to keep them safe until they could be stowed away in the freezer at home. In the disorder, I saw piles of bloody meat stacked on the muddy pavement where people were tripping over them. Yet a sense of fulfilment prevailed, everyone had stocked up for another year – their carnivorous appetites satiated – and they were going home to eat meat.
As I walked back through the narrow City streets, I contemplated the spectacle of the morning. It resembled a Bacchanale or some ancient pagan celebration in which people were liberated to pursue their animal instincts. But then I realised that my thinking was too complicated – it was Christmas I had witnessed.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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David Hoffman & Crisis At Christmas
Almost by chance, at the end of the seventies, photographer David Hoffman found himself recording the formation of an organisation called Crisis at Christmas that opened up disused spaces and created temporary shelters staffed by volunteers to provide accommodation for the homeless through the holiday season when other shelters were shut.
As a participant rather than a visitor, David was able to take intimate photographs of those who sought refuge, capturing emotional images which are compassionate yet void of sentimentality.
There is a timeless quality to many of these pictures that could equally be of refugees from a war zone or in some apocalyptic dystopian vision of the future, yet this is London in the recent past and Crisis at Christmas is still with us and the work goes on.
“At the time, I was known for my photos of the homeless at St Botolph’s in Aldgate and I was going out with a girl named Peta Watts, who was working at Crisis at Christmas – so when she asked me to take pictures there, I leapt at the chance of becoming the Crisis photographer, and I did it for three years.
This was the early days of these shelters and they used derelict churches. One of them was St Philip & St Augustine in Whitechapel, round the corner from the squat where I lived in Fieldgate Mansions, and the next year it was at the Tradescant church of St Mary’s in Lambeth. So there were very little facilities – perhaps only a cold tap and one toilet for hundreds of people – and the whole thing was a chaotic feat of organisation, but somehow it all worked. They got donations of food and clothing and toys. And I remember some of the guys found an old bath tub in a skip and brought it in and filled it with water, so they could wash themselves. There was no regard to Health & Safety or regulation as we know it, but it all worked brilliantly and everyone was very well looked after. There was no hierarchy and the homeless people would be involved in the cooking and arranging the mattresses, and keeping the whole thing running.
I photographed it because it was a wonderful event and – like at St Botolph’s – some of the people were couples, and I took their pictures and brought them prints the next day. Many of these people had been living on the streets all year and the photographs helped them to have a more positive self-image.
Some would be shooting up and and others would be drinking, and an ambulance would come two or three times a day to pick people up. There were fights too, and I remember there was an unspoken rule that only one volunteer would approach to break it up by speaking softly – and it never failed. Many of the volunteers were middle class people who would work eighteen to twenty hours a day. What I liked about it was people coming together and doing things for themselves – and it just worked, and the homeless people looked after each other.”
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
Click here to donate to Crisis At Christmas
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Midwinter At Christ Church
Today is the shortest day of the year and, at eleven minutes past five this afternoon, we pass the solstice taking us back towards shorter nights and longer days. At this time when the sun is at its lowest angle, Christ Church Spitalfields can become an intricate light box with powerful rays of light entering almost horizontally from the south and illuminating Nicholas Hawksmoor’s baroque architecture in startling ways. Yesterday’s crystalline sunlight provided the ideal conditions for such phenomena and inspired me to attempt to capture of these fleeting effects of light.
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At The Lego Exhibition
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I were among the very first through the doors at BRICK 2015, the exhibition of all things Lego at the ExCeL Centre at Royal Victoria Dock recently. Once we passed the lone Lego Woolly Mammoth, awaiting extinction upon the frosty tundra, we could not resist becoming intoxicated by the collective enthusiasm of the milling crowds.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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Contributing Photographer Phil Maxwell was granted access to the former Royal London Hospital while it sits in limbo. inhabited only by the lonely ghost of Joseph Merrick, as the building awaits its new purpose as Town Hall for the Borough of Tower Hamlets
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Len Hoffman, Sports Coach
Today it is my pleasure to introduce the fifth of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist Professor Dick Hobbs, Author of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK
For sixty-seven years, Len Hoffman has given up his time to coach kids in East London and, even now at the age of ninety-one, he cannot stop. “It keeps me young,” claimed the sprightly nonagenerian as he went about his regular stint, coaching at Mossford table tennis club in Seven Kings.
Born in Bow, Len moved to Forest Gate as a child and left school at fourteen. “Dad worked on the Times, so he got me a job there working as a messenger boy. I went everywhere in London, including to Buckingham Palace.” After service in the RAF – “they sent me to Germany as the German prisoners of war were being sent back” – Len returned to work as a clerk on the Times, but could not settle. It was at this point that his obsession with sport kicked in and his long career in coaching commenced in 1947. Len worked as a school attendance officer in Newham and as a table tennis coach in schools in Newham and Barking and Dagenham.
