Bobby Cummines, Not A Gangster
Today it is my pleasure to introduce the third of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist, Professor Dick Hobbs, Author of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK in which he writes – “My concern is primarily with deviance as an everyday feature of life, an activity that is integral to urban existence, and which I believe justifies academic attention in its own right, without being hampered by any conceits regarding helping the police with their enquiries.”
“The Queen told me I had a really colourful background”
Forty years ago, working class London was a cluster of self-contained villages boasting their own distinct occupations, football teams, and skulduggery. Indeed, every neighbourhood had its own villains and theft, robbery and a little light extortion were their crimes of choice. On a rainy day on the Southbank recently, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I met a friend of mine who was an enthusiastic and prominent player in this world.
By the late sixties, most of the big names of London’s underworld were buried deep in the prison system and any neighbourhood crime firm raising its head above the parapet was quickly crushed by a police force fearing attempts to fill the vacuum left by the Krays and the Richardsons. The days of the high profile self-congratulatory London gangster were over and anybody serious about a career in crime learnt the hard way to keep a low profile. Consequently, for a non-insider to hear about villains from another manor was most unusual. However, the name ‘Bobby Cummines’ was increasingly being mentioned in somewhat hushed tones in pub conversations across London.
Brought up as part of a big law-abiding family in Kings Cross, by the time Bobby Cummines left school at the age of sixteen he was already honing his reputation through a range of scams and schemes. But with a recently-acquired job in a shipping office and the prospect of a career in Customs & Excise ahead of him, Bobby’s life took a turn for the worse upon his first serious encounter with the police. “I was in a park with my mates when somebody let off a starting pistol. The police were called and began bullying these younger kids. They were aggressive and shouldn’t have been talking to these kids without an adult present, so I stood up to them. “ The police left and returned soon after. “They pointed to a cut-throat razor that was on the ground and claimed it was mine that I had took it out of my pocket and threw it on the floor. It was a fit-up. My dad was a straight-goer and thought the police were like Dixon of Dock Green. He said the police would never plant evidence. He told me to plead guilty and that I’d get a fine and it’ll be forgotten about in a few years.”
Bobby did as he was told and his dad paid the ten shilling fine. However, Bobby’s bosses at the shipping office found out about the case and sacked him. “I was gutted, I thought, if you want me to be bad, ‘I’ll show you how bad I can be.'” Within a year, he was in the Old Bailey charged with possession of a shotgun and armed robbery. While he waited for his case to come up, he met the Kray Twins who were about to be tried for murder. The twins were sentenced to life imprisonment and Bobby was sent to a Detention Centre for the possession of a sawn off shotgun. “It was supposed to be a short sharp shock, but it was just violence practised against vulnerable kids. I came out of there tougher and angrier than ever.”
Bobby became a committed and violent professional criminal. “We used to give local kids a few bob to chuck a brick through the window of some business. They would claim on the insurance, but if they made three claims their premium would go up. So after two bricks we would move in and for a few quid no more bricks and no upping of the premium.” Bobby and his crew were soon “minding” a wide range of businesses in a territory “that stretched from Highbury Corner to the Archway, across to Finsbury Park, and the edge of Caledonian Rd.” But this territory was fiercely contested with other groups of violent predators, and Bobby led a tight-knit group of co-offenders through several years of violent confrontation. At five foot six inches tall, Bobby learnt early on that he had to be more violent than the opposition, and his weapon of choice was a sawn-off shotgun. “When people ask why I used guns, I always tell them I was sick of getting my nice suits messed up. Anyway guns save time.”
Quickly, Bobby became a highly dangerous offender prepared to use violence to obtain money. However, he stood trial for murder when a robbery went wrong and a man that he tied up choked to death. Bobby was found not guilty of murder, but served five years of a seven and a half year sentence for manslaughter. “Over the years that unnecessary death has haunted me.”
On his release ,Bobby continued in his chosen career, showing considerable ability as an organiser, and becoming deadly serious about the crime business. “I made sure that there was never any photos of us floating about, and I didn’t drink, I always had bitter lemon. I needed to stay sharp.” But while he eschewed alcohol, Bobby did develop a penchant for armed robbery. At this time, bandits were pillaging large bundles of cash from banks, building societies and security vans, and Bobby and his crew were particularly successful.
