Mick Hardie, Butcher
Mick Hardie
Observe Mick Hardie’s quizzical smile, peering at me askance, when I took his portrait last week upon his return to the corner of Spitalfields that he left in 1967. It is a smile that is not so different from his grin of wonderment captured in a Coronation party photograph, sixty-one years earlier – taken just fifty yards away from this new picture when he was nine years old. Yet in spite of the lifetime that has passed between the two photographs, Mick was able to speak vividly of his youth and formative experiences in these narrow streets, which have changed almost beyond recognition in the last half century.
“I moved away in 1967. We got offered a house in Wanstead and we lived there thirty-nine years, and then we moved to Frinton eight years ago – I don’t know why we moved to Frinton, my wife saw a house there and liked it. Now, everyday I send my daughter a photo of the sea from my mobile phone.
In 1946, my parents moved into Albert Family Dwellings, Deal St, Spitalfields. My mother May Edith Hardie came from Waterlow Buildings in Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, but my father, John James Hardie, he was a Scotsman. I had been born in Hitchin in 1942 and I was four, and my elder brother Brian was six, when we moved into the Dwellings. There was still a bomb shelter in the courtyard. I can remember most of the people in the buildings and all the details of the neighbourhood, because my father died of tuberculosis when I was six and I became a child of the streets. If I ever needed anything, I called up to my mother and she would let me down a doughnut wrapped in paper on a string.
Everyone knew each other in Albert Family Dwellings, people leaned out of the windows and chatted with their neighbours above and below. You used to get the old Jewish people sitting around in the evenings, that’s what I remember, and on Friday they asked you to to turn the lights and gas on and off. One of the highlights was the procession from St Anne’s, the Catholic church. They used to process along Underwood Rd, up Vallance Rd and back along Buxton St.
The Truman’s bottling plant was nearby and, every day, I could hear the clogs of the bottling girls in Woodseer St – it was like an army on the march. From the window of Howard Buildings, you could look across and see the girls in the bottling plant.
We had two bedrooms, a living room and a small scullery with a coal bin, which had to be kept clean because my mother used the top of it as a work surface. Everyone had a coal fire and the coal man carried hundred-weight sacks of coal up the stairs on his back. The scullery was so small, you could wash your drawers while sitting on the toilet and, if you wanted a bath, you went to Cheshire St Public Baths. Under Howard Buildings, next door, there was a washhouse where all the residents did their laundry.
I belonged to every youth club, even the Jewish youth club. I bought a bike in Club Row and cycled to Victoria Park. I was always a keen reader and I borrowed books from St Matthew’s Library, across the railway line. I used to buy toast and dripping in the cafe at the foot of the Pedley St bridge and carry it up the steps, and make a greasy thumbprint on the cover of my book. When we had no money, we collected rags and waste paper and sold them to the waste merchant in Cheshire St.
They pulled down All Saints Church in Buxton St when I was was ten, fortunately I could still go to Christ Church Spitalfields – but not very often, mind! After my father’s funeral, my mother never wanted to go to church again. When I left school at fifteen, I got a job as a messenger boy in a shipping office in Gravel Lane, Wapping.
I met my wife, Doreen Delaney, through the All Saints youth club in December 1958 and that was it, we got married in 1963. I remember I was standing on a street corner one night and a friend asked me to come along carol singing with the choir, and I don’t like carol singing but I went along anyway, and that’s how I met Doreen. They never said it would last – but we just celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary with Rock ‘n Roll, fish and chips, and beer! She was in the choir. After we met, I went to church just to hear her sing, and I waited for her afterwards and walked her home. Doreen used to roller skate through Liverpool St Station.
A year later, when we decided to get married, my mother in law said, ‘You’d better get a proper job.’ So I became a butcher and that was my life for the next forty-five years. I worked at Smithfield and I worked at Sainsburys, and I worked in the Bethnal Green Rd when every other shop was a butcher’s shop. In those days, you could walk from Hanbury St, down Vallance Rd, then turn left and all along the Whitechapel Rd as far as the cinema, it was full of stalls that were very good.