However, it was in a scruffy ex-army shed in Sebert Rd Forest Gate that Len established what became a hotbed for British table tennis. In this unlikely setting, three or four nights per week, and on Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons, the hut was packed solid with kids aged from five to sixteen, including Chester Barnes, who became English Junior and Senior champion, and put the sport both on the map and on the back pages. Essex and National champions followed, along with a succession of East End kids who represented England at Junior and Senior level including England Number One at Junior, Senior and Veterans level Stuart Gibbs, and Skylet Andrew a former Olympian, winner of three Commonwealth Gold medals, a World Cup Silver medal and fouerteen National titles, who is now a successful sports agent.
If table tennis was not your thing, there was always five-a-side football under floodlights. Thus, across various East End and Essex venues, Len encouraged the fledgling careers of professional footballers such as Frank Lampard senior, Chris Hughton and Harry Redknapp.
After a day’s work, Len coached table tennis and football five nights a week, “lucky I never got married, no wife would have put up with it,” he admitted to me. One of his venues included the much-missed Fairbairn House Boys’ Club in Canning Town. Founded in 1891 and with its origins in the Mansfield House University settlement, at its peak the club had a membership of nine hundred, and included facilities such as a library, theatre, workshops, gymnasium, and canteen. The club could also boast a sports’ ground at Burgess Rd East Ham, with a running track, football pitches, tennis courts and an open air swimming pool which boasted a gym, a theatre, an athletics track and an outdoor swimming pool.
Generations of young people have benefitted from the quiet unassuming dedication of Len Hoffman who is now the proud recipient of the British Empire Medal.
While we were chatting in his room he worked out on an exercise bike that he has adapted. “I do this every day, it’s good for me to keep moving,” he explained. When he was not working out on his Heath Robinson machine, Len regaled me with tales from a lifetime of coaching. “Chester (Barnes)was the best, no doubt about it. He just had that little something about him.” Yet most of his memories do not involve stars or sporting excellence, they typically involve the little details of people’s lives, of teams, players and muddy football pitches, cold church halls on a winter’s night and the reaction in 1964 of a young kid on seeing the twin towers of the old Wembley stadium exclaimed, “But it looks just like it does on the tele!” These little details recounted over half a century later are what Len Hoffman is all about.
And he is a long way from retiring. Every Saturday morning he is picked up by Mossford Secretary, John Spero, and delivered to the club, where with undimmed enthusiasm he organises the weekly tournament and coaches hordes of potential champions – along with their young brothers and sisters.
For someone like Len Hoffman, it is not solely about stars. He recognised that too often we focus on the elite end of sport, ignoring the wider benefits to be gleaned from participation. All over London and in a wide range of sports, volunteers like Len and his coaching colleagues Phil Ashleigh and Tony Cantale offer kids a chance to get out of the house and off the street, to learn a skill, make friends and build their confidence. For once, the term “unsung heroes” seems entirely appropriate.
Len Hoffman, Sports Coach
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Joe Baden & Open Book
Today it is my pleasure to introduce the fourth of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist Professor Dick Hobbs, Author of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK
Joe Baden
Growing up in Bermondsey, Joe’s childhood ambition was to be an armed robber. Even a stint as one of the ‘working class aristocracy’ in the print trade never deterred him from dreams of banditry.
Eventually, Joe found himself on remand in Belmarsh Prison charged with armed robbery and violent affray. Fortunately for Joe, the armed robbery charges were dropped because a witness could not pick him out at an identity parade, so he was given a two-year community service order for violent affray and possession of a firearm. Alongside Joe’s history with drugs and mental health problems, you might consider these unusual qualifications to find in the Director of the country’s most innovative higher education scheme, but these are the experiences that Joe Baden brings to Goldsmiths’ Open Book project.
Although Joe “thought education was for people from another world,” he agreed to join a basic skills programme in order to placate his probation officer and discovered, to his surprise, that academic work could be enjoyable. This was followed by an access course at Greenwich University and in 1998 he graduated with a BA in History from Goldsmiths College.
Joe worked as a tutor for the probation service and then on a number of projects aimed at encouraging ex-offenders to get into education, before Goldsmiths’Open Book projectwas launched in 2002 with the aim of helping ex-offenders and those with addiction and mental health problems to get into education. The project provides both practical and emotional support, offering mentoring, drop-in and study sessions, and an outreach programme that includes visits to prisons, hospitals and residential units. Open Book has helped more than two hundred students to find places on undergraduate courses and has five hundred people on its books, with students studying a range of degree subjects from foundation to postgraduate level.
