Out Partying With The Bunny Girls Again
Several years ago, I attended a Bunny Girls Reunion at The Grapes in Limehouse hosted by ex-Bunny Barbara Haigh and to my amazement I was invited back this year as a guest of honour …
Old friends, Bunny Cherry & Bunny Odette
On Sunday afternoon, while the rest of London was tidying up leaves in the garden, taking tea, visiting the markets or enjoying a bracing autumn walk, I was at the Hippodrome Casino in Leicester Sq with Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven attending the Bunny Girls & Playboy Models Reunion.
The doorman gives you a deferential nod when you step from the milling tourist crowd over the threshold of the casino and the coat check woman bids you “Good afternoon!” as you pass through the passageway that leads into the vast gaming room. The proscenium and the elaborate plasterwork from the Edwardian theatre loom overhead, framing the auditorium that once hosted the “Talk of the Town,” where today excited gamblers throng around the roulette wheel and the baize tables where blackjack, craps and baccarat are played.
You ascend a winding staircase and acquire a glass of champagne, and you find yourself on another level and in another world. It is a poignant universe of nostalgia and recollection, where those who once based their public identities upon their youthful beauty gather to revisit and assess that experience, and rekindle the friendships and camaraderie forged a lifetime ago in the unlikely environment of the Playboy Club.
Presiding over the gathering of these evanescent spirits were the Oberon & Titania of this shadowy realm – Victor Lownes, the mythic lothario who opened the Playboy Club in Park Lane in 1966, now frail in his mid-eighties yet twinkling with genial humour, and his paramour, Marilyn Cole, the first full frontal Playboy centrefold, still sassy and commanding in physical presence.
In these more puritanical times, former Bunnies are aware of those who might judge them harshly yet they are unanimously unapologetic about their choice to become part of Playboy and their right to that choice. No-one voiced any regrets except one woman who confessed to me wistfully, “I wish I could go back and do it all over again.”
“Emmeline Pankhurst would have been proud of us!” asserted Marilyn with proud audacity, disarming me with her cultural reference while drawing raucous cheers from the crowd, “We were pioneers for equality – at the Playboy Club, the women all earned more than the men.”
A certain autumnal melancholy coloured the proceedings that afternoon, arising perhaps from a collective realisation of the transience of youth and physical beauty as commodified by Playboy. With unnecessary modesty, one woman confided to me that she was touched that anyone would be interested to take her portrait today and, as with other reunions, there were those who were absent never to return and quietly mourned by their fellows.
My enduring impression will be of astonishment at the vitality of these women. In spite of the changes that time has wrought and which are common to all humanity, they still have an abundance of spirit and charisma. Exhausted after a couple of hours chatting, I sat quietly in the corner to wonder at their stamina. Whatever life has dealt them, these women have not lost their star quality.
Regrettably, I do not think I could ever be a Bunny Girl because, alongside other obvious insufficiencies, I do not have the effervescence. When I confessed this weary realisation to Marilyn Cole at the end of Sunday’s long afternoon of mingling, she looked me in the eye and gave a surprising response. “That’s because you actually listen to what people say,” she informed me with a forgiving smile.
Marilyn Cole – “We were pioneers of equality!”
Bunny Marlon AKA Patricia Robson – “I was a cockney from Stepney and I went from there to the Bahamas!”
Bunny Monique AKA Mary Phillips –‘”I started as a Bunny at seventeen and was a croupier at eighteen. All the famous people were there and as a Bunny Girl you were a celebrity in your own right”
Bunny Kim AKA Therese Hyland – “I came from a boring office job and it opened my eyes”
Bunny Modesty AKA Bee Cassen – “I learnt Black Jack & was dealing roulette in the Officers’ Mess”
Bunny Sheen AKA Sheen Doran – “Forty years later, I still have so many friends from Playboy”
Danny Conti, Doorman – “I worked in the Car Park on Park Lane and they came over and asked me if I’d like to be doorman at the Playboy Club”
Bunnie Bobbie AKA Eileen Wilson
Bunny Zoe AKA Mary Sharina -“I’m a librarian now and no-one’s interested but if I tell them I was a Bunny, they say ‘Really?'”
Chris Shuter, Craps Dealer – “I used to have a big house with a swimming pool and all the girls came over”
Bunny Ruth AKA Elaine Murray
Bunny Elayne AKA Elaine Kingston – “I was the only Bunny DJ”
Kenny Houng, PR man – “I brought in all the big players from the Far East who would lose two or three million a night.”