Inevitably, Bobby was arrested by armed police and sentenced to twelve years in prison – “In the end it was almost a relief. I’ve done some horrendous things – extreme violence – I never deny that. I deserved every day I got in prison because it was lunacy. If I had carried on, I would either have been shot dead by the police or innocent members of the public could have been shot.”
In prison, he enhanced an already formidable reputation for violence and confrontation, and at one time held the governor of a maximum security prison as a hostage. “Well, they said that but he was on his rounds and I knew they was taking prisoners down the wing and giving out beatings. So I pulled him about it and he screamed that he was being taken hostage.” This incident added considerably to his reputation.
In Parkhurst Prison, Bobby negotiated a truce between Reggie Kray and Charlie Richardson in order to prevent serious violence between members of the two gangs who had been imprisoned over a decade earlier. He achieved this by carrying the blade from a pair of garden shears up his sleeve. “Everybody was walking around tooled up. It was a brutal place, one of my friends was killed over an onion. There was another bloke who had murdered his child as he felt the world was too cruel and nasty for his beautiful son to live in. Others reckoned they were being visited by angels. We had IRA, UDA, allsorts, Colonel Gaddafi’s top man in the Libyan army. The ‘p’ in prison stands for paranoia. Some of the people in there are pathetic. You have 50/60 year old men doing a ten stretch strutting about in boxer shorts and trainers trying to look nineteen, talking about jobs they are going to do when they get out. I’ve never understood why they do that. I never saw a lot of rehabilitation going on”.
Charlie Richardson had a huge impact on Bobby. “He told me I had a good brain but if I carried on I would end up dead or on a life sentence. He told me to get into education – it would earn me money without hurting anyone. Charlie got me reading. Education was my liberation. Prison brutalises people. When you’re inside, you don’t serve a sentence—you survive a sentence. I’m grateful that education humanised me.” Bobby successfully lobbied for a transfer to Maidstone Prison which had an education unit. Here he became education orderly, and with the support of his Probation Officer and a sympathetic Prison Governor, enrolled on an Open University course and started to think about the future.
On leaving prison, Bobby at first struggled to make a living, finding potential employers reluctant to take on an ex-con. “To live an honest life, I had to be dishonest about my past.” He persevered, taking a £100-a -week job stacking shelves and dealing with hostage negotiations and suicide management as a volunteer with the Kent Probation Service. Bobby went on to hold responsible positions in various companies and gained a degree in Housing from Greenwich University.
However, his initial struggles to gain employment inspired Bobby to join Mark Leach, the founder of Unlock, the National Association of Reformed Offenders, becoming CEO when Mark stood down. Initially operating from Bobby’s garage, and boasting Sir Stephen Tumim, a former judge and Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons as its founding President, Unlock became a powerful force in the rehabilitation of offenders, and when Bobby teamed up with the ex-Chief Inspector of Prisons Sir David Ramsbottom who succeeded Tumin, the pair provided an effective authoritative political voice. “I became media savvy. Few people seemed to know what they was talking about when it came to the needs of somebody coming out of prison. How to get a job, insurance, a bank account. Employers were saying that they couldn’t employ ex offenders as staff were paid through the BACS system and former offenders didn’t have bank accounts.”
Unlock provided practical support and advice and developed a particular expertise in tackling the financial exclusion of ex-offenders. Bobby is a very persuasive man, and gradually the banks and insurance industry – sectors not renowned for their social awareness – came on board, and the lives of some of the most excluded were materially changed for the better, largely as the result of the energy and intellect of an ex-offender who left school at the age of sixteen. The one time violent dynamo of pre-gentrified seventies Islington had become an eloquent advocate of social reform.
Bobby has been invited to sit upon numerous government committees and policy reviews. For instance, he was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the Rehabilitation of Offenders’ Act, becoming an expert witness to the Home Affairs Select Committee on prisoner education, and a specialist adviser in the 2004 public inquiry into murder of Zahid Mubarek in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution. He also served on the board of HM Inspector of Prisons and advised the Irish government on their Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. In 2006, Bobby travelled to South Africa on a fact-finding mission to look at how their prisons were run, as part of a trip sponsored by a firm of solicitors.
Bobby likes to speak to groups of young people in schools and colleges and, at these events, this ex-violent criminal does not pull his punches. “Tools (weapons) are for fools, drugs are for mugs,” he assures them. A regular speaker at conferences and events, when Coutts Bank awarded £10,000 to Unlock, Bobby revealed, “one of the directors said he was pleased to see me in his bank without a crash helmet and a gun.”