Because Doreen was in the choir, we got married for free at Christ Church and the choir sang for us as punishment. After we married, we moved into 99 Woodseer St and my brother lived almost next door in 104. Ours had been the flat belonging to Mrs Ivory, the dinner lady at All Saints School. We just had a living room, bedroom, scullery and backyard, but we were quite happy there. I had so many part-time jobs, trying to get a buck.
I can remember everything about that time, yet I can’t tell you what I did yesterday.”
Mick stands at the centre of this detail of the Coronation Party photo with his collar over his jumper
In the full photo, Mick stands centre left at the back of the crowd celebrating in Deal St, 1953
Doreen & Mick on a youth club ramble, 1960
Doreen and friends on the Bank Holiday ramble, 1960
Mick with a friend on a youth club excursion to Littlehampton, 1960
Friends at Littlehampton, 1960
Mick and pal sky-larking for the camera, Littlehampton 1960
Mick & Doreen, married at Christ Church, Spitalfields, 1963
Mick Hardie at Albert Cottages where he lived from 1963-7 when he first married
You may also like to read about these other residents of Deal St, Spitalfilds
On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 23
Jack London, Photographer
Jack London took photographs alongside his work as a writer throughout his life, creating a distinguished body of photography that stands upon its own merits beside his literary achievements. In 1903, the first edition of his account of life in the East End, The People of the Abyss, was illustrated with over a hundred photographs complementing the text and a new edition published by Tangerine Press & L-13 reinstates these original images, which were omitted in later reprints, permitting a full appreciation of London’s work as he intended it for the first time in over a century.
Homeless people in Itchy Park, Spitalfields
“In the shadow of Christ Church, Spitalfields, I saw a sight …
… I never wish to see again”
“Tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud”
Drunken women fighting on a rooftop
Frying Pan Alley, Spitalfields
Before Whitechapel Workhouse in Vallance Rd
Casual ward of Whitechapel Workhouse
“Only to be seen were the policemen, flashing their dark lanterns into doorways and alleys”
Homeless sleepers under Tower Bridge
“For an hour we stood quietly in this packed courtyard” – Salvation Army Shelter
London Hospital, Whitechapel
In Bethnal Green
Working men’s homes, Wentworth St
A small doss-house
An East End interior
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 22
Remembering Frank Thompson
Frank in 1931, aged twenty-three years, when he adopted the surname Thompson
In contemporary Britain, more children are born to unmarried parents than to wedded couples yet – just a generation ago – the shame of a birth outside wedlock was such that even the innocent offspring would be stigmatised. Consequently, many chose to carry the truth of their origins privately their whole lives without admitting it even to their nearest and dearest.
Imagine Sarah Thompson’s surprise when, after she and her sisters had grown up and left home, they were summoned back by their father, Frank Thompson – who was a Vicar in the Church of England – and informed that he had been born as Frank Peters to an unmarried mother. It was a startling discovery, although it did not change their affection for their father, yet it remained such a sensitive subject for the family that Sarah was only able to research the full story after both her parents had died.
“I am the youngest of four daughters and while we were growing up there was a man called John Thompson who we knew as our grandfather and Altrincham was where we came from,” Sarah admitted to me, “It wasn’t until after my father retired that he summoned us all to tell us his life story. He didn’t tell us before because he had been born in Stepney Workhouse and was illegitimate, and my mother Eileen had reservations about revealing the truth because she felt they had a social position to maintain. She had known from when she first met him and she was close to his adoptive mother, and obviously we all loved John.”
Sarah Thompson’s research confirmed her father had been born in Stepney Union Workhouse on June 28th 1908 and his mother was Ellen Rosina Peters who was twenty-eight years old and a resident of Limehouse. “I think she must have had a drink problem,” Sarah revealed to me,“He told me he remembered waiting for her outside a pub as a child. In the hospital records, I found he had a brother Albert, born in 1911, who died aged eleven months. He never talked about that and I found it very sad.“
“At some point he must have lived with his grandparents, George & Ellen Peters, because he told me he remembered looking under the bed for Christmas presents and his grandfather got out and stepped on his finger and broke it – he told me this when I asked him why his little finger was crooked. His grandfather was a Lighterman who had three daughters and five sons.”
