The Hackney Whipping Post
There is sometimes a certain tendency to talk about the past as if it were a better place, as if relics automatically speak of our ‘glorious history.’ Yet, occasionally, truth breaks through to remind us that, speaking of the past in this country, it was for many a place of suffering, of want and of violence – an inescapable but far less palatable historical reality.
Thus the emphasis of retelling history can often tend towards the celebratory and so, when the churchyard of St John-at-Hackney was handsomely restored with Lottery funds in recent years, the seventeenth century whipping post was conveniently consigned to the nearby backyard of Groundwork, the organisation which supervised the renovations, where it has been rotting ever since.
Historian Sean Gubbins of Walk Hackney drew my attention to this neglected artefact and took me there to see it last week. He showed me a photograph of it standing in the churchyard in 1919 and confirmed that it had decayed significantly in the last couple of years. Apparently, Hackney Council owns the whipping post but Sean can find no-one who wants to take responsibility for it and many would prefer if it simply rotted away.
In former centuries, the stocks, the whipping post and the pillory were essential elements of social control, but today these fearsome objects are treated with indifference or merely as subjects of ghoulish humour. Since they became defunct, they have acquired a phoney innocence as comic sideshows at school fetes where pupils can toss wet sponges at popular teachers to raise money for a worthy cause.
Yet the reality is that these instruments of violence and public humiliation were used to subjugate those at the margins of society – to punish the poor for petty thefts that might be as small as a loaf of bread, or to discourage vagrants, or to chasten prostitutes, or to drive homeless people out of the parish, or to subdue the mentally ill, or to penalise homosexuals, or to demean religious dissenters, or to intimidate immigrants into subservience, or against anyone at all who was considered socially unacceptable according to the prejudices of the day.
We need to remember this grim history, which reminds us that the struggle towards greater social equality and tolerance of difference in this country was a hard one, only achieved by those who resisted the culture of obedience enforced by state-sanctioned violence and enacted through instruments such as this whipping post.
Extract from Benjamin Clarke’s ‘Glimpses of Ancient Hackney & Stoke Newington’ 1894
Postcards supplied by Melvyn Brooks
Model of the Hackney whipping post
Tudor stocks and whipping post in the entrance to Shoreditch Church
If anyone is interested in helping to save and restore the whipping post please contact Sean Gubbins sean@walkhackney.co.uk
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Portraits Of South Asian Writers
Contributing Photographer Lucinda Douglas Menzies (who has more than seventy portraits in the National Portrait Gallery) has been working on a series of South Asian Writers which will be exhibited in Spitalfields from 7th-13th October at 6 Puma Court, E1 6QG and we publish a selection here today.
Rehana was surprised to hear the words, but realized they must be true, and here it was, the thing she had been looking for, a small window into her daughter’s locked heart. It was not that she was diffident but burdened. Burdened by the beloved, the disappeared. By her own widowed mother. Rehana embraced Maya, who was still so thin and brittle, but instead of telling her to be careful she found herself saying, ‘Write some good stories.’
– A Golden Age
Tahmima Anam is a British Bangladeshi writer, novelist and columnist. She was born in Dhaka and grew up in Paris, New York and Bangkok. Her first novel, A Golden Age, was published by John Murray in 2007 and was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The Bengal Trilogy, of which this is the first, chronicles three generations of the Haque family from the Bangladesh war of independence to the present day.
We could barely make out the tracks with our torchlight. From all sides, beyond our little pool of light, darkness lay in ambush to claim us. Dulu, sensing my unease, reassured me that he had imprinted the layout of this land on his mind from our last visit. He could find his way even with the torches off. We crossed the valley, over a fence, and entered the beech forest down a sloping path. We walked on fallen leaves, but enough of them remained on the branches to murmur in the wind.
As I waited, leaning against a beech tree, Dulu went crawling in the darkness. He must have been at the point of leaping on one of the clusters when we heard a gun go off and the barking of dogs. The pheasants whipped up a storm as they scattered blindly. Dulu ran back and dragged me deeper into the forest. In the distance we could see light jerking between tall beech trunks. Amidst the barking of the dogs, another shot went off. No doubt they were looking for us. I held onto Dulu and he broke into a trot.