In 2011, Unlock won The Guardian’s Charity of the Year Award and the same year Bobby received the OBE. “The Queen told me I had a really colourful background and she was pleased to award me the OBE. That’s the nicest way I can think of someone telling me I’ve got a lot of form.” From working class Kings Cross to Buckingham Palace via a solitary cell has been quite a journey. Bobby has proved to be a more successful campaigner, fund raiser and government advisor than he ever was a criminal.
Just before we parted, I asked Bobby if he had time for a drink, but he declined by explaining, “I need to be back, I agreed to meet up with a young boy who is going off the rails a bit. I know what he is doing, what he is up to. I told him bring his little firm with him. I will sort them out.” I have no doubt he will do just that.
Bobby Cummines in the seventies – “When I was well at it”
Bobby receiving the OBE in 2011 – “She was pleased to award me the OBE”
Bobby Cummines OBE
Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Sam Nicholls Of Nicholls & Clarke
Today I publish the second of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist, Professor Dick Hobbs, whose father worked at Nicholls & Clarke for forty-seven years as a clerk & warehouseman
Now that some of the Blossom St warehouses are been saved, yet with British Land’s threat of wholesale demolition still hanging over the rest of Norton Folgate, this is the moment to recall the story of the company which occupied the place from 1875 to 2003. Currently ensconced in purpose-built premises at Chadwell Heath, Nicholls & Clarke has retained an extensive archive of documents, photographs and illustrations that chart the company’s history, tracing its footprint upon this celebrated London neighbourhood.
The founder, Sam Nicholls was born in Worcestershire in 1842 and attended a school run by glass manufacturers. He left at the age of twelve and worked as a glass cutter for four shillings a week. In 1862, the twenty-year-old Sam Nicholls moved to London and, after a brief period working for a Chiswick-based company, he was employed by James Miles, Building Suppliers of Commercial St Stepney, who later moved to Shoreditch High St. He commenced at a wage of twenty-five shillings per week but by 1875, including a bonus that consisted of seven and a half per cent of the net profit, Sam Nicholls was earning the huge sum of £537 annually.
When, in 1875 James Miles’ recklessness led to the demise of the company, Sam Nicholls became self-employed at premises in Worship St. With £500 of savings, he went into partnership with Harry Clarke, whose brother William was the wealthy agent for a large glass company and, with money put up jointly by William & Sam Nicholls and Harry Clarke, they bought the business of James Miles in July 1875 and moved into the premises in Shoreditch High St. When Harry Clarke drank himself to death nine years later, Sam Nicholls needed to find £24,000 to make the business his own. He succeeded in this task, and by 1886, Nicholls & Clarke was his.
The company expanded, spreading out from Shoreditch High St and extending through the block onto Blossom St. Vacant land and nearby business premises and even a school were purchased, and in 1890, the new warehouse buildings were completed. By the early twentieth century, Nicholls & Clarke occupied almost half of the block delineated by Shoreditch High St and Norton Folgate to the west, and by Blossom St to the east, as well as a cluster of other buildings and yards in proximity to the main warehouses. In the thirties, the Art Deco Niclar House was built at 3-9 Shoreditch High St and the adjacent late nineteenth century premises were re-fronted.
Nicholls & Clarke were ideally placed to capitalise upon London’s nineteenth century building boom, which permitted Sam Nicholls to purchase Oak Hall, near Buckhurst Hill, becoming a Governor of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and one of the founders of the Forest Hospital. Fond of horse riding, he kept a carriage and pair.
Five of Sam Nicholls’ sons came into the company and Nicholls & Clarke remains a family firm to this day. Sam was ever-present in Shoreditch until his death in 1932 at the age of ninety and was succeeded as Chairman by his son, Sydney. Such was the legacy of Sam Nicholls that, up until his death in 2014, the founder’s grandson and namesake, who had been both Managing Director & Chairman, was still known to ex-employees of a certain vintage as “Young Mr Sam.”
