Marian Monas’ Portraits
Marian Monas has been painting her neighbours in Cable St, inspiring Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie to visit the subjects and photograph them with their pictures. You can see these paintings in a joint exhibition alongside recent pictures of France by Doreen Fletcher displayed for two days in a floating gallery at Hermitage Moorings, Wapping, this Wednesday 2nd December 10:30-5:30pm & Thursday December 3rd 10:30-7.30pm
Peter Duggan, Waterman & Lighterman
Terry Duncan, Compositor – ‘I lived in Glamis Rd as a child then I grew up and went to live in Dagenham but now I’ve come back to Cable St’
Mary Flanagan, Home Carer – ‘I was born in Wapping and have lived nine years in Cable St. I cared for my mother at home until she was ninety-five.’
Terry Page, West Ham Supporter – ‘I’ve lived forty years in Cable St. I was an electrician at Royal London Hospital then Watney Mann Brewery in Whitechapel and now I do bulk clearance.’
Joe Parker, ex-landlord of the Old House At Home in Watney St
Alicia Morrison, Housekeeper in the West End – ‘I came here from the Philippines thirty years ago and I’ve done a lot of jobs in hospitals and hotels, anything that’s legal’
Harry Parlour – ‘I’m from Bow’
Peter Duggan, Lighterman & Waterman
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Shopping In Old London
Butcher, Hoxton St, Shoreditch, c.1910
D0 Black Friday and Cyber Monday fill you with overwhelming feelings of lethargy, apathy and disdain? Why not consider visiting the shops of old London instead? There are no supermarkets, malls or pop-ups, but plenty of other diversions to captivate the eager shopper.
These glass slides once used for magic lantern shows by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute offer the ideal consumer experience for a reluctant browser such as myself since, as this crowd outside a butcher in Hoxton a century ago illustrates, shopping in London has always been a fiercely competitive sport.
Instead of braving the crowds and emptying our wallets, we can enjoy window shopping in old London safe from the temptation to pop inside and buy anything – because most of these shops do not exist anymore.
Towering over the shopping landscape of a century ago were monumental department stores, beloved destinations for the passionate shopper just as the City churches were once spiritual landmarks to pilgrims and the devout. Of particular interest to me are the two huge posters for Yardley that you can see in the Strand and on Shaftesbury Avenue, incorporating the Lavender Seller from Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London, originally painted in the seventeen nineties. There is an intriguing paradox in this romanticised image of a street seller of two centuries earlier, used to promote a brand of twentieth century cosmetics that were manufactured in a factory in Stratford and sold through a sleek modernist flagship store, Yardley House, in the West End.
Wych St, lined with medieval shambles that predated the Fire of London and famous for its dusty old bookshops and printsellers is my kind of shopping street, demolished in 1901 to construct the Aldwych. Equally, I am fascinated by the notion of cramming commerce into church porches, such as the C. Burrell, the Dealer in Pickled Tongues & Sweetbreads who used to operate from the gatehouse of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield and E.H. Robinson, the optician, through whose premises you once entered St Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate. Note that a toilet saloon was conveniently placed next door for those were nervous at the prospect of getting their eyes tested.
So let us set out together to explore the shops of old London. We do not need a shopping basket. We do not need a list. We do not even need money. We are shopping for wonders and delights. And we shall not have to carry anything home. This is my kind of shopping.
Optician built into St Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate, c.1910
Decorators and Pencil Works, Great Queen St, c.1910
Newsagent and Hairdresser at 152 Strand, c.1930
Dairy and ‘Sacks, bags, ropes, twines, tents, canvas, etc.’ Shop, c. 1940
Liberty of London, c.1910
Regent St, c.1920.
Harrods of Knightsbridge, c.1910
The Fashion Shoe Shop, c.1920 “Repetiton is the soul of advertising”
Evsns Tabacconist, Haymarket, c.1910
F. W. Woolworth & Co. Ltd. 3d and 6d store, c.1910
Finnigan’s of New Bond St, gold- & silversmiths, c.1910
Achille Serre,Cleaner & Dyers, c. 1920
Old Bond St. c. 1910
W.H.Daniel, Cow Keeper, White Hart Yard, c.1910
John Barker & Co. Ltd., High St Kensington, c.1910
Tobacconist, Glovers and Shoe Shop, c.1910
Ford Showroom, c.1925
Civil Service Supply Association, c. 1930
Swears & Wells Ltd, Ladies Modes, c. 1925
Glave’s Hosiery, c 1920
Shopping in Wych St, c. 1910 – note the sign of the crescent moon.
