Colin O’Brien Returns to Clerkenwell
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien is giving a Magic Lantern Show at Bishopsgate Institute next Thursday 19th November at 7:30pm, showing his photographs of Clerkenwell and beyond, and telling the stories behind the pictures. Click here to book a ticket.
Colin O’Brien in St Peter’s Italian Church, Clerkenwell
Many of Colin O’Brien’s early photographs were taken with a Leica camera that he received ‘off the back of a lorry’ when he was growing up in Clerkenwell in the fifties. Recently this was restored again to working order for Colin by Leica, prompting him to make a sentimental pilgrimage to his old neighbourhood with his cherished camera.
“It was an exciting day when I held my 1931 Leica again, newly-restored and working for the first time in more that forty years. My photographic journey has been an eventful one – starting with a box camera and ending with a digital monster that includes a setting for any photographic eventuality. There were many cameras in between but my favourite was always the Leica.
This camera served me well in the fifties, sixties & seventies and I welcomed it back as if it were a long-lost relative. When I pulled out the 3.5cm Elmar lens, looked through the viewfinder and fired the shutter, it sounded good. The Elmar lens was the same one I used to take accident pictures with at the crossing of Clerkenwell Rd and Farringdon Rd in the fifties and sixties.
The next step was to buy a roll of film and shoot some pictures again. Way back in my youthful Leica days, my eyesight was perfect, my hands were supple, my brain activated more quickly and my limbs bent without creaking like an old wooden sailing ship. The repaired camera felt heavy and solid to the touch and it was only when I realised that it did not have an exposure meter or auto-focus and – after each frame – it had to be wound on manually, that I discovered I would have to remember how to do all these procedures in an instant if I stood any chance of capturing the passing scene.
Yet it was amazing how it all came back to me. A quick movement of the split image rangefinder to focus, an estimation of exposure based on experience and the tolerance of black and white film to under- or over-exposure, switching from the rangefinder to the viewfinder, and pressing of the shutter release placed conveniently on the top of the camera. ‘It’s as simple as that,’ I thought. Or is it? I followed the same procedure for my next shot, but nothing happened. I had forgotten to wind on the film.
Arriving in Clerkenwell, the memories came flooding back – mum and dad, my relatives, Mrs Leinweber and the kids I used to play with on the surrounding bomb sites. Only today it is different. Pret A Manger stands on the corner of Clerkenwell Rd and Farringdon Rd where the Metropolitan Tavern once was. Victoria Dwellings, the tenement where I grew up in the forties and fifties, has been replaced by so-called luxury flats. Where once stood Booth’s Dry Gin Distillery there is now a new office block and the hoarding is gone that displayed the ubiquitous Guinness advertisements which were part of my growing up.
What still remains are ‘the steps,’ where as kids we used to meet before setting out to play our games of Hopscotch, or Cowboys & Indians. I sat on the steps where Razzi Tuffano and Pidge Boffer sat way back in 1948 on the very spot where I raised my box camera to take their photograph. The Italian church is still there in Clerkenwell Road where I took the picture of the Carmelite nun sweeping rubbish into the street from the building next to the church where they lived.
Amazingly, the door to the church was open and I went inside. It was like entering another world from the drabness of the dull street walking in to the ornate Italian decoration of the Church. The place was empty. I stood looking at the altar where I used to be an altar boy in the forties and from where I once set off with the Italian Procession, an annual event which still happens today. I remember Beniamino Gigli coming to the church to sing and they put up speakers outside so that more people could hear him. It was strange to be back in this church again, which had meant so much to the Italian and Irish immigrants of Clerkenwell, including my own family and relatives, who lived in the area all those years ago.