Portrait of Sam Nicholls above his desk at Nicholls & Clarke in Chadwell Heath
Blossom St warehouses in 1893
Blossom St, 1911
Blossom St, 1911
Blossom St, 1911
Nicholls & Clarke celebrated fifty years in business in 1925
The Shoreditch showroom
The women of Nicholls & Clarke in the sixties
Niclar House in the seventies
Samuel Nicholls (1842-1932)
Pages selected from Nicholls & Clarke’s catalogues from 1958 and 1968
Archive images courtesy Nicholls & Clarke
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Terry Jackson, Samaritan
Today it is my pleasure to introduce the first of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist, Professor Dick Hobbs, Author of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK in which he writes – “My concern is primarily with deviance as an everyday feature of life, an activity that is integral to urban existence, and which I believe justifies academic attention in its own right, without being hampered by any conceits regarding helping the police with their enquiries.”
Terry Jackson
They say crime does not pay, but – as Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I discovered – even a bit of do-it-yourself quantitative easing can have drastic consequences. For most of his adult life, Terry Jackson charged around the East End like a cross between Arthur Daley and Del Boy. Fiercely self-employed, he often pronounced himself to be “too expensive for wages,” and thrived for decades at the edge of legality. Terry’s family background is traditional East End. His paternal grandfather was a Ceylonese seaman who came to East London in 1909. A decorated First World War veteran, he married an East End woman of Portuguese background. “When people look at me, they say ‘Are you Pakistani? Greek? Turkish?’ I tell them I like the cold, so I must be an Eskimo,” admits Terry.
Terry’s father Marshall fought in the Second World War and married Florence in 1947. “In those days they took a lot of racist stick when they were out together in the street. He was a black man out with a white woman and it wasn’t the thing back then. He was a great character. He had a good voice and used to sing in the Aunt Sally pub in Burdett Rd. He used to pretend that he was singing in Italian, he couldn’t, he just made the words up, ” Terry recalls. Marshall Jackson died at the tragically young age of just twenty-nine and, when Florence remarried a few years later, Terry rejected his step-dad. “I wasn’t having it. He said ‘I’m your new dad,’ so I said, ‘No you ain’t and you never will be!” Meanwhile the racism continued – “It was blackie this and blackie that, your dad’s a blackie. I had to look after myself.”
Thus, Terry learned the art of self preservation, which he did to great effect, gaining a local reputation for fighting as well as ducking and diving. An almost inevitable ten week spell in a Detention Centre followed, for breaching a probation order after being found guilty of taking and driving away a car. At the age of twenty-one, Terry married Sylvie and lived in Poplar while working as a self-employed lorry driver. After a “bit of bother” in Poplar, Terry moved to Newham and with Sylvie, and children Marshall and Terri they laid down the roots that flourish today.
Terry moved effortlessly between hard physical graft and “buying and selling,” to theft from lorries, factories and warehouses. His first stop after a successful larcenous adventure was the local pawn shop where Terry would retrieve his gold sovereign and half sovereign rings, his necklace and chunky bracelet. I could always tell that his life was on an upward trajectory when he arrived on my doorstep looking like a cross between the Pope and Liberace. Yet violence was always close by and Terry became a renowned cobblestone fighter outside East End pubs.
If he arrived at my house minus the gold and with the addition of a few fresh facial scars, I knew that he was having a bad day. But the stitches and the odd Magistrate’s Court fine never kept him down for long and, looking like Bob Hoskins on steroids, he always bounced back with a new scheme and a van load of hookey gear. One endeavour, involving a local clothing warehouse, resulted in every man woman and child in the neighbourhood, aged from five to eighty-five, wearing identically-branded sweatshirts. Another venture into the world of larceny ended with Terry and his cohorts ignoring thousands of pounds worth of small electrical goods in favour of some tea chests marked as whisky. However, later and after a lot of lifting, from the safe haven of his lock-up garage he found that their loot consisted of hundreds of bibles destined for a regime where Christianity was banned. Ever the optimist, Terry was thwarted from using the bibles as Christmas gifts when he discovered that they “were written in Polish.” I still have one on my bookshelf. As for the dodgy pregnancy testing kits that he liberated from a Chemist shop after he was hired by the landlord to clear it out, that is a story for another time.
You win some and you lose some, but as far as the local kids were concerned, Terry was a winner. When an under-twelves’ football team need transport, he bought an old van, hand-painted it in the team’s colours, threw some cushions in the back and the boys had a bespoke coach.