Horne Brothers Ltd, c. 1920
Tobacconist, High Holborn, c. 1910
Yardley House, c. 1930
Peter Robinson, Oxford St, c. 1920
Confectionery Shop, corner of Greek St and Shaftesbury Ave, c. 1930
Bookseller, Wych St, c. 1890
Pawnbroker, 201 Seven Sisters Rd, Finsbury Park, c. 1910
Bookseller & Tobacconist and Dealer in Pickled Tongues at the entrance to St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, c. 1910
Oxford Circus, c. 1920
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Introducing The Cries Of London
In anticipation of publication of CRIES OF LONDON, it is my pleasure to present this extract from the book. I hope you can join me for the LAUNCH next Thursday at Waterstones Piccadilly or the CONCERT next Friday at Shoreditch Church or the PEDLARS CONFERENCE next Saturday at Bishopsgate Insitute. We shall be giving away posters of this drawing by George Scharf of London boardmen & women in the eighteen-thirties to all at these events.
London boardmen & women by George Scharf © British Museum (Click this image to enlarge)
The dispossessed and those with no other income were always able to cry their wares for sale in London. By turning their presence into performance with their Cries, they claimed the streets as their theatre – winning the lasting affections of generations of Londoners and embodying the soul of the city in the popular imagination. Thus, through time, the culture of the capital’s street Cries became integral to the distinctive identity of London.
Undertaking interviews with stallholders in Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Columbia Road and other East End markets in recent years led me to consider the cultural legacy of urban street trading. While this phenomenon might appear transitory and fleeting, I discovered a venerable tradition in the Cries of London. Yet even this genre of popular illustrated prints, which began in the seventeenth century, was itself preceded by verse such as London Lackpenny attributed to the fifteenth century poet John Lydgate that drew upon an earlier oral culture of hawkers’ Cries. From medieval times, the great number of Cries in London became recognised by travellers throughout Europe as indicative of the infinite variety of life in the British capital.
Given the former ubiquity of the Cries of London, the sophistication of many of the images, their significance as social history, and their existence as almost the only portraits of working people in London through four centuries, it astonishes me that there has been little attention paid to this subject and so I have set out to reclaim this devalued cultural tradition.
I take my cue from Samuel Pepys who pasted three sets of Cries into his albums of London & Westminster in a chronological sequence spanning a century, thereby permitting an assessment of the evolution of the style of the prints as well as social change in the capital in his era. In my book, I have supplemented these with another dozen series published over the following centuries which trace the development of the Cries right into our own time. My policy has been to collate a personal selection of those that delight me, those that speak most eloquently of the life of the street and those created by artists who demonstrated an affinity with the Criers.
Through the narrow urban thoroughfares and byways, hawkers announced their wares by calling out a repeated phrase that grew familiar to their customers, who learned to recognise the Cries of those from whom they bought regularly. By nature of repetition, these Cries acquired a musical quality as hawkers improvised upon the sounds of the words, evolving phrases into songs. Commonly, Cries also became unintelligible to those who did not already know what was being sold. Sometimes the outcome was melodic and lyrical, drawing the appreciation of bystanders, and at other times discordant and raucous as hawkers strained their voices to be heard across the longest distance.
Over time, certain Cries became widely adopted, and it is in written accounts and songbooks that we find the earliest records. Print collections of pictures of Criers also became known as ‘Cries’ and although the oldest set in London dates from around 1600, there are those from Paris which predate these by a century. Characteristically, the Cries represented peripatetic street traders or pedlars, yet other street characters were also included from the start. At first, the Cries were supplemented by the bellman and the town crier, but then preachers, beggars, musicians, performers were added as the notion of the Cries of London became expanded by artists and print sellers seeking greater novelty through elaborating upon the original premise.
Before the age of traffic, the streets of London offered a common public space for all manner of activity, trading, commerce, sport, entertainment and political rallies. Yet this arena of possibility, which is the primary source of the capital’s cultural vitality has also invited the consistent attention of those who seek policing and social control upon the premise of protecting citizens from each other, guarding against crime and preventing civil unrest. It suits the interest of those who would rule the city that, in London, street traders have always been perceived as equivocal characters with an identity barely distinguished from vagrants. Thus the suspicion that their itinerant nature facilitated thieving and illicit dealing, or that women might be selling their bodies as as well as their legitimate wares has never been dispelled.
Like the internet, the notion of the street as a space where people may communicate and do business freely can be profoundly threatening to some. It is a tension institutionalised in this country through the issuing of licences to traders, criminalising those denied such official endorsement, while on the continent of Europe the right to sell in the street is automatically granted to every citizen. Depending upon your point of view, the itinerants are those who bring life to the city through their occupation of its streets or they are outcasts who have no place in a developed modern urban environment.
When I interviewed Tony Purser on his last afternoon after fifty-two years selling flowers outside Fenchurch Street Station in the City of London, he admitted to me that as a boy he assisted his father Alfie, and, before licences were granted in 1962, they were both regularly arrested. Their stock was confiscated, they were charged three shillings and spent the night in the cells at Bishopsgate Police Station, before going back to trade again next day.