– Catching Pheasants
Manzu Islam was born in Bangladesh where he lived through the 1971 war, walking the swamps for weeks to reach the refugee camps in India, then returning to fight as a freedom fighter. He came to England as a political refugee and, after studying for a degree and working as a racial harassment officer in East London, he became interested in writing. He has written four books including The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (1997), an anthology of short stories set both in Bangladesh and the East End, Burrow (2004) about an illegal immigrant in East London and The Song of our Swampland (2011).
There was a rustling of silk behind me, and it took me a moment to realise that my mother was standing there. She put her hand on my shoulder. A spidery claw, with nails filed and polished to drips of bright blood; her palm was so cold, it felt that it might sink through my flesh, like a knife through warm butter. I sensed people were watching her, as she stood with her oldest child, and watched her others dancing, and that was her intention; that they saw her as the loving mother of happy children. That everyone in the room would be aware of how good a mother she was, by the measure of our apparent happiness, by the measurable inch-width of our smiles. She seemed pleased that she had won them over, and asked me, with the flirtatious charm that she had poured over the guests like syrup from a pot, if I was going to dance.
“Nah, Amma,” I said, replying in Punjabi. “No, Mummy, I don’t dance”
“Go on,” she said girlishly, adding with a steel tone, “Dance with your little friends.”
– The Good Children
Roopa Farooki was born in Pakistan and brought up in London. She worked in advertising before publishing six critically acclaimed novels, and has been listed three times for the Orange Prize. Her last novel, The Good Children (2014) follows a game-changing generation of post-Partition Pakistani immigrants from 1940s Lahore to modern-day London.
He could remember the long, noisy, rattling trip in the Beeston Humberette to the huge showroom of the Great Eastern Motor Company in Park Street, where he was taken to feast his eyes on the steam and motor-cars on display. The open-mouthed stares of people who stopped in their tracks to see that rarity, a car, phut-phutting down Circular Road. (The child Prafulla was not immune to this sense of wonder; he and his brother sat for long hours in the front balcony to watch motor cycles going down the street; when a horse-drawn brougham or a Victoria or, better still, an Oldsmobile, made an appearance, the boys’ day was made.) Much earlier, when he was a little boy carried in the tight embrace of his father’s arms, the spectacular experience of watching the ascent of a gas-balloon carrying a man up up up from the Oriental Gas Company fields to the sky.
The kadam tree in the garden that looked adorned with perfect spheres of creamy-golden light in the monsoon. The man who came around every evening, a ladder on his shoulder, lighting the street lamps.
– The Lives of Others
Neel Mukherjee is the author of two novels: A Life Apart (2010), and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award, and won the Encore Award. He was born in Calcutta and now lives in London.
Somewhere, Something
We travel not to explore another country
but to return home fresh, bearing gifts.
Our lives the airports we fly from,
our bodies and souls, maps and compasses –
days the journeys we make,
past the continents we leave behind.
Surely there is somewhere, something
that justifies our coming and going?
Isn’t that why we seek a sign from each other
of experiences worth dying for
as we commune with love under starlight
brittle with frost and the sharp taste of blood?
Let’s fly free, not nailed to a mast;
see the universe with new eyes
not blinded by shadows that light casts.
– Dreams That Spell the Light
Shanta Achayra is the author of ten books, including five volumes of poetry and her latest, a novel, A World Elsewhere. An internationally published poet, critic, reviewer and scholar, her poems figure in major anthologies such as Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (W.W. Norton), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry. Her New & Selected Poems is due for publication in 2016.
Mowasi
The children all search for their mothers
The women want each other
The men stand around
Making plans
On phones and in huddles in corridors.
The children have wet eyes
The women quietly wail, some even gently sway
The men instruct everyone
On how to mourn, pray, grieve and feel.
Sylhet or London?