Bunny Joni AKA Ann Oliver – “As a nice girl, I had a bit of trouble with my parents but they came in for dinner and thoroughly approved”
Bunny Joan AKA Joan Lawrence – “I was the first woman to manage a casino in Britain”
Bunny Cherry AKA Yvonne Johnson
Bunny Odette AKA Lorraine Palmer
Marilyn Cole & Victor Lownes
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
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Publication Day For Baddeley Brothers
Please join me tonight at 7pm at St Bride Institute in the shadow of St Bride’s Church, Fleet St, for the launch of my new book Baddeley Brothers with typographic designs by David Pearson, drawings by Lucinda Rogers and a fold-out map by Adam Dant. There will be opportunities to try an embossing press and imbibe beer, courtesy of London Fields Brewery. Click here to sign up
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CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY OF BADDELEY BROTHERS
The Caslon Letter Foundry
On the eve of publication of my account of Baddeley Brothers, (specialist printers in Moor Lane from 1885 until 1940) I present these photographs of their neighbours, the Caslon Letter Foundry, from St Bride Printing Library off Fleet St where the book launch is taking place tomorrow night. Click here to sign up for the party
22/23 Chiswell St with Caslon’s delivery van outside the foundry
William Caslon set up his type foundry in Chiswell St in 1737, where it operated without any significant change in the methods of production until 1937. These historic photographs taken in 1902, upon the occasion of the opening of the new Caslon factory in Hackney Wick, record both the final decades of the unchanged work of traditional type-founding, as well as the mechanisation of the process that would eventually lead to the industry being swept away by the end of the century.
The Directors’ Room with portraits of William Caslon and Elizabeth Caslon.
Sydney Caslon Smith in his office
Clerks’ office, 15th November 1902. A woman sits at her typewriter in the centre of the office.
Type store with fonts being made up in packets by women and boys working by candlelight.
Another view of the type store with women making up packets of fonts.
Another view of the type store.
Another part of the type store.
In the type store.
A boy makes up a packet of fonts in the type store.
Room of printers’ supplies including type cases, forme trolleys and electro cabinets.
Another view of the printers’ supplies store.
Printing office on an upper floor with pages of type specimens being set and printed on Albion and Imperial handpresses.
Packing department with crates labelled GER, GWR, LNWR, CALCUTTA, BOMBAY, and SYDNEY.
New Caslon Letter Foundry at Rothbury Rd, Hackney Wick, 1902.
Harold Arthur Caslon Smith at his rolltop desk in Hackney Wick with type specimens from 1780 on the wall, Friday 7th November, 1902.
Machine shop with plane, lathes and overhead belting.
Gas engines and man with oil can.
Lathes in the Machine Shop.
Hand forging in the Machine Shop.
Another view of lathes in the Machine Shop.
Type store with fonts being made up into packets.
Type matrix and mould store.
Metal store with boy hauling pigs upon a trolley.
Casting Shop, with women breaking off excess metal and rubbing the type at the window.
Another view of the Casting Shop.
Another view of the Casting Shop.
Founting Shop, with women breaking up the type and a man dressing the type.
Casting metal furniture.
Boys at work in the Brass Rule Shop.
Boys making packets of fonts in the Despatch Shop, with delivery van waiting outside the door.
Machine shop on the top floor with a fly-press in the bottom left.
Woodwork Shop.
Brass Rule Shop, hand-planing the rules.
Caretaker’s cottage with caretaker’s wife and the factory cat.
Photographs courtesy St Bride Printing Library
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William Caslon, Letter Founder
Return To Trinity Green
A few years have passed since I first walked through the gate off Mile End Rd into the quiet enclave of London’s oldest almshouses at Trinity Green where cats preside over a green lawn shaded by gnarly trees and enfolded by two lines of seventeenth-century brick cottages that glow in the October sunlight.
This extraordinary survival of Sir William Ogbourne’s seafarers’ almshouses from 1695 is almost solely due to the efforts of CR Ashbee, pioneer of the Conservation movement in this country and founder of the Guild of Handicrafts in Bow, who rescued them from demolition in 1895. It was the first historic building in the East End to be saved and exists today as an early example of the benign provision of social dwellings.
Regrettably, my return was at the invitation of the residents who wish to draw attention to the spiral of neglect by the council and to the imminent threat of a tower of luxury flats overshadowing Trinity Green, about which they have received no consultation. Built on top of Sainsburys in Whitechapel, they told me this proposed block will be as tall as Centrepoint.
After post-war restoration, the almshouses were handed over to the council, pursuing an enlightened policy of reusing these historic buildings for social housing, and celebrated by a visit of the Queen in 1963. More recently, many of the flats have been sold to private owners although the council still owns many of the dwellings and the chapel, and is responsible for the green which is a public park.
The residents wanted to show me how the council is failing in its duty of care to this grade I listed property. Cast your eyes along the front wall and you notice that four stone ball finials have gone missing. Step inside the gate and a vacant council-owned dwelling has water damage where a cistern was allowed to overflow for months. Next door, at another of the council-owned cottages, a ball has been removed from the pediment years ago and not replaced, while the pediment itself has been needlessly pierced by a flue outlet which could have been sited at the rear of the building.
I visited the chapel for the first time and discovered one of the East End’s finest architectural spaces. Within living memory, this chapel used as a satellite for St Anne’s, Underwood Rd. Today, although it retains its magnificent original features – its panelling, cornice and octagonal vestibule – it is a municipal meeting room marred by stacks of ugly furniture, corporate carpet and strip lighting. Most-disappointingly, the pair of seventeenth century brass chandeliers have gone in recent years leaving just the chains on which they once hung. Outside upon the stone steps, crude repairs in concrete will exacerbate problems with the ageing stonework over time.