Frank’s mother Ellen earned twenty-four pounds a year as a kitchen maid but she was unable to maintain steady employment and was admitted to the Red Lamp Rescue Home for Fallen Women, although she could stay only three months. Frequent ill-health put her in the Stepney Workhouse, leaving her unable to care or provide for Frank, and after being passed around among friends and relatives, he was admitted at eight years old to the Children’s Society home at Knutsford in 1917. His mother agreed to contribute four shillings a week to his care.
On 17th December 1922, at fourteen years old, Frank enlisted into the Royal Engineers’ Training School and he took the surname ‘Thompson’ at twenty-three years old, when he became part of the family of Jack Thompson who ran the Children’s Society home in Altrincham, though he was never officially adopted because he was too old.
The fragments that Sarah has pieced together tell a tragic story of a young woman losing control of her life and her child, and a child learning to survive without parents or a family, leaving us only to speculate about the emotional cost of these experiences. Yet the outcome was that Frank became a hardworking, selfless individual who chose to devote his life to public service as a priest. Beloved of his wife and daughters, he enjoyed a happy family life and always put the well-being of others above his own.
Contemplating her discoveries, Sarah is relieved that her father won the love of John Thompson and his wife, the matron, who ran the children’s home, so that – even after he left to go into the army – he always returned to stay with them while on leave. Yet Sarah also regretted she had never been able to speak with her father about his childhood and the loss of his mother. I just wish I’d known all this when he was alive, so we could have talked about what it was like growing up in an orphanage and I could have told him how proud I was of him,” she confided to me.
There is an unexpected symmetry in the conclusion to this story which imbues it with a poignant irony and speaks of the nature of social change across one generation – since Sarah is a single parent herself. “I can remember telling him, and him giving me a big hug and saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you,'” she recalled fondly, ” My elder sister said she thought, perhaps, it had helped him come to terms with his past.”
Application to put Frank into the Children’s Society home, December 11th 1916, when he was eight
Frank is sitting second from left in the football team at St Aidan’s Theological College, Liverpool, where he studied for the priesthood
Eileen Thompson, taken at the time of her engagement to Frank in 1938
Frank Thompson at the time of his engagement
Wedding at St Anne’s church, Birkenhead, where Frank was a curate on November 20th 1939 – John Thompson is standing on Frank’s left
Sarah in her school uniform, aged seven, at a family-friend’s Christening in 1957
Sarah and her three older sisters and pet dog Muffin on the vicarage lawn, Ryhall 1960
Frank & Sarah on holiday in the Isle of Man in 1960
The family having tea in the vicarage kitchen,1961
Frank dancing at his daughter’s twenty-first birthday party in 1961
Frank & Eileen outside the vicarage at Ryhall, Lincolnshire, 1965
At the Christening of Sarah’s son in London, 1981
Sarah Thompson has been a teacher in Hackney for thirty-five years
Portrait of Sarah Thompson copyright © Sarah Ainslie
On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 21
The Queenhithe Mosaic
Queenhithe is a natural inlet of the Thames in the City of London, it means ‘Queen’s harbour’ and is named after Queen Matilda who granted a charter for the use of the dock at the beginning of the twelfth century. This is just one of two thousand years of historical events illustrated in a new twenty metre mosaic recently installed upon the river wall at Queenhithe.
Commissioned by the City of London and paid for by 4C Hotel Group, who are constructing a new hotel on the waterfront, it was designed by Tessa Hunkin and executed by South Bank Mosaics under the supervision of Jo Thorpe – and I recommend you take a stroll down through the City to the river, and study the intricate and lively detail of this epic work for yourself.
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