The coup of the day for me was gaining access to the flats which now stand on the site of Victoria Dwellings and climbing onto the roof to look down onto the crossroads at the junction of Clerkenwell Rd & Farringdon Rd that was my childhood view. “
Colin O’Brien’s photographs of Clerkenwell in the fifties & sixties are currently on exhibition in the gallery at the Leica Store, 18 Royal Exchange, City of London, EC3V 3LT
Colin with his Leica in the fifties
Razzi Tuffano & Pidge Boffer photographed by Colin O’Brien in 1948
Colin O’Brien sits on the same steps in November 2015
A Carmelite nun sweeps the pavement in Clerkenwell, sixties
The same view today
Accident at the junction of Clerkenwell Rd & Farringdon Rd, early sixties
Junction of Clerkenwell Rd & Farringdon Rd, November 2015
Car crash at the junction of Clerkenwell Rd & Farringdon Rd, 1957
Colin O’Brien in Clerkenwell, November 2015
Portraits of Colin O’Brien copyright © Alex Pink
All other photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF COLIN O’BRIEN’S LONDON LIFE FOR £25
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Sandra & Bob: Two Film Portraits
It is my pleasure to present these two recent film portraits of individuals who will be no strangers to readers – Sandra Esqulant, beloved Landlady of The Golden Heart in Spitalfields, and Bob Mazzer, Aldgate-born Photographer whose tube pictures we published last year as Underground.
LANDLADY by Orlando Gili
[youtube YBj5hCa3F60 nolink]
BOB MAZZER:UNDERGROUND & OTHER PICTURES by Richard Butchins
At Fishmongers’ Hall
This palatial building of Portland stone tucked under the west side of the foot of London Bridge is Fishmongers’ Hall. Many a time I have passed by on an errand to the Borough to buy fresh fish and cast my eyes upon it, so – as one for whom the worship of fish is almost a religion – I was delighted to enter this temple to the wonders of the deep last week.
The Fishmongers’ Company were already long-established on this site when they received their first Royal Charter in 1272 from Edward I, the fish-loving king, and their earliest hall on this site was recorded in 1301. A monopoly on fish trading brought great wealth to the Company, and in the fourteenth century three fishmongers were successive Lord Mayors of London, John Lovekyn, Sir William Walworth and William Askham. Subsequently, they secured Fishmongers’ Wharf in 1444 and retained its sole usage for unloading their catch until 1666, prior to the development of Billingsgate Market which traded on the east side of London Bridge until 1982.
This most-recent Fishmongers Hall was constructed as part of the new London Bridge in the eighteen-thirties, designed by Henry Roberts but constructed from drawings by George Gilbert Scott. The tone is partly that of a stately home and partly that of a lofty public institution, yet salmon pink walls in the vestibule and mosaics gleaming like fish scales conjure an atmosphere unique to the Fishmongers’ Company, heightened by an astonishing collection of historic paintings, sculptures and artefacts which evoke all things fishy.
A lavishly embroidered funeral pall created by nuns around 1500, portraying Christ handing the keys of Heaven to St Peter the fisherman and embellished with mermen and mermaids, testifies to a former age of credulity, while a sturdy chair fabricated with timber from old London Bridge and with a seat containing a stone from the same source reminds us of the detail of history in this spot. The combination of architectural opulence and multiple fish references suggests that the Hall itself might be understood as a fishmonger’s distinctive vision of Heaven, where St Peter awaits the newly-departed at the head of a gilded staircase.
At every turn in this building, you are reminded of fish, the ocean and the ancient trade established more than seven centuries in this place, which fills your mind with thoughts of fishmongery and makes it startling to peer out from the prevailing silence in the Fishmongers’ Hall upon the clamour of the modern city with the Shard looming overhead.