With poignant symbolism, the hands have been removed from the clock face on the top of the chapel. If you step in through the main gates from Mile End Rd and cast your eyes upwards, this clock appears to meet your gaze as the central focus of Sir William Ogbourne’s entire architectural conception.
After it was saved by CR Ashbee at the end of the nineteenth century and restored for social housing in the twentieth century, I hope we shall not be the generation that presides over the decay of Trinity Green, leaving it to languish for future generations in the shadow of a monstrous tower.
A pair of quaint narrow terraces face each other across a green off the Mile End Rd in Whitechapel. Although they are lined up neatly like ships’ cabins, only the model boats upon the street frontage remain as evidence that these were built for as almshouses for mariners. But, if you step closer and crane your neck, a stone plaque high on the wall proclaims their noble origin thus, “THIS ALMES HOUSE wherein twenty-eight decay’d Masters & Commanders of Ships, or ye Widows of such are maintain’d, was built by ye CORP. of TRINITY HOUSE, ano 1695. The Ground was given by Capt. HENY MUDD of Rattcliff an Elder Brother, whose Widow did alfo Contribute.”
Even today, a certain atmosphere of repose hangs upon this small enclave, protected from the pandemonium of East London traffic by trees and delicate emerald green railings – now a preserve of cats and flowerpots and twisted old trees and lawns strewn with dandelions and daisies – where it is easy to imagine those “twenty-eight decay’d Masters & Commanders” who once sat around here competing to outdo each other with oft-repeated tales of high adventures upon the seven seas.
The architect was Sir William Ogbourne, and his design was ship-shape in its elegant organisation, fourteen dwellings on either side, each one with three rooms stacked up on top of the other, all arranged around a chapel at the centre to provide spiritual navigation. It was a rigorous structure enlivened by lyrical flourishes, elaborately carved corbels above each door, model boats and stone balls topping off the edifice, and luxuriant stone crests adorning the brick work.
In the nineteenth century, a tall mast stood at the centre of the green to complete the whole endeavour as an approximation of a ship upon dry land – complementing the concave walls at the front in place of a hull and the raised chapel in the aft where the poop deck would be. Just a mile from the docks, it was the perfect spot for Masters & Commanders to enjoy their decay, and it might have sailed on majestically, if it had not been sunk by the bombing in 1943, that destroyed part of the chapel and the rear eight cottages. Taken over by the LCC, Trinity Green is now a mixture of private and public dwellings where everyone gets along peaceably, unified in their appreciation of this favoured spot.
One of the guardians of Trinity Green
This stone ball was removed from the roof of a council owned cottage and never replaced, meanwhile a vent punctures the cornice of this grade 1 listed building
While this council owned cottage sits empty, the water tank has leaked for months damaging brick work
Council owned property to the left and privately owned property to the right reveal comparative levels of maintenance
Unappreciated interior of the chapel, where seventeenth century chandeliers have recently been removed leaving just the chains
Finely carved wooden cornice in the chapel
After three hundred years, the hands have recently been removed from the clock face
When I visited in 2011, the hands were still on the clock at Trinity Green
The proposed tower of luxury flats as tall as Centrepoint that threatens Whitechapel & Trinity Green
Letter by Charles Robert Ashbee, designer & founder of the School of Handicraft in Bow, to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings about the Trinity Almshouses.
Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd, 1695
CR Ashbee letter published courtesy of Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings
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The East End Suffragette Map
On the day of the opening of Sarah Gavron’s film SUFFRAGETTE which dramatises the contribution of women in the East End to the Suffrage Movement, we present Researcher Vicky Stewart & Designer Adam Tuck‘s map of some key events in the struggle in Bethnal Green, Roman Rd & Bow
Click to enlarge and see the map in the detail
The closure of W F Arber & Co Ltd, after one hundred and seventeen years in the Roman Rd, inspired me to look further at Gary Arber’s story of his grandmother, Emily Arber, organising the free printing of handbills and posters for the Suffragette movement. Just what was going on locally, who were involved, and how were these Suffragettes organised?
Nothing prepared me for what I discovered. My knowledge of Suffragette activity was limited to stories of upper middle class ladies marching behind Mrs Pankhurst, waving ‘Votes for Women’ banners, being imprisoned, getting force-fed, and then eventually securing the vote. In part this was true – Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel believed middle class women had the education and influence to bring about the necessary change, but Sylvia disagreed and insisted it was only direct action by working class women that could win the vote.
In 1912, Sylvia Pankhurst came to Bow as representative of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to campaign for local MP George Lansbury, who had resigned his seat in parliament to fight a by-election on the issue of votes for women. Although Lansbury lost the election, he continued to support Sylvia who decided to stay in the East End and do everything in her power to carry on the fight – not only to champion the cause of Suffrage but also to challenge injustice and alleviate suffering wherever she could.
She opened her first WSPU Headquarters in Bow Rd in 1912 but moved to Roman Rd when forming the East London Federation, whose policy was to “combine large-scale public demonstrations with public militancy… [to attract] immediate arrest.”
