Some Recent Blogs
One of the delights of teaching courses encouraging others to write blogs is that – without exception – the participants always come up with interesting stories and here are just a few recent examples. The next course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ will be held in Spitalfields on 7th & 8th November. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book your place.
A LONDON FAMILY
The Search For My Lost Ancestors
by The Incidental Genealogist
https://alondonfamily.wordpress.com
Some years after my father died, my mother came across a handful of old snapshots in a battered leather wallet. One of the pictures fascinated me in particular. It was the only hand-coloured image in the collection and showed five boys under a tree, relaxed and grinning at an unknown photographer with long, pointed sticks in their hands. On the reverse was written in faded blue ink, “Expedition to East Coker Woods, Whit Monday 1944.” It was not difficult to locate my father (on the far right) and my future uncle through marriage behind him.
The boys were teenagers, but their old-fashioned clothes and obvious delight in their holiday outing made them seem much younger. “That must have been taken when Dad was an evacuee,” my mother explained, “He was sent to Somerset. I think his mother’s family originally came from somewhere near there.”
“But wasn’t the place he went to called Yeovil – not East Coker?” I asked.
When I was a child, my father occasionally told me stories about the time he had spent in Somerset during the war. He told me about collecting newts in jam jars, about raiding birds’ nests for eggs and hunting for shrapnel in the lanes. When I grew older, he added other tales to his repertoire – the dances in the village hall, drinking scrumpy straight from the barrel and shooting rabbits. When I asked my father where this village was, all he said was that it was called ‘Yeovil.’ The place sounded exactly the mythic English village of perpetual idyllic summers, where hollyhocks and sunflowers towered high, and children were free to run through woods and fields.
I pulled out an old AA drivers’ map and once I located Yeovil it was easy to find East, West and North Coker. I thought it strange that my father, who loved poetry, had never bothered to tell me about the village and the connection to TS Eliot and his Four Quartets, particularly when I had studied the writer so intensively for my exams.
As we were growing up, my father had given my sister and me an eclectic mix of poetry books and he must have been aware of the connection Eliot had with East Coker. It was as if he had never wanted us to know the exact location of the village which had taken away so much with one hand – his home in London and his coveted scholarship to the posh school in Dulwich – but which had bestowed gifts with the other – love and respect for nature, and an appreciation and understanding of the countryside.
A few weeks later I came across the East Coker Newsletter online, proclaiming that there would be special events to commemorate the anniversary of VE and VJ Day during the second weekend in July, and I knew I had to make the trip.
From Yeovil we caught a bus to East Coker, travelling the same route the evacuees came on September 1st, 1939. Before long, a cast-iron signpost pointed us in the direction of East Coker and the bus veered off down a narrow lane which sunk deeper as we travelled along it. Roots of ancient trees protruded from the sandy soil, while above us their canopy shut out the late afternoon sun. We rounded an unexpected corner and came into the centre of East Coker – a village that looked as if it should not belong in the twenty-first century. Walking across the damp fields at dusk towards the warm light of the pub on that first evening, it was almost possible to imagine that, in this place, the past might still exist in some ghostly form alongside the present.
In the heat of the following day, on a sunken footpath which led from the farm through the woods to the old priory, I lay down, head to the red soil, and heard the drum of distant hooves and the click of midsummer insects. For those few seconds, it felt as if the earth was struggling to gather up momentum to move backwards, to reveal something to me – until the shouts of children in the playing fields broke through the thick afternoon air.
The following day I met the boy who had taken the photograph in the woods on Whitsun Monday over sixty years previously. He was manning one of the stalls at the village hall war exhibition and his table was a jumble of World War II paraphernalia – old ration books, home guard uniforms and pieces of ammunition. One part of his collection was dedicated to the story of the friendship between local children and the evacuees.
And there I saw it – among the letters and diaries and printed memorabilia, was a copy of my own photograph in black and white, mounted in a crude wooden frame. Not trusting myself to speak, I reached into my bag and pulled out my hand-coloured version, and passed it across the table, watching the old man’s face as he struggled to work out the connection.
It was then I learnt about that day out in the woods. A moment of late childhood, hanging high and free above the dark shadow cast by the war, and caught on camera like a dragonfly in ether for future generations to see.