Crest of the Fishmongers’ Company
Wonders of the Deep, 1 by Arnold Von Hacken
Wonders of the Deep, 2 by Arnold Von Hacken
Wonders of the Deep, 3 by Arnold Von Hacken
Arnold Von Hacken’s eight paintings of Wonders of the Deep
Wonders of the Deep, 4 by Arnold Von Hacken
Wonders of the Deep, 5 by Arnold Von Hacken
This stained glass of the earlier Fishmongers’ Crest dates from the before the Fire of London
Wonders of the Deep, 6 by Arnold Von Hacken
Wonders of the Deep, 7 by Arnold Von Hacken
Wonders of the Deep, 8 by Arnold Von Hacken
Chair made from the timber of old London Bridge with a seat including a piece of stone from the bridge and a back showing designs of subsequent bridges
Turtle shell painted with the crest of the Fishmongers’ Company
Figure of St Peter the Fisherman from the Fishmongers’ barge
Queen Victoria presides over the Great Hall
Fishmongers’ crest in the Great Hall
Fishmongers’ crest from a steel muniment box
Fishmongers’ funeral pall embroidered by nuns c. 1500
Christ hands the keys of Heaven to St Peter, the Fisherman
Merman from the pall
Mermaid from the pall
Fishmongers’ Hall, Fishmongers’ Wharf
Interior of Billingsgate Market at 6am by George Elgar Hicks
Fishmongers’ Hall, London Bridge
Paintings reproduced courtesy of Fishmongers’ Hall
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Derrick Porter’s Voices Of Hoxton
It is my great pleasure to announce that Derrick Porter’s impressive debut collection of poetry Voices of Hoxton is published this week. Click here to order a copy. Hear Derrick read this Friday 13th November at the launch at Peer Gallery, 97-99 Hoxton St, N1 6QL from 6:30pm.
Derrick Porter
This is the gentle face of Derrick Porter, craggy and wise, framed by snowy hair and punctuated with a pair of sharp eyes that reveal a hint of his imaginative capacity. Standing against a rural backdrop upon the banks of the river Ching in Essex not far from High Beach where John Clare was confined, Derrick looks every inch an English poet and he is quick to admit his love of nature. Yet, although he acquired an affection for the countryside at an early age and Chingford is his place of residence, the focus of Derrick’s literary landscape and centre of his personal universe is his place of origin – Hoxton.
“It was a place we all wanted to get out of – it was a tough place to live,” Derrick confessed to me, recalling his childhood, “but the the culture of Hoxton and that era was my imaginative education.”
“My interest in literature stems from spending so many years in hospital up to the age of thirteen and they used to read to us – I looked forward to it so much, I learnt to love reading stories,” he confided, explaining that he suffered from tuberculosis as a child and was exiled from London for long stretches in hospitals. “They made us stay out in the fresh air which was the worst possible thing because it actually helped the germs to flourish, when the foggy atmosphere of London was much more beneficial to sufferers – but they didn’t understand that in those days.
My dad worked at the Daily Mail as a printer and my mum was a housewife, but I never saw him until I was six when he returned from the war. He had been captured by the Japanese and was held in a prisoner of war camp. At first, they sent him to America which was where they kept them to build them up again before they came home.
Before the age of ten years old, I lived in a prefab in Vince St next to the Old St roundabout and then we moved to Fairchild House in Fanshawe St. The prefabs were made of asbestos without any insulation and were very cold in winter. As children, we used to break off pieces of asbestos and throw them on to the bonfire to watch them explode. Maybe that affected my health? We had free rein then and we played in the old bombed buildings at the back of Moorgate – that was our playground.
At thirteen, I had an operation to have half of my lung removed and they told my mother that they didn’t know if I would recover. From then on, I took care of my own health and I became a fitness and health junkie. When I left school I thought I’d like to go back to the countryside and, when the teacher asked my ambition, I said, ‘I’m going to work on a farm,’ he told me, ‘You won’t find many in ‘Oxton, Porter.’ My father got me a job as in the general printing trade but it did my lungs in.
I always had this compulsion to get away from Hoxton and write. So I decided to emigrate to Australia on my own. I knew I had to get away. I was nineteen when I went for two years. I was engaged to be married but I broke the engagement and emigrated. I went to writing workshops in Australia and my earliest poems were written while I was there. I got a job as a printer on the Sydney Morning Herald. At first, they told me I couldn’t get a job without a union card, but then there was a bit of skullduggery. They took pity on me and, when I got a job, they gave me a card.
After that, I travelled in the USA with this small bag of my poems. Then, in Las Vegas, I stayed in this $1-a-night fleapit for three nights while I was waiting for the coach to take me to Los Angeles. Twenty minutes after I had boarded the bus, I realised I had left my bag behind with all the poems I had written in the previous two years. I cried, I felt so dismayed. It was a significant loss.