Azra is about to commence his degree course in Anthropology, and is excited at the prospect of being a student, a status that stands in remarkable contrast to the chaos of his last twenty years – “Drugs, homelessness, prison, lots of crime, lots of drugs. In prison a drugs rehab course opened up my eyes where things were going wrong. Next stop – fix my life. I knew I needed education and Open Book was introduced by another prisoner. He gave me a brochure and said ‘check this out.’ I came here with no background in college or school. I got lots of help in coming to terms with who I am. They made me believe. I am positive what I can achieve. Joe is an inspiration.”
However, not everybody shared the belief that Joe Baden was an inspiration from the start, indeed Neil Bradley, a clerk at Goldsmiths College thought he was,“a spiv, too good to be true, selling me a timeshare. Joe knew that I wrote for The Lion Roars (Millwall fanzine), and he asked me to teach a two hour session on creative writing. I didn’t fancy it. I had always wanted to be a writer but from my background you were just told to get a proper job. I came from a Trade Union background, old school socialist. I thought that criminals should be locked up, and that drug addicts got what they deserved. But he went on about it and I gave it a go. They were a really nice group of people, and within three to four weeks I had bought into it totally.”
With Joe’s support, and despite the fact that he did not have an undergraduate degree, Neil registered for a part-time Masters, and on completing his MA degree took up a full-time post as an Open Book tutor. Last year he published his first book entitled Four Funerals and a Wedding. “Joe is the most generous person I have ever met.” Neil confided to me,
When Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I visited Goldsmiths College, the other Open Book tutors we met were Fiona Taylor, James Carney and Sue Hallisey. Fiona, from the Pepys Estate in Deptford worked alongside Joe from the beginning of the project. While struggling with her course at Goldsmiths, she was told about someone running a scheme at the college who “speaks just like you.” That was Joe, and Fiona has been Open Book mainstay ever since – and along the way, she has gained a Masters degree in Art History.
James arrived at Open Book through an addiction project. Now a History graduate, he is a trained Dyslexia Specialist and works for the project as a Dyslexia Development Worker. Inspired by their personal experiences and their immersion in the often-unruly lives of their students, the Open Book team are united by a powerful shared belief in the transformative power of education
Marguerita, a vital Liverpuddlian woman, is equally enthusiastic, “My life was carnage, total chaos. Seven kids, ten years in temporary accommodation, drink, drugs. Most of us at Open Book are working class people from bad spaces, but here everybody is a mentor, everybody is like your brother and sister.” Marguerita is shortly to fulfil her ambition to be an actor, in Gimme Shelter at the Omnibus Theatre, Clapham. The play is produced by Open Stage which was established in 2008 to further Open Book’s ethos of introducing Arts to its members. This aspect of their work is typified by the experience of Sue Hallissey who, before coming to Open Book, told me she “had a good drinking career, I felt at home with the chaos. I had never been to an art gallery or ever felt that I had an opinion.” But Open Book is about encouraging confidence in people who feel excluded from the mainstream and so, with the encouragement of tutors and fellow students alike, Sue has become an Open Book tutor, a qualified teacher, and a playwright with a successful production under her belt.
Open Book manifests an approach to working class education that has been bypassed by the market-led academic production lines for whom the notion of widening participation can be little more than a badge of convenience. Joe and his team studiously avoid patronising the often-vulnerable individuals who come to them. “We don’t make excuses for people or try to forgive people. No one has the right to forgive me or to say they are ’empowering’ me. People can only empower themselves,” he admitted.
Remarkably, after years of struggle, the prospects of future funding look good. Open Book has opened a branch in Chatham and plans to extend the reach of the project through ambitious collaborations with a wide range of academic partners and community organisations. “We’re not trying to reform people or turn them into middle-class clones. The strength of the Open Book project is that we all share similar experiences,” says Joe.
Empathy, expertise and the determination to instil confidence into people who can render the cliché of “non-traditional student” as an understatement are what Open Book is about. For instance, one student telephoned Joe in the middle of the night recently after a serious shooting incident at her home, yet her concern was not the horrendous violence that had been inflicted on her family, but rather the prospect that the shooting and its aftermath might result in late submission of her essay.
Fiona Taylor, Open Book Tutor
Azra, Open Book Student
Sue Hallisey, Open Book Tutor
Neil Bradley, Open Book Tutor
Marguerita, Open Book Student
James Carney, Open Book Tutor
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
OPEN BOOK, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW
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