In my beginning is my end, in succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass
– TS Eliot, East Coker, 1940
A CELEBRATION OF ORDINARINESS
by Liam O’Farrell
http://www.liamofarrell.com/blog/
My painting of Liverpool St Station
I love painting markets, so when I was commissioned by a couple to paint Spitalfields Market, I jumped at the chance. The clients’ family had worked in the market way back as far as the nineteenth century but they wanted the painting to be set in its heyday in the nineteen-thirties and include an old photo of his family at their market stall.
I lived in Hackney for a few years and enjoyed my time there, so I was delighted to revisit the borough to paint one of the typical terraced houses around London Fields. In my time, Hackney was viewed as run down and more than a little bit lawless.
In Great Eastern St
In Bacon St
In Brick Lane
Paintings copyright © Liam O’Farrell
SPIDERS IN AUTUMN
by The Bug Woman
Dear Readers, at this time of year a walk through my garden involves pushing through at least one spider’s web strung at head height. I feel bad as the remains float off the breeze like so many silk curtains, but what can I do? The spiders are everywhere.
They have been here since spring but they have been tiny. Most European spiders moult their skins five to ten times in their lives, growing larger after each episode, and in these late golden days, we start to notice the creatures for the first time. On a misty October morning, it may feel as if a hedge is more web than foliage.
Webs will vary according to the age and experience of the spider. With practice, you can determine the style of an individual spider. It is too easy to think of small creatures as identical automata but there is great variation in ‘character’ even among animals that we have been taught to consider almost brainless.
Silk is not just for webs, however. Spiders use it in almost every aspect of their lives. Spiderlings use an especially fine kind of silk known as gossamer in order to disperse. Once launched, the little spiders have no control over where they go. They may get eaten by swallows, fall into water or become food for other spiders. Nonetheless, this literal leap into the unknown resembles what many young humans have been doing at this season, as they start school or leave home to go to college.
Spiders’ silk is a form of protein, which is produced within the spiders’ body in the form of strands and exuded by the spinnerets, two glands at the base of the abdomen. Whilst many invertebrates produce silk, it has reached its highest form in the spider and one can produce up to seven kinds of silk.
We often hear that spider silk is as strong as steel, but what is truly remarkable is its toughness. Toughness is the measure of how hard it is to break a filament and silk used for supporting a web is tougher than any man-made substance. Darwin’s Bark Spider produces the toughest silk of all, which has been estimated to be ten times as tough as kevlar. It can build webs with strands of up to twenty-five metres across rivers. I imagine walking into a web like this would be like walking into a cheese wire.
The thing that I love about spiders’ webs is their combination of strength and delicacy, yet they often go unnoticed until a foggy morning reveals that every inch of a box hedge is connected with a lace-like lattice of silk, as beautiful and tattered as Miss Haversham’s wedding dress.
The Cornhill Water Pump, 1948
A LONDON INHERITANCE
The Cornhill Water Pump
My father took the photo of the Cornhill Water Pump in 1948 and what surprised me as I was taking the photo of it today is how little has changed. Not just the stonework of the buildings opposite which have been cleaned in the intervening years, but also the windows, the large lamps either side of the door on the right and the stone decoration on both buildings are the same. Apart from the traffic and the post box, I see little change.
During construction of Lloyds Bank there in 1927, the roadway and several buildings in Cornhill collapsed. The damage was so bad that the Commercial Union building had to be rebuilt and it is that building we see today on the right of the photograph. The collapse was put down to loose soil where the Walbrook once flowed beneath this part of the City at the approximate position of the water pump.
Writing in 1910, Sir Walter Besant refers to the origin of the pump in ‘London, The City’- “A conduit built by Henry le Waleys in 1282, and there was a standard for Thames water brought their by the contrivance of one Peter Morris, a Dutchman.” Besant also mentions several other conduits and a spring in the area of Cornhill, so it is not clear whether he is referring to the location of the pump.
The well was covered and rediscovered in 1799 due to “a sinking of the pavement in front of the Royal Exchange, March 16, 1799″ according to ‘Springs, Streams and Spas of London’ by Alfred Foord in 1910.
“The well and pump have been disused for some years past – the iron case of the pump remains, but deprived of handle and spout. The whole structure would be much better for a coat of paint, which would not only improve its appearance, but would also tend to arrest decay.” One hundred and five years later, Foord would be very pleased with the condition of the pump today.
HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ, 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields, 7th & 8th November
Spend a weekend in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Spitalfields and learn how to write a blog with The Gentle Author.
This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.