I was told that in Brick Lane, until recently, it was possible for casual traders to buy five pounds’ worth of parking tickets from a machine as a day’s licence but, when this was withdrawn those who had always sold their possessions on the pavement on Sunday mornings found themselves on the wrong side of the regulations. Prior to the opening of a shopping mall of sea containers for international brands on the former Bishopsgate Goods Yard, I witnessed fly-pitchers in their eighties and nineties turfed off the pavement by dubious enforcement officers who pilfered the best of their wares.
Yet in this part of London, the heartland of markets and street trading, there is a long-held understanding, that those who have no job, no shop, or stall have always been able to sell things in the street and make a living for themselves. I know several people who spend their days searching dustbins in the East End and make a living by selling their finds on Brick Lane each Sunday, and students who sell off their clothes and textbooks each week to buy groceries. I met a man who sold baked potatoes outside the Tower of London and opened a restaurant that became a chain. I know a spoon carver who sat on the pavement carving spoons until he saved the deposit to rent a shop. Last year, I interviewed a recently-divorced electrician who had his tools taken away and became a Directions Man, making an income by standing outside Liverpool Street Station and showing visitors the way.
Street trading proposes an interpretation of the ancient myth of London as a city paved with gold that is not without truth. Many large British corporate retailers including Tesco, started by Jack Cohen in 1919, Marks & Spencer, started by Michael Marks in 1884, owe their origin to single stalls in markets – emphasising the value of street trading to wider economic development. Meanwhile, Oxford Street Association seeks to rid the pavement of souvenir sellers between the large department stores and the current trend towards the privatisation of public spaces sees the increasing introduction of bylaws restricting trading solely to those legitimised by the property owners.
In particular, it was the story of Tony Hawkins, a licensed pedlar who was arrested eighty-seven times for legally selling caramelised peanuts in the West End of London that inspired me to pursue the history and politics of London street trading. Tony told me that on each occasion he was beaten up and had his stock confiscated even though he had the right to trade under the Pedlars Act of 1871. I recognise his experience as a snapshot of the contemporary situation for hawkers and also as testimony to the ongoing struggle of street traders, who have been consistently marginalised by the authorities in London through the centuries yet managed to thrive and endure regardless, through heroic tenacity and strength of will.
In the twentieth century, the Cries of London found their way onto cigarette cards, chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, tea towels, silk scarves, dinner services and, famously, tins of Yardley talcum powder from 1912 onwards, becoming divorced from the reality they once represented as time went by, copied and recopied by different artists.
Yet the sentimentally cheerful tones applied by hand to prints that were contrived to appeal to the casual purchaser, chime with the resilience required by traders selling in the street. And it is our respect for their spirit and resourcefulness which may account for the long lasting popularity of these poignant images of the self-respecting poor who turned their trades into performances. Even now, it is impossible to hear the cries of market traders and newspaper sellers without succumbing to their spell, as the last reverberations of a great cacophonous symphony echoing across time and through the streets of London.
Surely none can resist the romance of the Cries of London and the raffish appeal of the liberty of vagabondage, of those who had no indenture or task master, and who travelled wide throughout the city, witnessing the spectacle of its streets, speaking with a wide variety of customers, and seeing life. In the densely-populated neighbourhoods, it was the itinerants’ cries that marked the times of day and announced the changing seasons of the year. Before the motorcar, their calls were a constant of street life in London. Before advertising, their songs were the jingles that announced of the latest, freshest produce or appealing gimcrack. Before radio, television and internet, they were the harbingers of news, and gossip, and novelty ballads. These itinerants had nothing but they had possession of the city.
I write these words just a stone’s throw from Brick Lane, where Lionel Begleiter grew up in a first floor flat on the corner of Princelet Street in the nineteen-thirties. Although I do not know on which corner he lived, there is one building with a small window where I can imagine Lionel, as a little boy, leaning out to wonder at the Cries in Brick Lane. For, as ‘Lionel Bart’ in 1960, he wrote Oliver!, the only enduring theatrical dramatisation of Charles Dickens’ work, integrating both music hall and folk song into the stage musical with spectacular success. His setting of Cries of London, as “Who will buy this wonderful morning?” remains the most evocative musical manifestation in the collective consciousness.
I leave you with the words of most celebrated Crier in our own century – Muhammad Shahid Nazir, the ‘One Pound Fish Man’ of Queen’s Market in Upton Park – as an example of the acclaim and status that Criers can win in London through their wit, ingenuity and performance skill. Nazir became an internet sensation with fourteen million views on Youtube, won a recording contract and is now a pop star in Pakistan.