Terry was a particularly enthusiastic drinker and, when new owners took over his local pub, they asked him to run it for them.“Nothing on the books because you can’t be a licensee if a you have a criminal record. And I had one of them,” he confessed to me. Until it was sold five years later, The Steamship was a booming local community pub. With Terry in charge, there was never any trouble, apart from when one customer turned up with a gun – “I just had a word, talked him round, and he went outside put it in his motor and came back and had a drink with me.”
Over the years, Terry always drew the line at relatively low levels of skulduggery and avoided “doing anything that you could really get nicked for.” Despite many offers to engage in more serious forms of crime, in particular those involving violence, Terry stuck to what he knew. However, life was catching up with him and, after spending a few years uncharacteristically-legitimately employed as a driver, he suffered a series of heart attacks before eventually succumbing to an offer to get involved in a serious crime that was to change his life forever.
In 2006, Terry was convicted for his part in a major counterfeiting case that allegedly threatened, “the fiscal well-being of the British State.” Terry’s role was minor, he operated the machine that imprinted foil onto fake £20 notes. For four months, he operated the “foiler” yet, “I doubt that I made four grand out of it in the end,” he concluded. Police surveillance of the group had already commenced before he started work for the counterfeiters and, when his home was raided, he was found with one of the counterfeiting machines and a large quantity of notes. “They confiscated my motor, it was twelve years old. They took my caravan, which was worth about three grand and a few bits of gold that I bought. They wanted to put a confiscation order on me of £1.3 million when I had twelve-year-old motor and a caravan!”
Terry missed out on the rewards, yet was presented by the criminal justice system as a main player in “Britain’s biggest ever counterfeiting operation.” The subsequent worldwide media attention concentrated upon the seriousness of this “organised crime” and the vast amount of money that had been forged. Consequently, “when we walked onto the wing in Pentonville everybody clapped and cheered”. Terry was fifty-eight when he commenced his five year sentence. Due to his age and the fact that this was his first prison sentence, fellow inmates assumed, “that I was some sort of mastermind, that I had plenty of dough stashed away and that I had been at it for years and hadn’t been nicked. Instead, I had just been involved for a few months and never had a ‘pot.’ I got offered up all sorts of deals while I was inside. Geezer comes in, a forger, says he wants to meet me and comes on like we was best of pals. Says that I am the business, and that he wants to make one with me when I get out. I tells him, ‘No chance!’”
In prison, Terry was afforded a status that was entirely inappropriate to his actual experience and competence. But he buckled down, qualified as a Samaritan, and worked as a Listener helping troubled prisoners to come to terms with their plight. He became trusted by both inmates and prison authorities so, as a consequence, he was able to move around the prison at will and was eventually released with an exemplary prison record.
Terry acknowledges that his family suffered during his time in prison and he is now dedicated to helping them deal with their multifarious problems. He is immensely proud of his Samaritans’ qualification and uses his skills to provide informal support to various local people and visits an old peoples’ home, chatting to residents and singing some of the old songs taught to him by his father. In addition, despite his health problems, he has rediscovered his love of table tennis and is working to get the sport introduced to a local primary school. “Over the years I have taken a lot out of the local community, one way or another, and I want to put something back. I’m not a bad man,” he confided to me.
Terry’s grandparents with a young relative
Young Terry Jackson (right) with his aunt and young brother
Florence and Marshall Jackson
Terry Jackson
Portraits of Terry Jackson copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Cecile Moss of Old Montague St
A Map Of William Shakespeare’s Shordiche
Click on the image to enlarge & read the text on the map
Spitalfields Life Contributing Artist & Cartographer Extraordinaire, Adam Dant has been working through the night in the former Huguenot fish & chip shop which serves as his studio to conjure this extraordinary vision of William Shakespeare’s Shordiche, collating the scraps of information and myth about the landscape of London’s lost theatreland of five hundred years ago. Here Shakespeare arrived as a young actor in 1585, treading the boards at London’s earliest custom-built theatre, The Theatre at New Inn Yard where subsequently his first ventures as a playwright saw the light of day.
Adam Dant by Jeremy Freedman
Archaeologist raises a Shakespearian wine goblet to celebrate the excavation of The Theatre, 2011
Staffordshire figure of Shakespeare on my dresser
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Old London Bridges
Traffic from Covent Garden Market crosses Waterloo Bridge, c. 1924
London owes its very existence to bridges, since the location of the capital upon the banks of the Thames was defined by the lowest crossing point of the river. No wonder that the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society collected this edifying series of pictures of bridges on glass plates to use in their magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute.