What were the man’s last wishes?
Did he give instructions to you, you or you?
He didn’t expect to die so soon,
And said nothing to me.
What is going to be our judgment
On where to lay the man?
It’s the last thing we ever do
For someone we all loved.
Later, as the women made tea
and then put the children to sleep,
The men were still found discussing
What to do with him.
And then, the pronouncement was made.
He shall be buried here,
she said,
It is my decision to take.
Delwar Hussain is an British-born writer and anthropologist who grew up in Spitalfields. He spent two years conducting interviews on the boundary between India and Bangladesh before writing his first book Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh-India Border (2013). He is currently writing his second book about the city of Dhaka.
The security men are watching Ray. They regard her with a perfect indifference. There are three of them, of varying heights, their belted khaki safari suits finished cleanly with the bright gloss of winter sunlight. They loiter at the entry gate, two of them standing arm in arm, dwarfed by the high peepal trees behind them, the branches against the sky. The earth around them is pale and heavy, the colour of gram flour, interrupted rarely by weeds. They do not seem self-conscious. The third guard sits on the knee-high wall that forms the boundary of the hamlet, right against the road that connects the local farms to the main town. He is older than the other two. His hair seems paint-stained, the white unnaturally thick over the grey brush beneath. The badge on his cap glints in the sun. Ray can see the light flash as he turns, even at this distance. His posture is correct; a long neck lends him significance as he twitches abruptly to take in his surroundings, alert and urgent.
– The Village
Nikita Lalwani is a novelist born in Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff. She is the author of two novels: Gifted (2007), winning the Desmond Elliot Award Creative Writing prize in 2008, and The Village (2012). She is currently working on a novel set in contemporary London entitled The Altruist.
The Calling
the night is abrim with the in-between children
they are summoning Mother India
take us back xxx take us back xxxtake us back
but the Motherland is piping the old grief
I was down on my knees xxxon my knees
why did you fly for the moon
for the cities with their pistons of desire
the night is abrim with the in-between children
their heads are down, they are crying
take us back xxxtake us back xxxtake us back
our songs are afresh with the plough and the oxen,
the smell of open fires where the roti is crackling
and our roses are the roses of home
– He do the Feringhee Voices
Daljit Nagra is a poet who has published three collections with Faber & Faber. He has won the Forward Prize for Best Poem and for Best First Collection and his books have also been nominated for the TS Eliot Prize and the Costa Prize. He was born in Britain and has an Indian heritage.
Uff! Such fun I’m having in Dubai. I’m here only, staying in a fab hotel on Jumeirah Beach. But life here, you know, it’s totally fab. So different to Lahore. There’s no dust, no beggars, no poors, no smells, no flies, no filth, no in-laws, no crime, no bombs, no open gutters and no potholes either. Everything is clean, shiny and happy and there are no trees so there are no leaves to sweep and no birds to sit in them and do potty on your car. There are no parks but who needs parks when you have nice cemented compounds and the servants, they are all smiley and polite and English speaking with no families and no bother. All my friends live in big, big houses with Flipinas and swimming pools and twenty-four hour electricity, and they have no armed guards and no razor wire and no high, high walls even. And the malls! And the restaurants! And the clubs! Uff, complete heaven, I tell you.
Janoo says they have no freedom and that I should try doing a protest demo here and see what happens to me. And I said, ‘But what is there to protest about, haan?’
– The Return of the Butterfly
Monhi Monsin is a Pakistani writer based in London. She has written two novels, The End of Innocence and Duty Free. Her books, The Diary of a Social Butterfly and The Return of the Butterfly are based on her long running satirical column in the Pakistani weekly paper, The Friday Times.
Discovering Wolverhampton had a Starbucks had been a bigger shock than discovering it had a tourist information centre. Indeed, for years, I had defined the town by its lack of a Starbucks. The fact seemed to sum up the city’s arrested development: the aggressive coffee chain, which seems to have more outlets than employees, which would open stores in the lavatories of the opposition if it could do so, couldn’t, evidently, be bothered with Wolverhampton. But as with so many things to do with my past, I’d got it wrong.