On my return, I moved into Langbourne Buildings off Leonard St in Shoreditch. I was surrounded by my friends and family and this was where I first joined a writing group. It was in Dalston and I started to write regularly. After seven years, I began to write some decent poems and then I read in the Hackney Gazette about Centreprise Literary Trust. So I went along there and met Ken Worpole, and gave him some of my poems. Then he got back in touch and said he’d like to publish them, and that was the first work I ever had in print.
By now I was twenty-nine and married with two young children, and we were offered the opportunity of swapping our flat for a house in Orpington. It was a fabulous house with a garden and we couldn’t refuse, but the rent was three times the price. We lived there for thirty-odd years and my poetry developed, I became a member of the Poetry Society and had my works published in magazines, although I rarely send my poems out because I always think I can do better.
I bought paintings from D & J Simons & Sons Ltd, picture frame and moulding makers, in the Hackney Rd and, when I moved to Orpington, I bought all their ‘second’ picture frames off them and sold them there. I started working for myself, buying reproduction furniture and selling it in Orpington Village Hall and I earned a living from that for twenty years. But all the time I was writing, writing and I had a lot of encouragement from people.
I rework my poems a lot because I’d rather have one good one than a lot of mediocre ones. I have written a lot of poems and discarded most of them because I’d rather just keep my best. I love letter writing and I believe it can be an art if it is done well. As long as I live, I’ll carry on writing.”
Derrick and his childhood friend Roy Wild on the steps of the eighteenth century house in Charles Sq where they played as children
Sitting Under a Tree in Charles Square
The clear urgency of the voice caused me
to look up, my finger marking the place
in the newspaper I was then reading…
How old do you think this tree is? it asked.
I said it was here when I was a boy.
Well, it won’t be for much longer, it said.
The owner of the voice began to circle
the tree before running his hands over
the gnarled trunk as if in search of a precise spot.
From under his coat appeared a long-handled axe.
It would be better if you moved, he said.
But not before the tree had endured
several blows…and a large, older woman, shouted
Are we to suffer this nonsense again?
Come home and do something useful for once.
Instantly the attack ceased and – without
another word passing between them – his steps
quickened to reach, if not overtake, the other.
My thumb then lifted from the newspaper
returning my eye to the Middle East
where, as yet, no allaying voice can be heard.
Derrick standing outside the flat at Fairchild House in Fanshawe St where he grew up
Derby Day in Fairchild House
Walking along our third floor balcony
I can see – before I enter the door – the piano
blocking the view into our living room.
You are watching the TV, circling horses
in The Sporting Life as John Rickman
calls home another of those certainties
you always said you should have backed.
From the kitchen the clang of pots
tells me it’s a Friday and mum’s busy
preparing a stew. A day perhaps
when sand had been kicked into my face
and I’d come home to pump iron.
If so, my bedroom door will be locked
and I’ll be lifting sand-filled-petrol-cans
hung along an old broom handle.
It’s also possible it’s the evening
of the Pitfield Institute’s Weight-Lifting final
when I won my only trophy. Or the day
cash went missing and I bought my first watch.
But as I turn the key and enter the door
I want it to be the day when even
the piano joined in…and Gordon Richards
rode Pinza to victory in the Derby.
The Apprentice
When Mr Hounslow asked the class what jobs
we had in mind, I answered,
Working on a farm, sir. “You won’t find many
in Hoxton” the reply. Come summer
I started work for a musical instrument
supplier in Paul Street, close to the old Victorian
Fire Station later re-sited in Old Street.
For one day a week I was promoted
to van boy and helped deliver to the likes
of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho,
a world far removed from that of Hoxton.
Here I saw the upbeat side of the business,
the posh shiny part that could open doors
if you had the right kind of connections.
After a year working with men who enjoyed
nothing better than to send the new boys out
to buy rubber nails and glass hammers,
if never themselves discovering who put
the mouse droppings into their biscuit tin,
I began to question where I was heading.
That summer – while on holiday in Ostend
with the Lion Club – my dad handed in
my notice…and when I returned, was told
I had to start work in the Printing Trade.