In January 1914, Christabel asked Sylvia to change the name of the ELF and separate from the WSPU, and the organisation became the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) with new headquarters in Old Ford Rd.
What amazes me about this story is the number of women – often with active support of husbands or sons – who, despite harsh poverty and large families, gave huge support to Sylvia and the campaign. They risked assault and often were beaten by policemen at rallies, on marches and at meetings. They risked being sent to Holloway and subjected to force-feeding. They risked the anger and abuse of those who did not support Women’s’ Suffrage.
So who were these women and what do we know of them? Below you can read extracts from Sylvia Pankhurst’s books, ‘The Suffragette Movement’ and ‘The Home Front’, which locate their actions in the East End.
– Vicky Stewart
6
Victoria Park “On Sunday, May 25th 1913, was held ‘Women’s May Day’ in East London. The Members of Bow, Bromley, Poplar, and neighbouring districts had prepared for it for many weeks past and had made hundreds of almond branches, which were carried in a great procession with purple, white and green flags, and caps of Liberty flaunting above them from the East India Dock gates by winding ways, to Victoria Park. A vast crowd of people – the biggest ever seen in East London – assembled ….. to hear the speakers from twenty platforms.”
12
288 Old Ford Rd was home to Israel Zangwill, political activist and strong supporter of Sylvia and the Suffragette movement.
13
304 Old Ford Rd was home to Mrs Fischer where meetings were held .
7
Old Ford Rd was the route taken by the Suffragettes May Day processions to Victoria Park when they met with violence from the police at the gates and suffered many injuries.
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8
400 Old Ford Rd became the third headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914. A Women’s Hall was built on land behind which was used for a cost-price restaurant which provided nutritious meals for a pittance to women suffering from the huge rise in food prices in the early months of the war.
9
438 Old Ford Rd, The Mother’s Arms The ELFS set up another creche and baby clinic on this street, staffed by trained nurses and developed upon Montessori lines. This was housed in a converted pub called The Gunmaker’s Arms, whose name was changed to The Mother’s Arms.
1
Roman Rd “I decided to take the risk of opening a permanent East End headquarters in Bow … Miss Emerson and I went down there together one frosty Friday morning in February to hunt for an office. The sun was like a red ball in the misty, whitey-grey sky. Market stalls, covered with cheerful pink and yellow rhubarb, cabbages, oranges and all sorts of other interesting things, lined both sides of the narrow Roman Rd. ‘The Roman’ , as they call it, was crowded with busy kindly people. I had always liked Bow. That morning my heart warmed to it for ever.”
3
159 Roman Rd, (now 459) Arber & Co Ltd, Printing Works where Suffragette handbills were printed under the supervision of Emily Arber.
5
152 Roman Rd In 1912, tickets were available from this house, home of Mrs Margaret Mitchell, second-hand clothes dealer, for a demonstration in Bow Palace with Mrs Pankhurst and George Lansbury.
10 & 11
45 Norman Rd (now Norman Grove) A toy factory was opened in October 1914 to provide women with an income whilst their husbands were at War. They were paid a living wage and could put their children into the nursery further down the road.
4
Roman Rd Market The East London Federation of Suffragettes ran a stall in the market, decorated with posters and selling their newspaper, The Women’s Dreadnought – a “medium through which working women, however unlettered, might express themselves and find their interests defended.”
15
103 St Stephen’s Rd was home to George Lansbury and his family.
16
St Stephen’s Rd “On November 5th 1913, on my way to a Meeting to inaugurate the People’s Army, I happened to call at Mr Lansbury’s house in St Stephen’s Rd. The house was immediately surrounded by detectives and policemen and there seemed no possibility of mistake. But the people of Bow, on hearing of the trouble, came flocking out of the Baths where they had assembled. In the confusion that ensued the detectives dragged Miss Daisy Lansbury off in a taxi, and I went free.
When the police authorities realised their mistake, and learnt that I was actually speaking at the Baths, they sent hundreds of men to take me, but though they met the people in the Roman Rd as they came from the Meeting I escaped. Miss Emerson was again struck on the head, this time by a uniformed constable, and fell to the ground unconscious. Many other people were badly hurt. The people replied with spirit. Two mounted policemen were unhorsed and many others were disabled.”
19
28 Ford Rd “The members had begged me, if ever I should be imprisoned under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, to come down to them in the East End, in order that they might protect me, they would not let me be taken back to prison without a struggle as the others had been, they assured me.
On the night of my arrest Zelie Emerson had pressed into my hand an address: ‘Mr and Mrs Payne, 28 Ford Rd, Bow.’ Thither I was now driven in a taxi with two wardresses. As the cab slowed down perforce among the marketing throngs in the Roman Road, friends recognised me, and rushed to the roadway, cheering and waving their hands. Mrs Payne was waiting for me on the doorstep. It was a typical little East End house in a typical little street, the front door opening directly from the pavement, with not an inch of ground to withdraw its windows from the passers-by. I was welcomed by the kindest of kind people, shoemaking home-workers, who carried me in with the utmost tenderness.