“Come on ladies, come on ladies
One pound fish
Have-a, have-a look
One pound fish
Very, very good, very, very cheap
One pound fish
Six for five pound
One pound each”
The Cries of London have taught me the essential truth of London street traders down through the centuries, and it is one that still holds today – they do not need your sympathy, they only want your respect, and your money.
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CLICK TO BUY A SIGNED COPY OF CRIES OF LONDON FOR £20
Richard Boothby of Fretwork introduces next Friday’s concert in Shoreditch Church
“In 1530 London’s population was around 50,000, yet by 1605 it had swelled nearly five times to 230,000 souls, becoming one of the largest cities in the world and a thriving hub of commerce and wealth. If you wanted to sell your stuff, then London was the place to do it. But most people could not afford a shop, so they sold their wares on the street and the way they attracted passing customers was to shout out – loudly – what it was they were offering.
The Cries were as old as London itself but, by the end of the sixteenth century, they reached a deafening cacophony. As composers recognised the potential, a brief yet wonderful fashion arose for writing music where the rise and fall of these distinctive Cries were set for voices against the backdrop of a viol consort. Several composers joined in this Cries-fest – including Richard Deering, William Cobbold, Thomas Ravenscroft and, most famously, Orlando Gibbons.”
The Gentle Author introduces a concert of music from the songbooks of the Cries next Friday 4th December at Shoreditch Church, presented by SPITALFIELDS MUSIC and performed by Fretwork and Red Byrd. CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS
Cries of London 1600, reproduced from Samuel Pepys’ Album © Magdalene College, Cambridge (Click this image to enlarge)
William Matthews, Electrician, Waiter & Gym Instructor
Several years ago, Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Alex Pink experienced a life-changing head injury and, in the first of two stories published with Headway East London, he collaborates with fellow-survivor William Matthews to present this personal testimony of discovery and recovery.
“When a friend offered me a job as an electrician’s mate, doing installation, I loved it straight away. The company was based in Essex but the job was in St James’ Park. It was like I’d won the lottery. Down in Dagenham, it was a damp and depressing but this was a different world. I walked past Scotland Yard on the way to work, right next door to the Channel 4 offices. Opposite the block we were working on, there was a school and you would see them all turning up in their school uniform and a lot of them would be on time. It was nice to see it done correctly.
The money was unbelievable, I was there about a year and a half and I earned £1,400 a week sometimes. It was not like work, it was more of an adventure. We would go to work, have breakfast, we would have a beer after breakfast – this is not a great advert for electricians, is it? You would try and get your job done by three o’clock, so you could all get in the pub. There was a real family feeling which I loved.
It was quite easy to get hold of cocaine in the pubs. I would be so tired because I had to leave home at half four in the morning and I went to college at night, so that was when it really helped. It was widely available and, as soon as I had a bit, it gave me the burst of energy I needed. By this time, I was confident socially and I could do what I wanted. I thought everything was going well but obviously it was not, because I was addicted to cocaine.
When I had the stroke, I came home late on Sunday and went straight to bed. Mum had a migraine on the Monday, so she did not go to work. She checked in on me in the morning and I was sleeping but, when she checked back later in the afternoon, she knew there was something wrong with me. I was semi-conscious, rolling my eyes and moving my arms.
Discharge Report: William was admitted to hospital on 3rd December 2001, suffering from cocaine induced encephalopathy and remained unconscious for two weeks.
I could not walk or talk or eat, so I had a drip up my nose and a feeding tube in my belly, which I pulled out twice. I had gone back to being a baby – I had to learn to walk and talk and breathe again. I spent six months in the rehab unit. The left side of my body was most affected, so at first I could not even stand. My throat muscles were weak so I could not swallow easily or control my saliva. I was beginning life my again. I was eating a liquidised diet through the feeding tube and my friends used to wind me up, because every time they saw it get pumped in they would say ‘Oh, look at that chicken. Look at that crispy duck.’ Obviously I would get peed off with them so I would think ‘Shut up’ but I could not express that. I was laughing but I could not really laugh, so I just squeal. My voice box was not working which meant I sounded like a hyena.
I was surrounded by old people, because strokes generally happen to older people, so they put me in a separate bedroom. The World Cup was on and other patients, doctors, nurses used to come in and watch the football with me. It was nice because we became like a family. There was this old boy, he could hardly walk or talk or breathe, but he went into the toilet and had a cigarette. He had two women on the go. Seriously, he was in hospital and had two women and they came in at different times. I thought ‘This is ridiculous, like a comedy. How can anyone be a player in that situation?’
The hospital team got me on my feet and the occupational therapist, physiotherapist and speech therapist were really good with me. The speech therapist got me into the residential rehab centre and my cousin helped as well – I am very grateful to them. I loved the residential rehab, I thought it was brilliant – like a college or youth club. They would take me swimming and on outings, and I was doing to Maths, English, Art Therapy and Physiotherapy. I learned to read and write better, because I had time to sit down and do things, whereas at school I would always be rushing off.