Its every aspect – machinery, ink, oil,
noise and dust, the very air – a sort of
road taken, as old Hounslow might have said,
for there being no farms in Hoxton.
Derrick Porter at Fairchild House, Hoxton
Poems copyright © Derrick Porter
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In Praise Of Stench
Julian Dobson, author of How to Save Our Town Centres, newly published by Policy Press, explores the cultural and political significance of markets – accompanied with montages by Adam Tuck using photographs by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies.
On 24th November, Julian will be giving a lecture at Bishopsgate Institute entitled Is the Market Killing our Markets? as part of the Cries of London season. Click here to book a ticket
Spitalfields Market had its origins in congestion, stench and foul language. These were the vices that prompted the removal of the market once held within the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral first, in 1666, to Mansion House and a couple of decades later to the edge of the East End.
It is a far cry from a place that today prides itself on catering to the tastes of the hip and the well-heeled. But then markets have always been places of tension and contention. Who gets to use them, who gets excluded and what prices are paid have been the stuff of squabbles through the ages.
Sometimes those arguments erupt into violence. One of the most celebrated market riots took place at Nottingham’s famous Goose Fair in 1766, when – according to the chronicler Thomas Bailey – market-goers became ‘excessively exasperated’ at the exorbitant prices being charged for cheese.
‘The lots of cheese were taken forcible possession of – much was carried away, and much more damaged by being flung about, and rolled down the adjacent streets and passages,’ Bailey reported. ‘The mayor, whilst endeavouring to quell the disturbance, was knocked down by a cheese, hurled at him by one of the mob, and severely stunned.’
Spitalfields’ own riots happened just a few years earlier, in 1763. They were the result of longstanding grievances over the pay and conditions of silk weavers. In a protest that foreshadowed the Luddite disturbances sixty years later, disgruntled weavers destroyed looms and silk. For good measure, they paraded an effigy of one of their employers around the streets before hanging and burning it.
Commenting in the journal Past and Present, the historian E. P. Thompson observed that the ‘riots’ of the eighteenth century were far more than a gut reaction to the price of food or lack of work. Thompson describes them as the consequence of a breach of an unwritten social contract:
‘…a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.’
Few use the phrase ‘moral economy’ these days, but that sense of fairness underlies many of today’s tensions around markets and their surroundings. The redevelopment of Spitalfields Market ten years ago was strongly resisted by many local people – the fine line between regeneration and gentrification is often only noticed once it has been irretrievably crossed.
In a city where property speculation has become feverish and local councils are under pressure to sell social housing estates for redevelopment, all the signs are that the social contract is once again under unbearable strain.
Markets have often been the flashpoints where the tensions inherent in urban life explode. From Queen’s Market in Upton Park in the east to Brixton Market in South London and Portobello Road in the west, redevelopment plans and rising rents have prompted protest and opposition.
These tensions matter because they concern not only the historic character of the city’s markets but also the extent to which London can still be said to be a city for everyone. In the nineteenth century social cleansing was justified on grounds of morality – London’s Bartholomew Fair, a byword for licentiousness, was closed by the City of London in 1855. Today the removal of the cheap and unsightly has an economic rationale as markets are turned into ‘destinations’ for wide-walleted visitors.
At Queen’s Market, Upton Park, traders and local residents fought a long battle ten years ago to stop the redevelopment of the market with an Asda store, new shops and a residential tower – ironically, on the same site as the once notorious James Sinclair Point, a hulking slab that loomed over the market until 1993.
Newham Council, in the PR-speak beloved of aspirational local authorities, claimed the plans would ‘enhance Green Street’s status as a visitor destination’. The Friends of Queen’s Market, who gathered more than 12,000 signatures opposing the plans, believed local residents and businesses would be priced out.
The experience of Brixton Village would suggest that those fears were well-founded. Back in 2009 Granville Arcade, six avenues of thirties stalls and shops in the indoor market, was earmarked for demolition and redevelopment. Those plans were abandoned after vociferous local protests – and Space Makers, a collective of artists and activists, set to work to breathe life into vacant market stalls.