They had put their double bed for me in the little front parlour on the ground floor next the street, and had tied up the door knocker. For three days they stopped their work that I might not be disturbed by the noise of their tools. Yet there was no quiet. The detectives, notified of my release, had arrived before me. A hostile crowd collected. A woman flung one of the clogs she wore at the wash-tub at a detectives head. The ‘Cats’, as a hundred angry voices called them, retired to the nearby public-houses, there were several of these havens within a stone’s throw, as there usually are in the East End.
Yet, even though the detectives were out of sight, people were constantly stopping before the house to discuss the Movement and my imprisonment. Children gathered, with prattling treble. If anyone called at the house, or a vehicle stopped before it, detectives at once came hastening forth, a storm of hostile voices. Here indeed was no peace. My hosts carried me upstairs to their own bedroom, at the back of the house, hastily prepared, a small room, longer but scarcely wider than a prison cell – my home when out of prison for many months to come. (…)
In that little room I slept, wrote, interviewed the Press and personalities of all sorts, and presently edited a weekly paper. Its walls were covered with a cheap, drab paper, with an etching of a ship in full sail, and two old fashioned colour prints of a little girl at her morning and evening prayers. From the window by my bed, I could see the steeple of St Stephen’s Church and the belfry of its school, a jumble of red-tiled roofs, darkened by smoke and age, the dull brick of the walls and the new whitewash of some of the backyards in the next street.
Our colours were nailed to the wall behind my bed, and a flag of purple, white and green was displayed from an opposite dwelling, where pots of scarlet geraniums hung on the whitewashed wall of the yard below, and a beautiful girl with smooth, dark hair and a white bodice would come out to delight my eyes in helping her mother at the wash-tub. The next yard was a fish curers’. An old lady with a chenille net on her grey hair would be passing in and out of the smoke-house, preparing the sawdust fires. A man with his shirt sleeves rolled up would be splitting herrings, and another hooking them on to rods balanced on boards and packing-cases, till the yard was filled, and gleamed with them like a coat of mail. Close by, tall sunflowers were growing, and garments of many colours hung out to dry. Next door to us they bred pigeons and cocks and hens, which cooed and crowed and clucked in the early hours. Two doors away a woman supported a paralysed husband and a number of young children by making shirts at 8d a dozen. Opposite, on the other side of Ford St, was a poor widow with a family of little ones. The detectives endeavoured to hire a room from her, that they might watch me unobserved. “It will be a small fortune to you while it lasts!” they told her. Bravely she refused with disdain, “Money wouldn’t do me any good if I was to hurt that young woman!” The same proposal was made and rejected at every house in Ford Rd.
Flowers and presents of all kinds were showered on me by kindly neighbours. One woman wrote to say that she did not see why I should ever go back to prison when every woman could buy a rolling pin for a penny.”
2
321 Roman Rd, Second Headquarters of the East London Federation “We decided to take a shop and house at 321 Roman Rd at a weekly rental of 14s 6d a week. It was the only shop to let in the road. The shop window was broken right across, and was only held together by putty. The landlord would not put in new glass, nor would he repair the many holes in the shop and passage flooring because he thought we would only stay a short time. But all such things have since been done.
Plenty of friends at once rallied round us. Women …. came in and scrubbed the floors and cleaned the windows. Mrs Wise, who kept the sweetshop next door, lent us a trestle table for a counter and helped us to put up purple, white and green flags. Her little boy took down the shutters for us every morning, and put them up each night, and her little girls often came in to sweep.”
20
Bow Rd – Sylvia described it as ‘dingy Bow Rd.’
25
The George Lansbury Memorial – Elected to parliament in 1910, he resigned his seat in 1912 to campaign for women’s suffrage, and was briefly imprisoned after publicly supporting militant action.
George Lansbury
26
The Minnie Lansbury Clock is at the Bow Rd near the junction with Alfred St. Minnie Lansbury was the daughter-in-law of George Lansbury, and very actively supported the campaign and was in Holloway. She died at the age of thirty-two.
Minnie Lansbury is congratulated on her way to be arrested at Poplar Town Hall
14
Bow Rd Police Station The police were horrifyingly brutal towards Suffragettes when on demonstrations and then, once arrested and tried, they would often receive excessively harsh prison sentences. Hunger striking was in protest against the government’s failure to treat them as political prisoners.
Mrs Parsons told Asquith – “We do protest when we go along in processions that suddenly without a word of warning we are pounced upon by detectives and bludgeoned and women are called names by cowardly detectives, when nobody is about. There was one old lady of seventy who was with us the other day, who was knocked to the ground and kicked. She is a shirtmaker and is forced to work on a machine and she has been in the most awful agony. These men are not fit to help rule the country while we have no say in the matter.” (From the Woman’s Dreadnought.)
Under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ hunger strikers were released when their lives was in danger so as to recuperate before returning to finish their sentences. They told tales of dreadful brutality during force-feeding in Holloway.