My date was late, giving me plenty of time to see how Wulfrunians were taking to café culture. Judging from the conversations floating around the till, they were struggling.
Customer one: ‘So y’am saying “tall” ay yower biggest size?’
Customer two: ‘Can’t I just have a simple coffee?’
Customer three: ‘Do yow serve fish and chips?’
– The Boy with the Topknot
Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi parents in Wolverhampton and raised as a Sikh. At the age of ten he worked part-time in a sewing factory. He attended Wolverhampton Grammar School and graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a first class degree in English Language and Literature. Between 1998 and 2006 he was a reporter and feature writer for the Financial Times before publishing The Boy With The Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton in 2008.
Arrival 1946
The boat docked in at Liverpool.
From the train Tariq stared
at an unbroken line of washing
from the North West to Euston.
These are strange people, he thought –
an Empire, and all this washing,
the underwear, the Englishman’s garden.
It was Monday, and very sharp.
– Split World: Poems 1990-2005
Monica Aleevi is a British-Pakistani poet and writer, born in Lahore, Pakistan, who came to England when she was a few months old. She has written eight poetry collectioins, including How the Stone Found its Voice (2005), inspired by Kipling’s Just So Stories, and Homesick for the Earth (2011), English versions of selected poems by Jules Supervielle. Her latest collection is At the Time of Partition.
The furniture in Mandira’s room – the bed, the study-table, its chair, the cupboard, the bookshelves – was old, enduring. The armchair was stolid and stoic, and seemed to cradle the space that existed between its thick arms; one felt protected when one sat in it. As I got to know Mandira better, as we became intimate and then grew increasingly unhappy, the room became her refuge, her dwelling, and when she said, ‘I want to go back to my room’, the words ‘my room’ suggested the small but familiar vacuums that kept close around her, that attended to her and guided her in this faraway country. Because, for a foreigner and a student, the room one wakes and sleeps in becomes one’s first friend, the only thing with which one establishes a relationship that is natural and unthinking, its air and light what one shares with one’s thoughts, its deep, unambiguous space, whether in daytime, or in darkness when the light has been switched off, what gives one back to oneself. The bed and chairs in it had an inscape, a life, which made them particular, and not a general array of objects. That is why, when she spoke of her room, I think what she meant was the sense of not being deserted, of something, if not someone, waiting, of a silent but reliable expectancy.
– Afternoon Raag
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of six novels, the latest of which is Odysseus Abroad. He is also a critic and a musician and composer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Awards for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award. In 2013, he was awarded the first Infosys Prize in the Humanities for outstanding contribution to literary studies.
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas Menzies
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Samuel Pepys At St Olave’s
In anticipation of the forthcoming exhibition Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution opening at National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on 20th November, I visited Pepys’ parish church in the City
Do you see Elizabeth Pepys, leaning out from her monument and directing her gaze across the church to where Samuel sat in the gallery opposite? These days the gallery has long gone but, since her late husband became celebrated for his journal, a memorial to him was installed in 1883 where the gallery once was, which contains a portrait bust that peers back eternally at Elizabeth. They will always see eye-to-eye even if they are forever separated by the nave.
St Olave’s on the corner of Seething Lane has long been one of my favourite City churches. Dating from the eleventh century, it is a rare survivor of the Great Fire and the London Blitz. When you walk in from Hart St, three steps down into the nave immediately reveal you are entering an ancient building, where gothic vaults and medieval monuments conjure an atmosphere more reminiscent of a country church than one in the City of London.
Samuel Pepys moved into this parish when he was appointed Commissioner of the Navy Board and came to live next to the Navy Office at the rear of the church, noting his arrival at “my house in Seething Lane” in his journal on July 18th 1660. It was here that Pepys recorded the volatile events of the subsequent decade, the Plague and the Fire.