I learnt to cook, which was great because I had never cooked before and I love cooking now. They would make me cook for three or four and I had to work out the ingredients and buy them from the supermarket. You would not believe how fatigued you can get from that, when your fitness and energy is low, I would come back from the supermarket and sleep for an hour.
Discharge Report/ July 2003/ Cognitive difficulties – William has difficulty sustaining, switching and dividing his attention between tasks. William has an anterograde memory deficit (difficulty remembering new information after his brain injury) and also visual and auditory memory deficits. His ability to plan, think flexibly, sequence and make decisions is impaired, and he is impulsive at times. A Support Worker has been commissioned to provide him with daily support as required, and to help him with tasks such as enrolling at college and ensuring he receives the benefits to which he is entitled.
Unfortunately, after spending all that money to make me independent, the system failed when I left the residential centre. Something went wrong and I was left defenceless. A social worker told me the only way I could get a place to live was to go homeless, which I did and they took me to this hostel full of single parents and drunks. It was a scary moment. My mum arrived with me and, when she left, I sat down and cried.
After six weeks, I went to look at a council bedsit and it was horrible – damp and small. The bathroom was dirty with limescale and there was a tiny old kitchen so I said ‘I don’t want it.’ But the social worker told me ‘You’re at the top of the queue, but if you don’t take this property you’ll go down the priority list and you won’t get offered nothing.’ So I took it and I decorated it, I put up some blinds with my friends. Basically, they were saying to me, ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’
My whole experience in that place was rotten and I was there for eight years. I had no prospects. I was very shy. By which I mean, I was too scared to get on the bus. At that time, my mobility and my speech was much worse than now and I walked with a little stick like Yoda.
Things changed when I saw an advert for a neuro-linguistic programming course. My mum paid for me to go. It was a ten day course and I loved it – I went from being a recluse to actually being sociable. There were a lot of business people there, people with a positive attitude. That opened my eyes to a new life, I think, and I became determined to move out of the bedsit.
I must have bid on council properties about forty or fifty times. You never get anywhere because the only way you can move up the council list is if you have a medical report – you speak to other people and learn how the system works. After eight years of being stuck, as soon as I got a doctor’s note I moved within five days.
While I was in the bedsit, the gym became my life. At first, I went every day just to take a shower, but then I started to work out a lot and I treated it as my job, instead of sitting at home. Phil the fireman, an instructor, started training me and became a friend as well. I looked up to him, he was a good fella. As I used to be very fit before, I had loads of body fat on me from being in hospital but when I started to burn it off, my muscles started coming through again and I was like ‘Hello, who is this?!’
When I came out of rehab, I said to the social worker, ‘I don’t want to rely on benefits, I want to go back to work.’ I was so adamant that I would achieve it. She said ‘Well, you need to claim benefits, you can’t live otherwise.’ It made me feel I could not do any better and that affected me at the time.
I signed up to a back to work programme and started doing a job where I worked a few hours as a one-armed waiter in a sushi bar. That was quite funny because my walking and talking were not very good, so people could not understand me that well and, if I was there two days in a row, my brain could not function because of the fatigue. Taking the job meant I had to give up my benefits and my rent and council tax went to full price, so I needed to earn £300 a week to pay for everything. In fact, the job did not work out and I had only done a few hours’ work, so I had acquired over a thousand pounds of debt which I am still paying off.
I tried getting back into work through volunteering at the gym. I like training people and I am good at it. I qualified as an instructor in 2006 and I got to know the manager at a gym in Essex. We got on alright and she said ‘I will give you a job here, if you can prove it to me.’ I went on a trial period of training people and then she said ‘Fine, you have the job.’
I worked there for a couple of months but I could not cope with the fatigue, both physical and emotional. So my quality of life, which funnily enough was meant to get better through working, just went downhill. After a few months, I had to accept I just could not handle it and I gave up the job.
When you start a conversation with ‘I’ve had a stroke,’ everyone feels sorry for you. As soon as you mention the drugs, they think,‘Well, it was your own fault.’ I take responsibility for my actions but, if you keep blaming yourself, you will never move forward. This injury, this situation, has made me grow up so quickly. It is an experience I would not have wanted but it has made me a more complete person, I have become wise for a young lad (I call myself young still).
I train some guys with brain injuries at the YMCA. It is really nice because I can give them my knowledge and what I have learnt but, at the end of the day, I think it would be nice to get a career outside of the gym. Each time I try to go back to work and then have to stop, I go through the process of getting benefits again. Each time, it takes a little bit more out of you, because you want to be positive but you are confronted by the things you cannot do.
The only way of changing my situation is through more knowledge. I have realised that education has to come before everything else. I am working towards getting my Maths and English GCSE so I can study at University. It is a slow process but I have put my whole life on hold for it.