17 & 18
13 Tomlin’s Grove “When the procession turned out of Bow Rd into Tomlin’s Grove they found that the street lamps were not lighted and that a strong force of police were waiting in the dark before the house of Councillor Le Manquais. Just as the people at the head of the procession reached the house, the policemen closed around them and arrested Miss Emerson, Miss Godfrey and seven men, two of whom were not in the procession, but were going home to tea in the opposite direction.
At the same moment twenty mounted police came riding down upon the people from the far end of Tomlin’s Grove, and twenty more from the Bow Rd. The people were all unarmed. … There were cries and shrieks and people ran panic-stricken into the little front gardens of the houses in the Grove.
But wherever the people stopped the police hunted them away. I was told that an old woman who saw the police beating the people in her garden was so much upset that she fell down in a fit and died without regaining consciousness. A boy of eighteen was so brutally kicked and trampled on that he had to be carried to the infirmary for treatment. A publican who was passing was knocked down and kicked and one of his ribs was broken. Even the bandsmen were not spared. The police threw their instruments over the garden walls. The big drummer was knocked down and so badly used that he is still on the list for sick insurance benefit. Mr Atkinson, a labourer, was severely handled and was then arrested. In the charge room Inspector Potter was said to have blacked his eye.”
21
198 Bow Rd was the first Headquarters of the First Headquarters of the East London Federation, 1912. When Sylvia first arrived in Bow she rented an empty baker’s shop at 198 Bow Rd. She used a platform to paint “VOTES FOR WOMEN” in gold across the frontage and addressed the crowds from here.
22
The Obelisk, Bromley High St “On the following Monday, February 17th (1913) we held a meeting at the Obelisk, a mean-looking monument in a dreary, almost unlighted open space near Bow Church.
Our platform, a high, uncovered cart, was pitched against the dark wall of a dismal council school in the teeth of a bitter wind. Already a little knot of people had gathered; women holding their dark garments closely about them, shivering and talking of the cold, four or five police constables and a couple of Inspectors. We climbed into the cart and watched the crowd growing, the men and women turning from the footpaths to join the mass. … I said I knew it to be a hard thing for men and women to risk imprisonment in such a neighbourhood, where most of them were labouring under the steepest economic pressure, yet I pleaded for some of the women of Bow to join us in showing themselves prepared to make a sacrifice to secure enfranchisement …
… After it was over Mrs Watkins, Mrs Moore, Miss Annie Lansbury, and I broke an undertaker’s window. Willie Lansbury, George Lansbury’s eldest son, who had promised his wife to go to prison instead of her because she had tubercular tendencies and could not leave their little daughter only two years old, broke a window in the Bromley Public Hall.
I was seized by two policemen, three other women were seized. We were dragged, resisting, along the Bow Rd, the crowd cheering and running with us. We were sent to prison without an option of fine.
There were four others inside with me: Annie Lansbury and her brother Will, pale, delicate Mrs. Watkins, a widow struggling to maintain herself by sweated sewing-machine work, and young Mrs. Moore. A moment later little Zelie Emerson was bundled in, flushed and triumphant – she had broken the window of the Liberal Club.
That was the beginning of Militancy in East London. Miss Emerson, Mrs Watkins and I decided to do the hunger-strike, and hoped that we should soon be out to work again. But although Mrs Watkins was released after ten days, Miss Emerson and I were forcibly fed, and she was kept in for seven weeks although she had developed appendicitis, and I for five. When we were once free we found that we were too ill to do anything at all for some weeks.
But we need not have feared that the work would slacken without us. A tremendous flame of enthusiasm had burst forth in the East End. Great meetings were held, and during our imprisonment long processions marched eight times the six miles to cheer us in Holloway, and several times also to Brixton goal, where Mr Will Lansbury was imprisoned. The people of East London, with Miss Dalgleish to help them, certainly kept the purple, white and green flag flying …”
23
Bromley Public Hall, Bow Rd “On February 14th [1913] … we held a meeting in the Bromley Public Hall, Bow Road, and from it led a procession round the district. …To make sure of imprisonment, I broke a window in the police station … Daisy Lansbury was accused of catching a policeman by the belt, but the charge was dismissed. Zelie Emerson and I went to prison … .and began the hunger and thirst strike … On release we rushed back to the shop, found Mrs Lake scrubbing the table, and it crowded with members arranging to march to Holloway Prison to cheer us next day.”
24
Bow Palace, 156 Bow Rd was built at the rear of the Three Cups public house and had a capacity of two thousand.
“One Sunday afternoon I spoke in Bow Palace and marched openly with the people of Bow Rd. When I spoke from the window afterwards, a veritable forest of sticks was waved by the crowd. …
While I was in prison after my arrest in Shoreditch …. a Meeting …. was held in Bow Palace on Sunday afternoon, December 14th. After the Meeting it was arranged to go in procession around the district and to hoot outside the houses of hostile Borough Councillors.”
Sylvia Pankhurst – Women over the age of twenty-one were eventually enfranchised in 1928
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Maps reproduced courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
Postcard reproduced courtesy of Libby Hall Collection at Bishopsgate Institute
Photograph of Suffragette in Holloway courtesy of LSE Women’s Library
Copy of The Women’s Dreadnought courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
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My Night Out With The Bunny Girls
Today is the day the Bunny Girls have their annual reunion and I publish my account of joining them at the Grapes in Limehouse. To my astonishment, I find myself a guest of honour at this year’s reunion which is at the Hippodrome, Leicester Sq, and you may expect a further report next week.