SALIENT DETAILS
The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 7th & 8th November from 10am -5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday. Lunches cooked by Oliver Rowe and tea, coffee and cakes by the Townhouse.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.
On The SS Robin
Sitting on a pontoon before the Millennium Mills in Royal Victoria Dock, with her proud crimson breast evoking the bird that is her namesake, SS Robin is the oldest complete steam coaster in the world. Constructed just a few miles away by Mackenzie, MacAlpine & Co at Orchard Yard, Bow, in 1890 alongside her sister ship SS Rook, she was fitted out in East India Dock and equipped with an engine in Dundee. There were once fifteen hundred of these vessels chugging up and down the coastline of the British Isles, competing with the railway to deliver bulk cargoes such as grain, coal, iron ore and china clay – but today only SS Robin survives to tell the story of this lost maritime endeavour.
Beneath an occluded sky with rain blowing in the wind, I visited SS Robin yesterday within the shadow of Spiler’s derelict Millennium Mills, like some great cliff looming overhead. Repair to the hull of the steam coaster reveals the damage that time has wrought, yet lines of sturdy nineteenth century rivets, once heated and thrown by children, remain visible alongside modern repairs. Of squat design and robust workmanship, these ships were only designed to withstand ten years of use, and SS Robin was sold off to a Spanish owner in 1900 but continued to work the Altantic coastal route from Bilbao for a further seventy-four years, under the guise of ‘Maria.’
“She is as significant a vessel as Cutty Sark,” Matt Friday, who works for the trust set up to care for SS Robin, assured me, “She is just twenty years younger and the last of her class.” SS Robin was due to be broken up in September 1974 but instead, once her final cargo was unloaded in Bilbao in May of that year, she was purchased by the Maritime Trust and steamed back up the English Channel and the Thames to London in June, where she was moored at St Katharine Dock.
In spite of major restoration, SS Robin fell into neglect and, by 1991, had been moved down river to East India Dock. Sold for the sum of just one pound, she was used as a floating gallery for several years until, as this century dawned, it became clear more restoration work was required and the old vessel was no longer seaworthy. 80% of her steelwork would need to be replaced to make her shipshape again and so SS Robin was transferred permanently to a pontoon which permits retention of the original fabric.
When I visited yesterday, a thick layer of asphalt was being removed from the deck – formerly installed as a waterproofing agent, it had become a medium for water to enter the structure. Walking around the pontoon, the elegant sculptural form of the hull was magnificent to behold, while down below, the original cylinders and pistons of the triple expansion engine remain. In spite of its modest origin, this is a vessel of distinguished design and sitting in the vast emptiness of Royal Victoria Dock, once the largest working dock in the world, SS Robin – the last of the ‘dirty British coasters’ – provides the necessary catalyst to evoke the history and meaning of this extraordinary place.
SS Robin in Lerwick (Courtesy of SS Robin Trust)
SS Robin in River Douro, Porto, under the guise of ‘Maria’ (Courtesy of SS Robin Trust)
Undergoing restoration in the seventies (Courtesy of SS Robin Trust)
At St Katharine Docks in the eighties (Courtesy of Ambrose Greenway)
SS Robin’s neighbour in Royal Victoria Dock is a lightship
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.
from Cargoes by John Masefield
Learn more from SS Robin Trust
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The Lexicography Of Cockney Slang
As part of the CRIES OF LONDON season I have devised for Bishopsgate Institute, the foremost lexicographer of slang Jonathon Green is giving a lecture about Cockney rhyming slang entitled Slingin’ the Old Jack Lang: London’s Coster Language on October 22nd at 7:30pm. Click here for tickets
Copies of Paul Bommer’s print ‘The Cockney Alphabet’ are available from the online shop
You may like to read my original profile
William Whiffin’s London
William Whiffin (1878-1957) is one of the great unsung London photographers, which makes it a rare pleasure to present this gallery of his pictures from the collection of his granddaughter Hellen Martin, many of which have never been published before. Born into a family of photographers in the East End, Whiffin made his living with studio portraits and commercial commissions, yet he strove to be recognised for his more artistic photography. I recommend you visit the exhibition of William Whiffin’s East End at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives until November 19th.