In Seething Lane, a gateway adorned with skulls as memento mori survives from that time. Pepys saw the gate from his house across the road and could walk out of the Navy Office and through it into the churchyard, where an external staircase led him straight into the private Navy Office pew in the gallery.
The churchyard itself is swollen above surrounding ground level by the vast number of bodies interred within and, even today, the gardeners constantly unearth human bones. When Elizabeth and the staff of the Navy Office took refuge from the Plague south of the river, Pepys stayed behind in the City. Countless times, he walked back and forth between his house and the Navy Office and St Olave’s as the body count escalated through the summer of 1665. “The sickness in general thickens round us, and particularly upon our neighbourhood,” he wrote to Sir William Coventry in grim resignation.
The following year, Pepys employed workers from the dockyard to pull down empty houses surrounding the Navy Office and his own home to create fire breaks. “About 2 in the morning my wife calls me up and tells me of new cries of fire, it being come to … the bottom of our lane,” he recorded on 6th September 1666.
In the seventeenth century vestry room where a plaster angel presides solemnly from the ceiling, I was able to open Samuel Pepys’ prayer book. It was heart-stopping to turn the pages. Dark leather covers embossed with intricate designs enfold the volume, which he embellished with religious engravings and an elaborate hand-drawn calligraphic title page.
Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys are buried in a vault beneath the nave. Within living memory, when the Victorian font was removed, a hole was exposed that led to a chamber with a passage that led to a hidden chapel where a tunnel was dug to reach the Pepys vault. Scholars would love to know if he was buried with his bladder stone upon its silver mount, but no investigation has yet been permitted.
If you seek Samuel Pepys, St Olave’s is undoubtedly where you can find him. Walk in beneath the gate laden with skulls, across the graveyard bulging with the bodies of the long dead, cast your eyes along the flower beds for any shards of human bone, and enter the church where Samuel and Elizabeth regard each other from either side of the nave eternally.
St Olave’s at the corner of Seething Lane
“To our own church, and at noon, by invitation, Sir W Pen dined with me and Mrs Hester, my Lady Betten’s kinswoman, to dinner from church with me, and we were very merry. So to church again, and heard a simple fellow upon the praise of Church musique, and exclaiming against men’s wearing their hats on in the church, but I slept part of the sermon, till latter prayer and blessing and all was done without waking which I never did in my life…” SAMUEL PEPYS, Sunday 17th November, 1661
Samuel Pepys’ memorial in the south aisle
Samuel Pepys’ prayerbook
Engraved nativity and fine calligraphy upon the title page of Pepys’ prayerbook
Door to the vestry
The oldest monument in the church, 1566
Memorial of Peter Capponi, a Florentine merchant & spy, 1582
Paul Bayning, 1616, was an Alderman of the City & member of the Levant company
A Norwegian flag hangs in honour of St Olave
The gate where Pepys walked in from the Navy Office across the street
Sculpture of Samuel Pepys in the churchyard
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Makers Of East London
Our friends at Hoxton Mini Press have just published MAKERS OF EAST LONDON written by Kate Treggiden, a survey of craftsmen and women working in the East End – and today we publish a gallery of portraits of the makers by Charlotte Schreiber selected from the book
Steve McEwan makes handbells at Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Andreas Hudelmayer makes violins, violas & cellos in Clerkenwell
Daniel Harris weaves tweed in Clapton
Nicola Tassie makes ceramics in Hoxton
Rob Court makes neon signs in Walthamstow
Sebastian Tarek makes shoes in Hoxton
Katherine May works with textiles in Homerton
Walter Berwick makes spectacles at Algha Works in Fish Island
Richard Ince makes umbrellas at James Ince & Son in Cambridge Heath
Naomi Paul crochets lamps in Cambridge Heath
Barn the Spoon carves spoons in Bethnal Green & Stepney
Ray Rawlings makes pointe shoes at Freed of London in Well St
Kyla McCallum makes origami lamps in Bow
Casting sculpture at AB Fine Art Foundry in Poplar
Casting sculpture at AB Fine Art Foundry in Poplar
Gareth Neal makes furniture in Dalston
Graham Bignell, Beatrice Bless & Richard Ardagh at New North Press in Hoxton
James Kennedy makes bicycles in De Beauvoir
Simon Day makes furniture in Dalston
Photographs copyright © Charlotte Schreiber
Click here to buy a copy of MAKERS OF EAST LONDON direct from Hoxton Mini Press
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At Haggerston Pool
Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney gained rare access to Haggerston Pool which has been sitting unused for fifteen years and produced this photoessay of a journey through the building.