One Sunday night, I attended the most glamorous party of my life. It was a Bunny Girls & Playboy Models’ reunion hosted by ex-Bunny Barbara Haigh, esteemed landlady of The Grapes in Limehouse. Never have I encountered more voluptuous charismatic ladies per square metre than were crammed joyfully together in the tiny bar-rooms of this historic riverside pub that night. With Sarah Ainslie, Spitalfields Life contributing photographer, as my chaperone, I was thrilled to join this exuberant sisterhood of more than a hundred garrulous alpha females for a knees-up. Squeezing my way through the curvy bodies – fine specimens of their sex who have all got what it takes to succeed in life – I arrived on the river frontage where waves were crashing theatrically over the verandah as if, in reenactment of Botticelli’s Venus, each of these goddesses had just emerged triumphant from the Thames’ spray to delight the souls of mere mortals like myself.
The first Aphrodite to catch my eye was cheeky Bunny Sandie (pictured above), the seventh Bunny to join the newly opened Playboy Club in Park Lane in 1966, who is more formally known these days as Lady Sandra Bates. Within seconds of our introduction, Sandie gleefully revealed she had bedded Sean Connery, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty and Telly Savalas, emphasising that her most important conquest was Sir Charles Clore, owner of Selfridges and Mappin & Webb. “I was living in a house in Mayfair at the time, but the owner put it up for sale and wanted to throw me out, so I told Charles and he bought it for me!” she declared with a glittering smile, rolling her chestnut eyes, batting her eyelashes and clutching her hands in girlish pleasure. “You should see my art collection!” she proposed recklessly now that her husband Sir Charles is no more, as we shared a glass of wine on the verandah and the setting sun lit up the clouds, turning the river livid pink.
It was a remarkable overture to an unforgettable evening, because these girls all know how to party. Bunnies had flown in from all over the world, Tasmania, Las Vegas, the Bahamas, Egypt and as far away as Australia to celebrate the glory days of the British Playboy Club that ran from 1966 until 1980. As Marilyn Cole (the first full frontal nude in the history of Playboy in 1972) put it so elegantly in her speech of welcome, “When people ask ‘Where did you go to school?’ I say, ‘Fuck that, I went to the University of Playboy! You learn much more about life.’” An astute comment that drew roars of approval from the assembled Bunnies.
Marilyn, resplendent in a quilted leather miniskirt and thigh length high-heeled boots, ushered me over to meet her famously reclusive husband Victor Lownes, who opened the London Playboy Club. Formerly in charge of all Playboy’s gaming operations, Victor Lownes is a bon-viveur who was once Britain’s highest paid executive, counted Francis Bacon and Roman Polanski as friends and reputedly had five girls a day, sometimes two at once. He looked at me benignly from under a mop of white hair across the chasm of our different experiences of life. “Do you miss it?” I enquired tentatively, and Victor rolled his twinkly eyes in good-humoured irony. “What do you think? I am eighty-two years old!” he replied with dignified restraint.
There was a giddy atmosphere in the Grapes that night and so I chose to embrace the spirit of the occasion and mingle with as many Bunnies as possible. “I was a young girl from a very religious strict background in Birmingham who ran away from home.”admitted Bobbie, one of first black Bunnies, who worked at the Playboy Club from 1975-80, “I was shopping one day and I went along to ‘a cattle drive’ and out of fifty girls was one of a handful accepted to be a Bunny. I had four wonderful years that totally changed my life. It was a terrific experience. I have run my own business for the past twenty years and the things I learnt at Playboy set me on the road to be able to do that.”
“There was only one rule,’Don’t touch the Bunnies!’”explained Bunny Erica, raising a finger of authority,“Membership of the Playboy Club came with a key, which members handed in when they arrived and collected when they left. If somebody went too far the management took away their key. So the men always behaved respectfully. You were never forced to do anything. It’s made to seem cheap now – but we wore two pair of tights, our costumes were fitted and stiffened with whalebone, we even put toilet rolls down the front as padding – it was an illusion. We were supposed to share tips, but I put mine down my costume and when I took it off all the banknotes would fall out. The money was fabulous. Playboy gave us the most amazing part of our lives. It gave us freedom. It gave us a love of humanity. It enlightened us.”
“I was the very first UK Bunny to be hired in 1966,” declared Bunny Alexis, still glowing with pride over forty years later, “I was a dancer at the Talk of the Town in Leicester Sq on £12 a week, but at Playboy I earned £200. I was already married with a child and on the strength of my two years as a Bunny I was able to buy our first house in Wood Green. It was the hardest work, eight hours a day on five-inch heels with just one half hour break. But it was good fun and we met all the most amazing people. 1966 was a very good year!”