I would like to move out of where I live. In an affluent area, you feel alive and the people you meet have got energy. When you live in a deprived area, the standard of living is low in lots of different ways. You have to travel a long way to get anywhere. You get on the bus and it is packed, and people are arguing about whose bag is in the way because they are basically angry and frustrated.
I just want the same things everybody does. I want to earn enough to support a family – I have always wanted to have kids. I want to own my own house and have a career. I do not want to be in this system where you get a taster of things, through work schemes and volunteer placements. A taster’s not enough, I want the real thing.”
“I just want the same things everybody does”
William Matthews – “It is an experience I would not have wanted but it has made me a more complete person.”
Photographs copyright © Alex Pink
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Forgotten Corners Of Old London
Who knows what you might find lurking in the forgotten corners of old London? Like this lonely old waxwork of Charles II who once adorned a side aisle of Westminster Abbey, peering out through a haze of graffiti engraved upon his pane by mischievous tourists with diamond rings.
As one with a pathological devotion to walking through London’s sidestreets and byways, seeking to avoid the main roads wherever possible, these glass slides of the forgotten corners of London – used long ago by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute – hold a special appeal for me. I have elaborate routes across the city which permit me to walk from one side to the other exclusively by way of the back streets and I discover all manner of delights neglected by those who solely inhabit the broad thoroughfares.
And so it is with many of these extraordinary pictures that show us the things which usually nobody bothers to photograph. There are a lot of glass slides of the exterior of Buckingham Palace in the collection but, personally, I am much more interested in the roof space above Richard III’s palace of Crosby Hall that once stood in Bishopsgate, and in the unlikely paraphernalia which accumulated in the crypt of the Carmelite Monastery or the Cow Shed at the Tower of London, a hundred years ago. These pictures satisfy my perverse curiosity to visit the spaces closed off to visitors at historic buildings, in preference to seeing the public rooms.
Within these forgotten corners, there are always further mysteries to be explored. I wonder who pitched a teepee in the undergrowth next to the moat at Fulham Palace in 192o. I wonder if that is a cannon or a chimney pot abandoned in the crypt at the Carmelite monastery. I wonder why that man had a bucket, a piece of string and a plank inside the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. I wonder what those fat books were next to the stove in the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries’ shop. I wonder who was pulling that girl out of the photograph in Woolwich Gardens. I wonder who put that dish in the roof of Crosby Hall. I wonder why Charles II had no legs. The pictures set me wondering.
It is what we cannot know that endows these photographs with such poignancy. Like errant pieces from lost jigsaws, they inspire us to imagine the full picture that we shall never be party to.
Tiltyard Gate, Eltham Palace, c. 1930
Refuse collecting at London Zoo, c. 1910
Passage in Highgate, c. 1910
Westminster Dust Carts, c. 1910
The Jewel Tower, Westminster, 1921
Fifteenth century brickwork at Charterhouse Wash House, c1910
Middle Temple Lane, c. 1910
Carmelite monastery crypt, c. 1910
The Moat at Fulham Palace, c. 1920
Clifford’s Inn, c. 1910
Top of inner dome at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1920
Apothecaries’ Hall Quadrangle, c. 1920
Worshipful Company of Apothecaries’ Shop, c.1920
Unidentified destroyed building near St Paul’s, c. 1940
Merchant Taylors’ Hall, c. 1920
Crouch End Old Baptist Chapel, c. 1900
Woolwich Gardens, c. 1910
The roof of Crosby Hall, Richard III’s palace in Bishopsgate , c. 1910
Refreshment stall in St James’ Park, c. 1910
River Wandle at Wandsworth, c. 1920
Corridor at Battersea Rise House, c. 1900
Tram emerging from the Kingsway Tunnel, c. 1920
Between the interior and exterior domes at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1920
Fossilised tree trunk on Tooting Common, c. 1920
St Dunstan-in-the-East, 1911
Cow shed at the Queen’s House, Tower of London, c. 1910
Boundary marks for St Benet Gracechurch, St Andrew Hubbard and St Dionis Backchurch in Talbot Court, c. 1910
Lincoln’s Inn gateway seen from Old Hall, c. 1910
St Bride’s Fleet St, c. 1920
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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All Change At Maggs Bros Ltd
Tomorrow, Maggs Bros Ltd will be closing the door after seventy-eight years in Berkeley Sq prior to opening new premises nearby, but I managed to cross the threshold in time to explore this astonishing five-storey Georgian mansion stacked with rare books and manuscripts.
The green carpet is as springy beneath your feet as moss in the deep forest, compounding the wonder of this house of arcane marvels and delights of a literary nature presented in palatial rooms furnished with fine marble fireplaces and elaborately-decorated plaster ceilings. Beneath the garden, a vast basement is filled with bookshelves of further treasures. Once the residence of George Canning, Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister, these premises also enjoy a reputation as London’s most-haunted house.