Lion Brewery and the Shot Tower, South Bank
The photographer’s son Sid Whiffin at Cooper’s Stairs, Old Queen St
Off Fetter Lane
The Pantheon, Oxford St
In Princes Sq, Stepney
Figureheads of fighting ships in Grosvenor Rd
At Covent Garden Market
Milwall & the Island Horse Omnibus, c.1910
St Catherine Coleman next to Fenchurch St Station
In Fleet St
In Buckfast St, Bethnal Green
At Borough Market
In Lombard St
Rotherhithe Watch House
Wapping Old Stairs
Junction of Cambridge Heath Rd & Hackney Rd
Ratcliff Stairs, Limehouse
Ratcliff Causeway, Limehouse
St Jude’s, Commercial St
Farthing Bundles at the Fern St Settlement, Bow
Houndsditch Rag Fair
At the Royal Exchange, City of London
Weavers’ House, Bethnal Green Rd
Off Pennington St, Wapping
Borough of Poplar Electricity Dept
Pruning in the hop gardens of Faversham
Photographs copyright © Estate of William Whiffin
Hellen Martin & I should be very grateful if readers can identify any of the uncaptioned photographs
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At Queens Market
Asif Sheikh
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I spent our Saturday morning at Queen’s Market in Upton Park and we were inspired by the vitality of the place and the infinite variety of cheap goods on sale. Brightly-lit stalls gleam beneath a cavernous dark roof that seems to recede forever, sheltering an intricate labyrinth of booths, kiosks and shops offering some new wonder at every corner. It is one of those places where you can buy everything you need and want for nothing in life.
Like the porter at the gate, Neil Stockwell greeted us from the very first stall in the front of the market where he sells fruit and vegetables at bargain prices. “My grandfather was here before me in 1955,” he informed me, “As a child I worked with him, and when he retired in 1979 I took over his hawker’s licence and I’ve been here ever since.”
Understandably, Neil is very protective of his beloved market. “This is the jewel of the East End,” he assured me authoritatively, “Its survival has been very much to do with all the different people who have come here – once upon a time, we only sold apples, oranges and veg but now we sell everything. There’s no divisions in this market, it is a community within a community.”
With this in mind, Colin & I set off through the market and – even at that busy time – we received a welcome from the traders, graciously permitting us to take their portraits. We met Zulaikha, Qasim & Aisha Tasawer on their first day of trading and David Martin who has been selling fish for twenty-seven years, and it became evident that this is a prospering market.
Astonishingly, it might have closed forever if not for the tenacious campaign by Friends of Queens Market who fought for ten years to see off a high-rise development plan and get the market designated as an asset of community value. Now the future is secure, yet the level of maintenance has been pitiful and – as traders face another winter with leaks in the roof – a protest took place on Saturday in an attempt to underline the importance of this basic provision.
If you have not yet made the pilgrimage to Queens Market, then I encourage you to do so. Once you have been there, you will want to go back regularly. You can see life, get all your weekly supplies fresh and cheap, and never go near a supermarket again.
Neil Stockwell ‘This is the jewel of the East End”
Carol Porter has been selling fruit & veg for nineteen years in Queens Market
Zulaikha, Qasim & Aisha Tasawer on their first day as stallholders
Joan Thompson has been selling jewellery here for seven years and was in Brixton before
Ahmed Nassr has been selling olives and honey for just two months in Queens Market
David Martin has been selling fish in this market for twenty-seven years
Mrs Wheatley has been selling jewellery at Queens Market for thirty-two years
Mr Baig has been trading in textiles here for four years
Friends of Queens Market protest about the lack of repairs to the leaky roof
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Read about how Queens Market was saved on the Friends of Queens Market website
From The Lives Of Commercial Stationers
Today I present an extract from my new book BADDELEY BROTHERS published on 15th October
Observe all the diners looking snappy and quite resplendent in their finery at a fancy dinner in 1956 to celebrate the centenary of Baddeley Brothers. Envelope makers, die sinkers and engravers present themselves to the camera with dignity and poise. Some of these people had stayed with the company, supplying commercial stationery to the City of London throughout the war, while others had returned afterwards as veterans to make a new start.
Baddeley Brothers’ factory in Moor Lane was destroyed in the Blitz of 1940 but, by 1946, David Baddeley had acquired the lease to 92 & 94 Paul St in Shoreditch, permitting the print works to leave temporary premises in Bishopsgate, opposite Liverpool St Station, where they had operated during hostilities. Like others in the company, David Baddeley never spoke about his service career, yet he had commanded a squadron of North Sea minesweepers on the East Coast off Harwich. They were old steam trawlers run by skippers who were barely susceptible to naval discipline yet he had to lead them into mined waters.