People often ask what happened to the nineteen sixties, yet here the evidence was all around me. It was a buzz to be in a room full of such self-confident women who knew who they were and were supremely comfortable with it too, women with their wits about them, who counted brains amongst other natural assets when it came to interactions with the opposite sex. Women who knew how to make the best of the situation they found themselves in at the Playboy Club – unashamedly constructed as an arena of male fantasy yet, paradoxically, as all these women testify thirty years on, provided opportunities for them to take control of their lives.
Undoubtably there were those that, as Bunny Serena put it succinctly, “screwed their way to the top,” but equally there were many who, as Bunny Lara confirmed, found it, “An empowering experience. They sent us on management training courses, and I learnt how to handle people and manage staff. All of which has come in useful ever since in everything I have done.” She now runs a young offenders’ programme, training staff in conflict management. Many women I spoke with occupy senior management roles in the gaming and entertainment industry today – including one who manages a chain of casinos – in jobs that would have been closed to them previously.
Above all, these were women who were full of life, they had seen so much life and had so many stories to tell, that it was wonderful simply to be amongst them, confirming Bunny Lara’s fond verdict on her experience working at the Playboy Club, “The camaraderie was phenomenal.”
Bunny Cleo, with evidence of her encounter with Sid James at The Playboy Club.
Marilyn Cole, “Whatever else happens in life, good, bad or indifferent, we can always say we had this!”
Bunny Maretta & Bunny friend
Bunny Marisa is now an artist painting in oils.
Bunny Dilys & Bunny friend.
Bunny Alexis, ex-Windmill Girl was the very first UK Bunny to be recruited in 1966.
Bunny Serena & Bunny Jane.
Bunny Bobbie
Bunny Brenda, Bunny Nancy & Bunny Marion
Victor Lownes, “What is a playboy? It is someone who is getting more sex than you are.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Tom Fellows, London’s Oldest Cabby
Here is Tom Fellows at eighty-six years old, squinting into the light with a half-smile that betrays a circumspect nature honed by a lifetime driving a cab around London. Tom has seen all that existence has to show and he presents himself to the camera with a diplomatic restraint that could equally be deference or suspicion. Tom is looking out at us and making his own assessment of the situation.
I came upon ‘Old Tom’ in the pages of ‘London People’ by Rev F Howell Everson with photographs by William Whiffin among others, published in 1951 and, although this picture is uncredited, it makes sense that it is by Whiffin, the East End’s pre-eminent photographer of the first half of the twentieth century.
“Hidden away in the vast anonymity of the little streets of the East End there are many interesting characters,” wrote the Rev, making a bold foray beyond his usual stomping ground of New Barnet Methodist Church, “including the oldest surviving horse-cab driver in London.”
Directed to Old Tom’s house near the People’s Palace by a woman with a pram, as being the one with “the little dawg in front,” the Rev knocked but received no response. “Knock ‘ard,” insisted the woman.
“I do so – and presently the door opened and there stood Old Tom who, when I had explained my errand, invited me in. It was, to tell you the truth a rather shabby little dwelling, but when you are eighty-six and living by yourself with only a shaggy dog named Mick as your companion, the niceties of domestic life probably lose their importance,” wrote the Rev, already missing his cosy rectory in New Barnet.
“Tom Fellows took out a flat tin and rolled a cigarette of Royal Tartan Shag which he lit, and I noticed that his hand was steady,” noted the Rev, relieved that the old codger was not half-cut.
“He told me that his father, a navvy, had been a pugilist in the bad old days of the Birmingham Bull Ring, but had come to London before Tom was born” reported the Rev, “As a young man, Tom had ‘taken up with the ‘orses,’ and drove cabs – growlers and hansoms – as long as he could.”
“What do you do with yourself nowadays?” ventured the Rev with an empathetic smile.
“Old Tom looked out of the window at the high brick wall above which a patch of blue sky could just be seen and shook the ash off his cigarette,” observed the Rev, his thoughts turning towards his Sunday sermon.
“There’s not much you can do when you’re my age except wait. Me and Mick, we sort of look after each other, don’t we, Mick?” admitted Old Tom with dignified resignation.
“The canine hearthrug promptly sat up and begged, and looked through that curtain of untidy hair at his old master with eyes of melting innocence,” registered the Rev, recognising the work of the Almighty in the agency of the scruffy mutt.
“‘But there’s one thing, sir, I do like,” said Old Tom, a thought striking him spontaneously, “I like to go round to the Mission in Bow Rd. Been going a long time, I have, ever since a friend who was a publican took me along. The Mission people have been very good to me, and it’s nice when you’re my age to ‘ave a few friends like that.”
The heart of the Rev almost burst with joy at Old Tom’s statement and he knew that this was what he had come to hear.
“Thank God I’ve got the Mission, and old Mick – and me brains!” added Old Tom for good measure,”Yes sir, I’ve always kept me brains and that’s something to be thankful for isn’t it?”
After more than sixty years as a cabby, Old Tom knew instinctively how to find the right words to say to each of his customers – and the Rev J Howell Everson left the East End with his soul gladdened, eager to share this heart-warming experience with the congregation in New Barnet.
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Jack Corbett, London’s Oldest Fireman
Aaron Biber, London’s Oldest Barber