Readers are encouraged to attend the public meeting on Thursday 8th October at 7pm to discuss the future of the Grade II listed building at VLC Centre (next to the pool), Whiston Rd, E2 8BN, where an exhibition of competing proposals will be open to view from 6pm.
At the opening ceremony, Alderman E J Wakeling, Vice-Chair of the Baths Committee, swam a length of the pool underwater
Photographs copyright © Simon Mooney
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At Walter Reginald Ltd, Leather Merchants
Dee Ahmed
In Wapping, where once there were hundreds of warehouses packed with exotic treasures, I had mistakenly believed there were no longer any such wonders left to be discovered – until I came upon Walter Reginald, the East End’s largest sheepskin & leather merchants, tucked away behind Machine Mart at 100 The Highway.
Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I went to investigate, and we were intoxicated by the smell of leather in its infinite variety of colours and finishes, brought from all over the world and crammed into this well-ordered storehouse. This is where designers come to seek material for manufacturing coats, belts and bags, and costume-makers source fleeces and hides to dress film actors in epic mythological dramas, yet also where anyone can walk in and buy a sheepskin.
“We are London’s leather heaven,” declared Jill Saxony widening her eyes in dizzy excitement. She has presided over the company since her husband Raymond Farbey’s death in 2008, assisted by her glamorous daughters Natalie & Bianca, and supported by a loyal team of long-term staff including co-director Malcolm Proops who has been there thirty years. The prevailing atmosphere is that of a small well-run family hotel where everyone goes about their business with relaxed efficiently yet all have time to answer questions and enjoy a chat with customers, most of whom return regularly.
Walter Reginald was established seventy years ago by Walter Weiss, who had fled to this country from Austria before the war, and his company merged with Jill’s husband’s company in the eighties. Today, Jill maintains a discreet presence in the office, while Natalie & Bianca hold court out in the warehouse attending to the customers and maintaining a constant stream of good-humoured sisterly banter.
Orders are laid out across a huge table, presenting swathes of sensuous colour to please the eye while more options are brought from each corner of the warehouse to present an embarrassment of choices. There is a compelling theatre to this process of rolling and unrolling large pieces of leather, expressed in gasps of wonder and delight as unexpected colours are revealed with a dramatic flourish and customers clasp their hands in pleasure, inspired by the potential of such luxurious materials.
The spectacle of all the fleeces at Walter Reginald reminded me that my old sheepskin waistcoat might not last another winter. When I acquired it in New York City twenty years ago, the waistcoat was already thirty years old and now it has become brittle and ragged. Yet over all these winters I have come to rely upon its warmth.
To my amazement and gratitude, Natalie was able to match the colour and quality of the fleece and Bianca directed me to someone who could make a replica. So thanks to Walter Reginald and the last warehouse of wonders in Wapping, I can relax, secure in the knowledge I am ready to face the winter weather, snug in my sheepskin waistcoat for many years to come.
The staff at Walter Reginald
Natalie Saxony-Farbey, General Manager
Barry Francis, Sales Manager
Bianca Nilsson, Director
Malcolm Proops, Director, has been with the company for thirty years
Danny McMullan, Warehouse Apprentice
Bianca, Natalie and their mother Jill
My sheepskin waistcoat made from fleeces supplied by Walter Reginald
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Walter Reginald, 100 The Highway, St George-in-the-East, E1 2BX
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At The Pearlies’ Harvest Festival
Today I preview the Pearly Kings & Queens Harvest Festival which takes place this year on Sunday 27th September, commencing with high jinks in the Guildhall yard in the City of London from 1:30pm followed by a procession to St Mary-le-Bow
On the last Sunday afternoon in September, the Pearly Kings & Queens come together from every corner of London and gather in the square outside the Guildhall in the City of London for a lively celebration to mark the changing of the seasons.