A long line of photographs ascends the stairs, commencing with Uriah Maggs who founded the family business in 1853 at the foot and culminating with Maggs of recent years at the head. Former generations bought and sold the Codex Sinaiticus, two Gutenberg Bibles, a copy of Canterbury Tales, the first book printed by Caxton in England, and – notoriously – Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis.
Although Maggs is one of the oldest established firms of book dealers in existence, the current incumbent, Ed Maggs, bears his legacy with an appealing levity. ‘It came as a surprise to me to be a bookseller,’ he admitted in the seclusion of the basement tearoom. ‘I was going to be Reggae star but that didn’t work out and I had nothing else to do. So I came here in 1979, when I was twenty-one years old, and I sabotaged the accounts department and then the packing department, before I was apprenticed to a wonderfully curmudgeonly old bookseller by the name of Bill Lent, and I realised what a good job it was.’
‘We have twenty-one years left on the lease, but rather than stay and let it dwindle, we’ve sold it so we can buy a permanent home,’ he explained, ‘The heartbreaking thing is leaving the accretion of details that will have no meaning to anyone else.’ And he indicated an old catch upon a cupboard. ‘I’ve been looking at that for thirty-five years,’ he confessed in tender sentiment.
‘I always say my role is like being a Mahoot sat upon a tilt elephant that knows exactly where it wants to go,’ continued Ed, a man who cherishes his metaphors, ‘But now we are changing direction, it is like the Sultan’s Elephant, a simulacrum controlled by a group of people who need to work both independently and in unison.’
Ed’s son, Ben Maggs, sat across the table listening to his father as he sipped his tea and nibbled a biscuit thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps it was lack of ambition, but I never expected to do anything else – it was a fact of life that I would be a bookseller,’ he declared with a singular level-headedness in contrast to his father’s thwarted Reggae ambitions. ‘I knew I would be a bookseller and I became one.’
Ben Maggs, the youngest bookseller in a line that began with Uriah Maggs in 1853
The line of Maggs ascends the staircase
Stairs ascending to the haunted room
Below stairs
In the basement tea room
In the stables at the rear
MAGGS BROS LTD new shop opens 46 Curzon St, Mayfair, W1J 7UH tomorrow
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Annie Macpherson & The Gutter Children
Introducing her talk at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green tomorrow night, Contributing Writer Sarah Wise (author of The Blackest Streets) considers the work of one of the East End’s less-known Victorian philanthropists, Annie Macpherson. Click here to book a ticket.
Spitalfields Nipper by Horace Warner
In 1866, London’s fourth and final major cholera epidemic arrived, killing five and a half thousand Londoners. Out of that public health disaster emerged three hugely influential East London charitable bodies – the Salvation Army, Dr Barnardo’s, and the less-renowned Annie Macpherson Home of Industry. Miss Macpherson was an evangelical Scottish Presbyterian who set up a large-scale programme of shipping London’s orphans and street children across the Atlantic for new lives in Canada.
Born in 1833, Miss Macpherson arrived in London in 1862 and joined a loose-knit group of wealthy evangelicals involved in assisting the destitute. In February 1869, she rented a warehouse at 60 Commercial St in Spitalfields which had formerly been put to use as a cholera ‘hospital’ by the Sisters of Mercy, the Church of England sisterhood. She called her refuge for children ‘The Bee Hive’ (later also referring to it as ‘The Home of Industry’). The building is still there, on the southern corner of Commercial St and Flower & Dean St.
Miss Macpherson found herself on the edge of one of the most deprived pockets of the East End – she estimated that four people each week starved to death in the surrounding streets and official figures confirm her estimate. In 1869, 154,000 Londoners were reliant on parish ‘welfare’ relief (out of a population of 3.9 million), but many thousands never came forward for help. Estimates of London children living rough are as high as 30,000, and one such individual, Maggie Fritz, aged twelve, arrived at The Bee Hive one night close to midnight. She was brought in by a girl even younger who could not bear to see homeless Maggie sleeping night after night on a doorstep. The final straw had been witnessing other homeless girls kicking Maggie so they could take the doorstep to sleep on. Maggie was freezing, wet and hungry, with a filthy tear-stained face and matted hair. Miss Macpherson took her in and trained her to become a housemaid.
Elsewhere in her notes, Miss Macpherson refers to a boy she took in named Hugh, whose widowed mother had three other children, another on the way, an aged mother and a learning disabled eighteen-year-old-sister, all to provide for from her pitiful wages as a cigar-maker.