Space Makers were almost too successful for their own good. A year later the market was thriving, with new food stalls and what the New York Times described as ‘playful pop-up shops’. The market’s owners, London & Associated Properties, saw an opportunity and bills for rent increases started landing on doormats. Some traders received bills backdated to 2007, the date when London & Associated took over, totalling tens of thousands of pounds.
Five years on, Brixton is now the scene of protests against gentrification (symbolised to many by the appearance of gung-ho estate agents Foxtons) but the new demographic of latte-drinkers and cupcake-consumers has become entrenched. For better or worse, Brixton’s character has changed.
Over in West London similar tensions are evident at Portobello Road, home of Britain’s largest antique market. Recent proposals to move some of the market stalls into a new purpose-designed centre by the Westway flyover have prompted opposition from local residents who claim it will replace a much-loved outdoor market with a ‘sanitised shopping experience’.
The irony of Portobello Road is that the plans have been put forward by Westway Trust, a charitable trust set up to protect residents’ interests after the hugely disruptive construction of the A40 flyover in the sixties. The Trust was gifted the land below the flyover – space at the time thought to be of little commercial value – and has since developed much of it with business premises and community facilities. Now the Trust itself is being accused of the kind of behaviour usually associated with the capital’s more cut-throat property developers.
These are local difficulties, but they are also part of a much wider continuing tussle over who gets to use the city and its public spaces, and on what terms. The attributes valued by many – accessibility, value for money, inclusion – are seen by others as the problems of congestion, stench and foul language.
There is not much stench to be found in Spitalfields Market today. Writing in the New Scientist in 2014, Sheffield University academic Victoria Henshaw described a ‘smellwalk’ through the market. Whereas in Istanbul she had found ‘perfumes and body odour, leather, spices, Turkish delight’, in Spitalfields ‘I smell nothing until I reach the far end of the market where I detect some faint ventilation emissions from a restaurant’.
Sanitised, smell-free environments are not markets – they are shopping malls, and there is little room in them for the ‘moral economy of the poor’. London removes its congestion, stench and foul language at its peril.
Photographs copyright © Mark Jackson & Huw Davies & Adam Tuck
Mark Jackson & Huw Davies photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Stepney School Strike
In the summer of 1971, eight hundred pupils went on strike in Stepney, demanding that their teacher, Chris Searle, be reinstated after the school fired him for publishing a book of their poetry. At a time of unrest, following strikes by postmen and dustmen, the children’s strike became national headline news and they received universal support in the press for their protest.
More than two years later, after the parents, the Inner London Education Authority, the National Union of Teachers, and even Margaret Thatcher, then Education Secretary, came out in favour of Chris Searle, he got his job back and the children were vindicated. And the book of verse, entitled “Stepney Words” sold more than fifteen thousand copies, with the poems published in newspapers, and broadcast on television and read at the Albert Hall. It was an inspirational moment that revealed the liberating power of poetry as a profound expression of the truth of human experience.
Many of those school children – in their fifties now – still recall the event with great affection as a formative moment that changed their lives forever, and so when Chris Searle, the twenty-four-year-old student teacher of 1971 returned to the East End to recall that cathartic Summer and meet some of his former pupils, it was an understandably emotional occasion. And I was lucky enough to be there to hear what he had to say.
I grew up in the fifties and sixties, failed the eleven plus and I hated any kind of divisiveness in education, I saw hundreds of my mates just pushed out into menial jobs. So I got into a Libertarian frame of mind and became involved in Socialist politics. I was in the Caribbean at the time of the Black Power uprisings, so I had some fairly strong ideas about power and education. Sir John Cass Foundation & Redcoat School in Stepney was grim. It was a so-called Christian School and many of the teachers were priests, yet I remember one used to walk round with a cape and cane like something out of Dickens.
The ways of the school contrasted harshly with the vitality and verve of the students. As drama teacher, I used to do play readings but I found they responded better to poetry, and I was reading William Blake and Isaac Rosenberg to them, both London poets who took inspiration from the streets. So I took the pupils out onto the street and asked them to write about what they saw, and the poems these eleven-year-olds wrote were so beautiful, I was stunned and I thought they should be published. Blake and Rosenberg were published, why not these young writers? We asked the school governors but they said the poems were too gloomy, so they forbade us to publish them.