Yet until the eighteenth century, the story of London’s bridges was solely that of London Bridge. The Romans created the first wooden crossing of Thames close to the current site of London Bridge and the settlement upon the northern shore grew to become the City of London. When the Saxons tried to regain the City from the Danes in the eleventh century, they attached ropes to London Bridge and used their boats to dislodge the piers, thus originating the myth celebrated in the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is Falling Down.”
The first stone London Bridge was built by Peter de Colechurch in 1209 and lasted over six hundred years, surviving the Great Fire and numerous rebuildings of the houses and shops that clustered upon its structure. When traffic upon grew too crowded in 1722, a “keep left” rule was instated that later became the pattern for all roads in this country and, by 1763, all the houses were removed to provide extra clearance. Then, in 1831, John Rennie’s famous bridge of Dartmoor granite replaced old London Bridge until it was shipped off to Arizona in the nineteen-sixties to make way for the current concrete bridge, with its centrally heated pavements and hollow structure that permits essential pipes and cables to cross the Thames easily.
After London Bridge, next came Putney Bridge in 1726 and then Westminster Bridge in 1738 – until today we have a line of bridges, holding the north and south banks of London together tightly like laces on a boot. The hero of London’s bridges was unquestionably John Rennie (1761-1821) who pioneered the combination or iron and stone in bridge building and designed London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Southwark Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge, although only the Serpentine Bridge remains today as his memorial.
Even to the seasoned Londoner, there is something unfailingly exhilarating about sitting on top of a bus, erupting from the narrow city streets onto one of the bridges and discovering yourself suspended high above the vast River Thames, it is one of the definitive experiences of our city.
Tower Bridge took eight year to construct, 1886 -1894
Tower Bridge with barges, c. 1910
St. Paul’s Cathedral from Southwark Bridge, c. 1925
Southwark Bridge, c. 1925
Old wooden bridge at Putney, 1880. The second bridge to be built after London Bridge, constructed in 1726 and replaced by the current stone structure in 1886.
On Tower Bridge, 1905.
Tower Bridge, c. 1910
John Rennie’s London Bridge of 1831 viewed from the waterside, c. 1910
London Bridge, c. 1930. Sold to Robert Mc Culloch in 1968 and re-assembled in Arizona in 1971.
The former bridgekeeper’s house on Tower Bridge, c. 1900
Wandsworth Bridge by Julian Tolme, c. 1910 (demolished in 1937)
Waterloo Bridge, c. 1910. The increased river flow created by the demolition of old London Bridge required temporary reinforcements to Waterloo Bridge from 1884.
Waterloo Bridge, c. 1910
Under an arch of Waterloo Bridge, c. 1910
View under Waterloo Bridge towards Hungerford Bridge, Westminster Bridge, & Palace of Westminster, c. 1910
Westminster Bridge, c. 1910. The third bridge, built over the Thames after London and Putney Bridges, in 1739-1750. The current bridge by Thomas Page of 1862 is painted green to match the leather seats in the House of Commons.
Westminster Bridge, c. 1910
Westminster Bridge, c. 1910
Hammersmith Bridge with Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race, 1928. Dixon, Appleby & Thorne’s bridge was built in 1887.
Battersea Bridge, c. 1910 Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s bridge was built in 1879.
Battersea Bridge from waterside, c. 1910
Blackfriars Bridge, c. 1910
Cannon St Railway Bridge, c. 1910. Designed by John Hawkshaw and John Wolfe-Barry for the South Eastern Railway in 1866.
Serpentine Bridge, 1910. Designed by John Rennie in the eighteen-twenties.
Westminster Bridge, c. 1910
On Hammersmith Bridge, c. 1910
Victoria Embankment, c. 1910
London Bridge, c. 1910
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The What Pub Next? Club
“I only come here to make your lives happier, I don’t enjoy it”
I was delighted to be invited along to Simpsons Chop House, the oldest tavern in the City of London established 1757, to join the members of the “What Pub Next?” Club. Believed to have been founded in the nineteen-fifties, this venerable society of wags once had a membership of over three hundred who used to visit all the bars in the City one after another, encouraged by the cry of “What Pub Next?”