Another lad, named ‘Punch’, about ten, was discovered one night by Miss Macpherson, asleep in a barrel at Billingsgate Market alongside his dog, Little Dosser. Punch made a living of sorts by doing acrobatic tricks and ventriloquism in East End gin palaces.
Annie Macpherson’s approach to charity was to offer food, shelter and some kind of industrial or domestic training to children – initially boys, but later also girls, wives and mothers. Among the skills for which she offered training at The Bee Hive were tailoring and shoe-mending for the boys, and sewing and domestic service for girls and women. On Sundays, after the children had a breakfast of bread and treacle and a mug of coffee, Miss Macpherson would lead them up Commercial St and under the Wheler St arch to the animal and bird fair at Club Row, where they played the harmonium and sang rousing hymns. Over the next thirty years, Macpherson and her Bee Hive boys and girls became a noted feature of this part of the Bethnal Green Rd.
For Annie Macpherson, Satan was no mere figure of speech – in her eyes, the Devil literally haunted slum areas, and the exploitation and human misery that she witnessed were His work. These were districts, she wrote ‘where Satan reigns openly, in which ‘the subtle deceiver’ would continually put obstacles in her way — which was the way of the Lord. Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green were, in Annie’s words, ‘the Enemy’s territory.’
Years of personal observation of the malfunctioning labour market and the appalling housing shortage prompted her to write ‘God is watching the grasping capitalists and the oppressors of the poor, the grinding taskmasters who cannot wring another farthing out of the toilers.’ Yet, in her view, politics was not the arena in which social evil should be fought. Instead, evangelical revivalists regarded such mass poverty as the forerunner to the Apocalypse. As Scripture foretold, the world had to be in ruins before the Messiah returns to establish His kingdom. These things were divinely ordained and, though the alleviation of human suffering was a Christian’s purpose, it was only divine power that could right all wrongs and mete out appropriate punishments.
Miss Macpherson was a believer in the controversial practice of emigrationism — transporting of poor British children to far-flung imperial colonies for re-settlement. Such schemes were tried earlier in the century but abandoned, largely because of worries about potential labour shortages in Britain, but also because of the risks of abuse and neglect for unsupervised youngsters sent halfway around the globe. However, the cholera crisis of 1866, together with a run of bad harvests, bitter winters and a recession saw the government change its mind. A number of charitable bodies were permitted to send both workhouse and street children abroad to work — unpaid — as either farm labourers or domestic servants. By the time of her death in 1904, Annie Macpherson had exported over 12,000 London children to Canada.
By 1874, worrying reports began to appear in the Canadian press about English street children who had run away or been dismissed by their employers, and who were to be found living rough, engaged in petty crime or even in jail.
The government sent over an inspector in 1875. He was horrified by the lack of follow-up inspection on the part of Miss Macpherson and other emigrating agencies. Without questioning Miss Macpherson’s integrity, the inspector criticised her scheme, among others, for its naïve trust in human nature, placing children with scarcely-vetted Canadian families. The children’s lives, he wrote, were ‘hard and lonely… the little emigrants have been set afloat, and too many of them left to paddle their own canoes.’
Artist and illustrator George Cruikshank was another, early, critic of child emigration. In his pamphlet, ‘Our Gutter Children’, he declared the ‘transportation of innocent…children a disgrace to the Christian world.’ His illustration showed small infants being shovelled up out of the London gutter and into a cart, for export, ‘like so much guano, or like so many cattle for a foreign market.’
Annie Macpherson accepted the criticisms and made all the improvements suggested. But attacks on child emigration started from another source – the various left-wing or ‘progressive’ voices that grew louder from the eighteen-eighties onwards. Why should poverty be a reason for a child to be exiled from its country of birth? Why should a child do ‘slave’ work for no pay except their board and lodging? One anarchist collective, based in Boundary St, Shoreditch, printed a pamphlet entitled ‘Are We Overpopulated?’, which called for the forced emigration of the idle rich only, since they – rather than the poor – were a parasitical drain on the resources of Britain.
In the late eighteen-eighties, Miss Macpherson moved The Bee Hive north to the corner of Club Row and Bethnal Green Rd, on the edge of the Old Nichol slum. By now, she was attracting over five hundred people to her regular Gospel evenings — astonishing in an area in which many parish churches struggled to match such attendance levels. Yet, upon her death, Annie Macpherson’s work was taken over by Dr Barnardo’s charity and her name simply slipped into history.
Annie Macpherson (1833-1904)
Annie Macpherson’s first Home of Industry at 60 C0mmercial St
Annie Macpherson’s second Home of Industry at 29 Bethnal Green Rd
George Cruickshank published ‘Our Gutter Children’ in 1869 (Click image to enlarge)
Spitalfields Nipper by Horace Warner
Sarah Wise’s lecture ‘A Disgrace to the Christian World?’ is at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green on Thursday 26th November at 7pm. Click here to book a ticket.
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