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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Phil Maxwell At The London Hospital
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
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
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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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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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