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.
Luke Clennell’s London Melodies
Of all the dozens of woodcuts of CRIES OF LONDON I have come across, this anonymously-published set is my favourite – so I am very grateful to historian Dr Ruth Richardson who has identified them for me as the work of Thomas Bewick’s apprentice Luke Clennell.
Self-portrait by Luke Clennell (1781–1840)
The hawkers in Luke Clennell’s woodcuts look filthy, with bad skin and teeth, dressed in ragged clothes, either skinny as cadavers or fat as thieves, and with hands as scrawny as rats’ claws.You can almost smell their bad breath and sweaty unwashed bodies, pushing themselves up against you in the crowd to make a hard sell.
Luke Clennell was apprenticed as an engraver to Thomas Bewick and then moved to London in 1804 as a young man, seeking a career as a painter and winning a major commission in 1816 from the Earl of Bridgewater to do portraits of more than four hundred guests at dinner in the Guildhall. The impossibility of getting all these subjects to sit for him drove Clennell to a nervous breakdown and he was committed to Salisbury Asylum. Although he recovered sufficiently to continue his career, he was afflicted with mental illness for the rest of his life and died in Newcastle Asylum in 1840.
The distinctive quality of Clennell’s Cries, first published as ‘London Melodies & Cries of the Seasons’ in 1812, stands out among the hundreds of anonymous woodcuts published in chapbooks in the early nineteenth century by virtue of their lively texture and unapologetic, unsentimental portraiture.
Clennell’s hawkers are never going to be framed on the parlour wall and they do not give a toss. They own their defiant uncouth spirit. They are a rough bunch with ready fists that you would not wish to encounter in a narrow byway on a dark night. Yet they are survivors who know the lore of the streets, how to scratch a living out of little more than resourcefulness, and how to turn a shilling as easily as a groat.
With unrivalled spirit, savage humour, profane vocabulary and a rapacious appetite, Luke Clennell’s woodcuts are the most street-wise of all the Cries. He gloried in the grotesque features and unrestrained personalities of hawkers, while also permitting them an unbridled humanity that we can only regard with esteem. They call to me across the centuries, crying, “Sweet and Pretty Beau-Pots – One a-Penny” and “Buy my Live Scate.”
It is wonderful to learn the name of this artist who captured the vigorous life of these loud characters with such art. For a contemporary eye these are portraits that sit naturally alongside the work of Ronald Searle and Quentin Blake. Luke Clennell gloried in the grotesque features and unrestrained personalities of street people, while also permitting them a humanity which we can recognise and respect. Now I can publish them with the artist’s name beside them for the very first time in my book of CRIES OF LONDON.
Rabbit, Rabbit – Nice fat Rabbit
All Round & Sound, Full Weight, Threepence a Pound, my Ripe Kentish Cherries.
Buy my Fresh Herrings, Fresh Herrings, O! Three a Groat, Herrings, O!
Buy a Nice Wax Doll – Rosy and Fresh.
The King’s Speech, The King’s Speech to both Houses of Parliament.
Here’s all a Blowing, Alive and Growing – Choice Shrubs and Plants, Alive and Growing.
Hot Spice Gingerbread, Hot – Come buy my Spice Gingerbread, Smoaking Hot – Hot Spice Gingerbread, All Hot.
Any Earthen Ware, Plates, Dishes, or Jugs, today – any Clothes to Exchange, Madam?
Hot Mutton Dumplings – Nice Dumplings, All Hot.
Buy a Hat Box, Cap Box, or Bonnet Box.
Buy my Baskets, a Work, Fruit, or a Bread Basket.
Chickens, a Nice Fat Chicken – Chicken, or a Young Fowl.
Sweet and Pretty Beau-Pots, One a-Penny – Chickweed and Groundsel for your Birds.
Buy my Wooden Ware – a Bowl, Dish, Spoon or Platter.
Six Bunches a-Penny, Sweet Lavender – Six Bunches a-Penny, Sweet Blooming Lavender.
Here’s One a-Penny – Here’s Two a-Penny, Hot Cross Buns.
Lilies of the Valley, Sweet Lilies of the Valley.
Cats Meat, Dogs Meat – Any Cat’s or Dog’s Meat Today?
Buy my Live Scate, Live Scate – Buy my Dainty Fresh Salmon.
Mackerel, O! Four for shilling, Mackerel, O!
Hastings Green and Young Hastings. Here’s Young Peas, Tenpence a Peck, Marrow-fat Peas.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Alongside my book of CRIES OF LONDON published on 12th November, Bishopsgate Institute is staging a festival around the history and politics of markets and street trading, and Spitalfields Music is opening its Winter Festival with a concert of Cries of London by Fretwork on 4th December at Shoreditch Church.
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The Tragical Death Of An Apple Pie
It has been a record apple harvest this year and – as I have no doubt the thoughts of my readers will be turning towards Apple Pie – I take this opportunity to present The Tragical Death of an Apple Pie, an alphabet rhyme first published in 1671, in a version produced by Jemmy Catnach in the eighteen-twenties.
Poet, compositor and publisher, Catnach moved to London from Newcastle in 1812 and set up Seven Dials Press in Monmouth Court, producing more than four thousand chapbooks and broadsides in the next quarter century. Anointed as the high priest of street literature and eager to feed a seemingly-endless appetite for cheap printed novelties in the capital, Catnach put forth a multifarious list of titles, from lurid crime and political satire to juvenile rhymes and comic ballads, priced famously at a halfpenny or a ‘farden.’
A An Apple Pie
B Bit it
C Cut it
D Dealt it
E Did eat it
F Fought for it
G Got it
H Had it
J Join’d for it
K Kept it
L Long’d for it
M Mourned for it
N Nodded at it
O Open’d it
P Peeped into it
Q Quartered it
R Ran for it
S Stole it
T Took it
V View’d it
W Wanted it
XYZ and & all wished for a piece in hand
Dame Dumpling who made the Apple Pie
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