Yet, even though the “What Pub Next?” Club was officially disbanded a couple of years ago – even though there are only a handful of members left alive – even though there are no new members, no junior members, only senior members in their eighties and nineties – even though they no longer stray to any other pubs, adopting Simpsons Chop House (thirty seven and a half, Cornhill) as their headquarters – even though the question “What Pub Next?” is no longer asked – such is the intoxicating nature of this fellowship, these rebel diehards continue to put on their club ties and gather for old time’s sake.
Escaping the icy gusts in Cornhill, I walked through Ball Court and discovered the eighteenth century edifice of Simpsons looming overhead, then I climbed down a windy stair to join the members of the “What Pub Next?” Club, who were merrily clinking tankards and celebrating as if Christmas had come already. So pervasive was the sense of mischief and fun, that whilst I could enjoy the experience offered by the “What Pub Next?” Club at once, appreciating the exact the nature of the organisation proved to be more elusive. Several original members squinted and strained when I asked them if they could remember when they first came along or if they could recall how it started. The genesis of the “What Pub Next?” Club is lost, it seems, in a haze of conviviality.
“I’m not sure anyone knows when it began,” queried ninety-one-year-old Douglas, whose daughters had dropped him off while they did their Christmas shopping. “It had to be a Bass pub, they had to serve draft beer,” interposed his friend “Ginger” helpfully, gesticulating with a sausage. “And we had to drink a spoonful of Worcestershire sauce as an initiation,” contributed Brian with a chuckle.
“By Jingo, let us have what we are here for!” exclaimed Pat authoritatively, the most senior member at ninety-two, reaching out for a mustard smothered sausage on a stick.“I know everyone here but don’t for a minute think that I can recall their names,” he informed me, “because somewhere along the way, I lost my memory – I can remember their name as long as as it’s Brian.” A comment which was the catalyst for general hilarity. “I only come here to make your lives happier, I don’t enjoy it,” he continued, adopting a stern tone, waving his hands around and asking rhetorically, “Can you enjoy life without laughing? Life’s far too serious not to be taken lightly.” It was a maxim that could easily be the Club motto.
Originating among employees of the Australia & New Zealand Bank who wanted to learn about British culture whilst posted to London before they returned to the antipodes, the “What Pub Next?” Club quickly became a social focus for hundreds of City workers in the nineteen-sixties. All that was required for membership was a tie – a tie that was ceremonially cut off with giant shears belonging to Mr True, the tailor at the Bell in Cannon St, if members left to return to their country of origin. These stumps of ties were nailed to wall in the cellar of Simpsons along with pairs of knickers acquired by undisclosed means, I was assured. A fact that was the cue to recall Sid Cumberland, who had his little finger cut off by mistake during the tie ceremony – though fortunately the surgeons at Barts were able to sew it on again and Sid returned safely to New Zealand with only a crooked digit as evidence of his misadventures in London. The late Ken Wickes is commemorated as president and founder of the “What Pub Next?” Club by a brass plate over the bar. “Every year he resigned and every year he was re-elected,” they told me affectionately.
By now, the port was being passed around in a pewter tankard and – with so few members of the Club left – it was circulating like a horse on a merry-go-round. As a consequence, the momentum and eloquence of the conversation accelerated too, so that the story of the WPNC trip to the Bass brewery and the account of the WPNC Morris dancing on the banks of the Stour passed me by. Yet I had grasped enough of an impression of the glorious history of the noble Club, enough to understand why they should all wish to keep meeting and celebrating for ever.
“I worked fifty years in the City and I’ve still got my bowler hat and brolly at home. I remember the first thing I did when I started work at the insurance exchange in 1962 was go and buy a bowler, “ Brian confided to me with a sentimental smile as he passed the Port back and forth – turning contemplative and pausing for a moment to ask, “Do they still wear bowler hats?”
Jean – “I have a garter made of a club tie, it only goes to my knee now but it used to go all the way up!”
The WPN club tie with its discreet logo is de rigeur on these occasions.
Jean Churcher, the celebrated raconteuse of Simpsons Chop House.
Quaffing the Port from a pewter tankard.
Happy Christmas from the members of the “What Pub Next?” Club!
Cheese on toast with Worcestershire Sauce is the traditional conclusion of proceedings at the WPN Club.