I showed the poems to Trevor Huddleston, the Bishop of Stepney, and he loved them. And it became evident that there was a duality in the church, because the chairman of the school governors who was a priest said to me, ‘“Don’t you realise these are fallen children?” in other words, they were of the devil. But Trevor Huddleston read the poems and then, with a profound look, said, “These children are the children of God.” So I should have realised there was going to be a bit of a battle.
There was even a suggestion that I had written the poems myself, but though I am a poet, I could not have written anything as powerful as these children had done. Once it was published, the sequence of events was swift, I was suspended and eight hundred children went on strike the next day, standing outside in the rain and refusing to go inside the school. I didn’t know they were going to go on strike, but the day before they were very secretive and I realised something was up, though I didn’t know what it was.
I didn’t have an easy time as a teacher, it was sometimes difficult to get their interest, and I had bad days and I had good days, and sometimes I had wonderful days. Looking back, it was the energy, and vitality, and extraordinary sense of humour of the children that got you through the day. And if, as a teacher, you could set these kids free, then you really did begin to enjoy the days. It gave me the impetus to remain a teacher for the rest of my life.
I tried to get the kids to go back into the school.
Tony Harcup, a former pupil of Chris Searle’s and now senior lecturer in Journalism at Sheffield University, spoke for many when he admitted, “It was one of the proudest days of my life, it taught me that you can make a stand. It was about dignified mutual respect. He didn’t expect the worst of us, he believed everyone could produce work of value. He opened your eyes to the world.”
During the two years Chris was waiting to be reinstated at the school, he founded a group of writers in the basement of St George’s Town Hall in Cable St. Students who had their work published in “Stepney Words” were able to continue their writing there, thinking of themselves as writers now rather than pupils. People of different ages came to join them, especially pensioners, and they used the money from “Stepney Words” to publish other works, beginning with the poetry of Stephen Hicks, the boxer poet, who lived near the school and had been befriended by many of children.
“Stepney Words” became the catalyst for an entire movement of community publishing in this country, and many involved went on to become writers or work in related professions.“The power to write, the power to create, and the power of the imagination, these are the fundamentals to achieve a satisfied life,” said Chris, speaking from the heart, “and when you look back today at the lives of those in the Basement Writers, you can see the proof of that.”
The story of the Stepney school strike reveals what happens when a single individual is able to unlock the creative potential of a group of people, who might otherwise be considered to be without prospects, and it also reminds us of all the human possibility that for the most part, remains untapped. ” I just want to thank the young people that stood up for me” declared Chris Searle with humility, thinking back over his life and recalling his experiences in Stepney, “How could you not be optimistic about youth when you were faced with that?”
Returning to the East End four decades after the school strike, teacher Chris Searle reads one of the original poems from Stepney Words,”Let it Flow, Joe”, with some of his former pupils.
Alan Dein will be interviewing Chris Searle at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive on Thursday 12th November at 6pm. Click here to book a ticket
David Hoffman’s East End
Contributing Photographer David Hoffman sent me these pictures from the seventies he uncovered recently while digitising his archive and which it is my privilege to publish for the first time here today.
“I moved to the dilapidated slums of Whitechapel from the dilapidated slums of North Kensington in 1970. First to 19a Chicksand St which was soon demolished, then to 17 Black Lion Yard. When that was predictably demolished in 1973, I squatted one of the tinned-up tenement flats in Fieldgate Mansions, replacing the council concrete-filled loo and building a darkroom.
With a Nikon F and 35mm lens hanging from my wrist, I wandered the strange, chaotic time-slipped streets trying to work out what photography was about. I never did find out. These photos ended up as contact sheets buried and forgotten beneath the protest photography that became my specialism in the late seventies.
As I now digitise forty years’ work, they’ve floated back into sight. I think they’ve matured nicely over the decades.” – David Hoffman
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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