When I visited there was Maypole dancing and Morris Dancing, there was a pipe band and a marching band, there were mayors and dignitaries in red robes and gold chains, there were people from Rochester in Dickensian costume, there were donkeys with carts and veteran cars, and there was even an old hobby horse leaping around – yet all these idiosyncratic elements successfully blended to create an event with its own strange poetry. In fact, the participants outnumbered the audience and a curiously small town atmosphere prevailed, allowing the proud Pearlies to mingle with their fans, and enjoy an afternoon of high-spirited chit-chat and getting their pictures snapped.
I delighted in the multiplicity of designs that the Pearlies had contrived for their outfits, each creating their own identity expressed through ingenious patterns of pearl buttons, and on this bright afternoon of early Autumn they made a fine spectacle, sparkling in the last rays of September sunshine. My host was the admirable Doreen Golding, Pearly Queen of the Old Kent Rd & Bow Bells, who spent the whole year organising the event. And I was especially impressed with her persuasive abilities in cajoled all the mayors into a spot of maypole dancing, because it was a heartening sight to see a team of these dignified senior gentlemen in their regalia prancing around like eleven year olds and enjoying it quite unselfconsciously too.
In the melee, I had the pleasure to grapple with George Major, the Pearly King of Peckham (crowned in 1958), and his grandson Daniel, the Pearly Prince, sporting an exceptionally pearly hat that is a century old. George is an irrepressibly flamboyant character who taught me the Cockney salute, and then took the opportunity of his celebrity to steal cheeky kisses from ladies in the crowd, causing more than a few shrieks and blushes. As the oldest surviving member of one of the only three surviving original pearly families, he enjoys the swaggering distinction of being the senior Pearly in London, taking it as licence to behave like a mischievous schoolboy. Nearby I met Matthew (Daniels’s father) – a Pearly by marriage not birth, he revealed apologetically – who confessed he sewed the six thousand buttons on George’s jacket while watching Match of the Day.
Fortunately, the Lambeth Walk had been enacted all round the Guildhall Yard and all the photo opportunites were exhausted before the gentle rain set in. And by then it was time to form a parade to process down the road to St Mary-le-Bow for the annual Harvest Festival. A distinguished man in a red tail coat with an umbrella led the procession through the drizzle, followed by a pipe band setting an auspicious tone for the impressive spectacle of the Pearlies en masse, some in veteran cars and others leading donkeys pulling carts with their offerings for the Harvest Festival. St Mary-le-Bow is a church of special significance for Pearlies because it is the home of the famous Bow Bells that called Dick Whittington back to London from Highgate Hill, and you need to be born within earshot of these to call yourself a true Cockney.
The black and white chequerboard marble floor of the church was the perfect complement to the pearly suits, now that they were massed together in delirious effect. Everyone was happy to huddle in the warmth and dry out, and there were so many people crammed together in the church in such an array of colourful and bizarre costumes of diverse styles, that as one of the few people not in some form of fancy dress, I felt I was the odd one out. But we were as one, singing “All Things Bring and Beautiful” together. Prayers were said, speeches were given and the priest reminded us of the Pearlies’ origins among he costermongers in the poverty of nineteenth century London. We stood in reverent silence for the sake of history and then a Pearly cap was passed around in aid of the Whitechapel Mission.
Coming out of the church, there was a chill in the air. The day that began with Summery sunshine was closing with Autumnal rain. Pearlies scattered down Cheapside and through the empty City streets for another year, back to their respective corners of London. Satisfied that they had celebrated Summer’s harvest, the Pearlies were going home to light fires, cook hot dinners and turn their minds towards the Wintry delights of the coming season, including sewing yet more pearl buttons on their suits during Match of the Day.