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Signs Of Old London
The little wooden midshipman outside Solomon Gillis’ chandlery, 157 Leadenhall St
Even though most of the signs of old London were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, a few created just after that date survive today in the City – anachronisms affixed to modern buildings, as if they were Penny Blacks stuck onto Jiffy padded envelopes. Yet in the Bishopsgate Institute archive, I found plenty of atmospheric pictures of curious stone plaques which lasted into the era of photography, only to be destroyed by the blitz and subsequent redevelopment.
It was Charles I who gave people the right to hang out signs as they pleased, when once they were restricted to innkeepers – “for the better finding out such citizens’ dwellings, shops, pubs or occupations, without impediment, molestation, or interruption to their heirs or successors.” An elaborate language of symbols quickly grew in the common understanding, such as a dragon for an apothecary, a sugar loaf for a grocer, a wheatsheaf for a baker, a frying pan for a confectioner, and – as still seen in Spitalfields today – a spool for a silk weaver.
As time went by, the meanings of the signs became more complex and arcane as shops changed ownership but retained the signs as identifiers of the buildings. James Maddox, the coffin maker at St Olaves had the symbol of three coffins and a sugarloaf, the sugarloaf because it was a former grocers and three coffins as his personal device. Opposite St Dunstan’s in Fleet St, a sign of three squirrels first put up by Henry Pinkley the goldsmith in 1649, was appropriated by the bankers who moved in afterwards, and this symbol of the three squirrels continued to be used by the National Westminster Bank until the mid-twentieth century.
Lombard St was once famed for its array of magnificent signs, and eighteenth century prints show quaint symbols hung upon elaborate wrought iron brackets outside every single premises in Cornhill and Cheapside. Anticipating our modern concern with brands and logos, these devices suited the city before streets were numbered and when many of the populace did not read. But during heavy weather and in strong wind, these monstrous signs creaked and groaned – and, in 1718, a huge sign in Bride St collapsed killing four people and taking part of the shop front with it. Such was the severity of the problem of the forest of hanging signs crowding the streets of London, that a commission was appointed in 1762 to take them all down and fix them onto the shopfronts – thereby creating the modern notion of the fascia sign declaring the identity of the premises.
“The Commissioners are empowered to take down and remove all signs and emblems, used to denote the trade, occupation or calling – any sign posts, sign boards, sign irons, balconies, penthouses, show boards, spouts and gutters projecting into the streets etc, and all other encroachments and projections whatsoever in the said cities and liberties – and cause the same, or such parts thereof as they think fit to be affixed or placed on the front of the houses, shops, alehouses or buildings to which they belong.”
Street numbers were only in partial use at the beginning of the eighteenth century, becoming widespread by the end of the century as a standardised system to identify properties. Although many were reluctant to give up the language of signs and symbols, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the signs were commonly replaced by the familiar pattern of a board with signwriting above the shopwindow. Most of the decorative signs to found in the City of London today are pastiches created a hundred years ago as nostalgic tributes to a bygone age, though two favourites of mine are the golden owl on the House of Fraser, facing South over London Bridge, and the figure of Atlas holding up the globe on the exterior of Barclays in Cheapside.
Just three signs remain in common usage, the barbers’ pole (with its bloody red and white stripe recalling when barbers were also surgeons), the chemists’ pestle and mortar, and the pawnbrokers’ three balls – originally blue, they turned gold in the early nineteenth century and are said to be based upon the crest of the Dukes of Medici, itself derived from coins taken by Crusaders from Byzantium.
At the sign of the Fox in Lombard St.
At the sign of the Three Kings in Lombard St.
At the sign of the Half Moon in Holywell St, off the Strand.
A physician.
A locksmith.
At the sign of the Lamb & Flag
The grasshopper, symbol of industry and personal emblem of Sir Thomas Gresham who founded the Royal Exchange, is to be found all over the City of London even today.
At the sign of Three Squirrels in Fleet St.
At the sign of the Bull & Mouth in Aldgate.
This was the symbol of the Cutlers.
Child’s bank at the sign of the Marigold in Temple Bar.
In Ely Place, off Hatton Garden – this mitre came from an episcopal palace and was set into the wall of a public house.
The maid of the Mercer’s company is still to be seen in Corbet Court off Gracechurch St.
An old sign that remains in situ outside St Paul’s tube station.“When ye have sought the Citty round, yet still this is the highest ground. August 27th 1698”
“- an old sign affixed to a modern building, like a Penny Black stuck onto a Jiffy padded envelope.”
Archive photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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