Thus, returning to the world of wholesale commercial stationery, David Baddeley did not suffer fools gladly and expected his jobs to take priority in the works. A few years later when his nephews, David & Roger Pertwee, walked into this building, most of the working practices and the arrangement of the workplace still followed those established in the nineteenth century. Although we cannot go back in time to see it for ourselves, David & Roger were able to describe for me what they discovered inside.
On the top floor sat a row of seven or eight engravers working at their benches, each with an anglepoise light and a magnifying glass. These engravers each had different specialities – one did various forms of script, especially copperplate, another did the different range of lettering styles for titles, another worked the pantograph which scaled letters up and down from the designs onto the metal plate, another did ‘ordinary’ lettering for addresses and lists of directors, and there was an ‘artist’ who could do preliminary drawings and illuminations, graphic lettering and elaborate calligraphic styles. They all took great pride in their work.
Ken Roddis, the foreman engraver, was in his sixties then. He always wore a suit and tie, and had joined the company at fourteen in 1920. Ken organised who was to going to engrave which part of a complete design according to their best skills. Everyone was paid by piecework – so much per letter – and Roger always understood from Ken that this was how they got through the Depression of the thirties, by being careful to share out the work fairly so that everyone got enough to live.
Below the engravers, on the third floor, they did edge-gilding for cards, interleaving them with fine tissue and packed them. On the second floor, there were die-stamping machines and a hand die-stamping press, as well as litho and copperplate printing, and, on the first floor, there were offices divided by glass partitions. This was where you found Stan Woolley, the office manager, who had served in the Navy with David Baddeley and been recruited to Baddelely Brothers at the end of the war.
On the same floor, Charlie Ewin ran the litho department for fifty years. “He lived at the top of Shoreditch High Street on the right hand side by the church,” David Pertwee remembered, “Charlie’d say to me, ‘Come and have a drink on Saturday night,’ and I’d say, ‘Alright Charlie!’ and I’d have a fantastic evening. On Monday, I’d ask him, ‘Did you have a good weekend, Charlie?’ and, ’Yes,’ he’d say, ‘I picked a fight with the wife because she wouldn’t go out with me, so I stayed out the whole time the pubs were open.” Then I’d see him hanging onto the railings by Shoreditch Church to find his way home.”
“He used to take all the high pressure jobs like menus and table plans,” Roger added, “and every so often it would get too much for him and the whole lot would go up in the air. He was a great friend actually. He was never ever late, and you’d never notice he’d been on the tonk.”
When David Pertwee first arrived in 1956, Bill Steer was the factory manager, running both premises. “He was a small man, a bit like a ferret and a little brow beaten by my uncle I think,” David admitted to me,”My uncle relied upon him but as he grew older, he grew less reliable and there were three pubs in between our Paul St and Tabernacle St factories. Even so, he was a very good long-standing employee.”
With the development of trade in the City of London, extra capacity was required for modern machines and more room for envelope-makers to work. Thus, another factory in Tabernacle St was acquired in 1952, less than five minutes walk away. Most significantly, it had a coke furnace in the basement where dies could be softened and hardened, which meant that this essential part of the work need no longer be sent out. One of Roger’s first jobs was to order the coke for the furnace which was fired up every Tuesday and Thursday. On those days, there was always a film of smoke and an acrid smell – the whiff of cyanide – which told Roger that the hardening of dies was in progress.
At first, a rubbing was taken of the die as it was when it was received. Engraved dies are hardened with cyanide but equally they can be softened by exposure to heat. Once this is done, the original design may be scraped out and re-engraved before hardening again, and this process can be repeated over and over as required until the die becomes too worn and needs replacing.
The dies to be hardened were put into steel boxes and the cyanide was heated in a steel pot. Then the dies would be dipped in it for a second and cooled in a bucket of water afterwards. This achieved a surface of hardened steel and they were known as ‘case-hardened.’
To soften the dies again, they were put into a steel box known as a ‘saggar’, packed with layers of charcoal and sealed with fine clay, before being left in the furnace overnight. Thus the hardening of dies always came first and the softening was done at the end of the day.
The basement was also used for envelope-cutting, for guillotining and as a paper warehouse. The paper was delivered down a chute. The men would open up the cellar door and reams of paper would be thrown down from the lorry and stacked away. Roger remembers how, in the sixties, the men would stand under the trapdoor and watch the young women going by in their miniskirts. “Hackney girls started off working in overalls,” Roger confided to me, “but once they got the chance they started dressing up, as factory spaces around Old St were converted to offices and clerical work replaced manufacturing.”
On the ground and first floors were the new automatic die-stamping machines with five or six men minding them on each floor. Yet in spite of this new mechanisation, there was still Charlie Davis, an experience hand die-stamper who had been with Baddeley Brothers for his whole working life. If a crest consisted of five or six colours that had to be in register, his skill was such that, if you wanted two hundred and fifty copies, it was quicker for him to do it than a machine.
The second floor and third floors were a female preserve ruled by Mary Brandon who ran the department, as successor to the legendary Mrs Carter, with five or six women devoted to envelope-making and hand-folding. Mary Brandon came from another envelope-maker in Croydon who went out of business and was an expert at making any sort of envelope asked of her, whether a tissue-lined or gusseted or any other style.
Violet Rogers, who worked at Baddeley Brothers into her seventies and eventually retired in 1993, still talked about the bomb in December 1940. “We all turned up to work the next day but we could only get to the end of Moor Lane,” she remembered, “and they told us we couldn’t get any further.”
As the photographs of Baddeley Brothers’ dinners reveal, the opportunity for regular celebration was not neglected as the age of austerity passed away. “David Baddeley may have been a blunt Victorian,” Roger confessed to me,”but he was good at talking and mixing with people and, every year or so, he’d say, ’It’s time we had a firm’s dinner’ and we’d have it in one of the large eateries in Copthall Avenue in the City.”
Held on a Friday night, these dinners were formal affairs done in style with engraved invitations, at which employees dressed up and brought their husbands and wives, all the pensioners came back for a reunion, and speeches and votes of thanks were made. “It was a bit stilted to start with, but then after a couple of drinks people relaxed and had fun,” Roger recalled fondly, “I think everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and there was a free bar which was open afterwards until either it was getting out of hand or people went home.”
The responsibility fell upon David & Roger to stay to the end of these parties. “There would be a bit of a sing song, and there was always one or two who went the extra mile, but no fighting, we all behaved ourselves,” David assured me.
“As a junior director, I was essentially an errand boy,” Roger concluded, “but it was apparent to me that the company was getting going in the sixties and had regained the momentum it lost in the war.”
Charlie Davis, hand die-stamping
David Bates working a proofing press
Graham Donaldson, engraver
Graham Donaldson scrutinises his work
Mary Brandon folding envelopes by hand
Alan Reeves, envelope maker
Baddeley Brothers at IPEX (International Print Exhibition) 1960
BADDELEY BROTHERS will be launched at St Bride Printing Library, Fleet St, on Thursday October 15th at 7pm
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Scars Of War
Taking advantage of yesterday’s bright October sunshine, I set out for a walk across London with my camera to see what shrapnel and bomb damage I could find still visible from the last century. Much of the damage upon brick structures appears to have gone along with the walls, since most of what I discovered was upon stone buildings.
Shrapnel damage at the junction of Mansell St & Chambers St from World War II
Shrapnel pock-marks upon Southwark Cathedral from February 1941
Damage at St Bartholomew’s Hospital from zeppelin raids on 8th September 1915 and on 7th July 1917
Damage at St Bartholomew’s Hospital from zeppelin raids on 8th September 1915 and on 7th July 1917
Damage at Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from a bomb dropped on Wednesday 18th December 1917 at 8pm
Damage at Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from a bomb dropped on Wednesday 18th December 1917 at 8pm
Repair of shrapnel damage from September 194o at University College London, Zoology Museum, Gower St
Damage at St Clement Dane’s in the Strand from 10th May 1941 when the church was gutted
Damage at St Clement Dane’s in the Strand from 10th May 1941 when the church was gutted
Sphinx on the Embankment with damage from the first raid by German aeroplanes Tuesday 4th September 1917
Cleopatra’s Needle with damage from the first raid by German aeroplanes Tuesday 4th September 1917
Damage at Victoria & Albert Museum from two bombs in Exhibition Rd during World War II
Damage at Victoria & Albert Museum from two bombs in Exhibition Rd during World War II
Damage at Tate Britain from September 16th 1940
Please tell me of more locations of visible bomb damage and I will extend this series
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