So Long, Edward Greenfield
Today I publish my profile of Edward Greenfield as a tribute to a great music critic and popular long-term Spitalfields resident who died yesterday afternoon aged eighty-six
Edward Greenfield by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
The entire ground floor of Ted Greenfield’s house in Folgate St was given over to an archive of thousands upon thousands of CDs. Stretching from floor to ceiling in each room were shelves of utilitarian design, lined with meticulously labelled brown archive boxes containing them all, while down in the cellar was stored his collection of over thirty thousand LPs. When you first walked through the door, it felt as if you had entered the storeroom of a music shop or the hidden stack of music library, but climbing the stairs to the first floor led you into the more congenial atmosphere of Ted’s domestic arena.
Ted lived up above, in the top three storeys of his magnificently tottering eighteenth century, in rooms stacked with more CDs, musical biographies, back copies of The Gramophone, programmes from concerts and opera – and innumerable notes and cards of good wishes that testified to his many friends and admirers.
“I once had a flat in Highgate but the LPs got me out!” he admitted to me as we enjoyed a reviving mid-morning vodka and lemon in his sunlit, panelled living room, lined with striking modernist portraits by Jeffrey Spedding of Ted’s musical icons, Mahler, Sibelius, Brahms, William Walton, Leonard Bernstein and Beethoven.
“I have been here in Spitalfields for thirty-seven years and it seems like no time at all. The whole place has changed, yet largely for the better I think. In those days, there was nothing between me and the church, nowadays you’d barely recognise it. My friends were shocked when I bought this house with a hole in the roof in 1979, but I could see the potential and so could my architect, because it was he who suggested I come to live here.
The builders were in for over two years, and then it took another ten years to get the panelling sorted out. This room alone took over a year. In the nineteen thirties, they thought ‘horrible old panelling’ and lined it with fibreboard and covered the walls with miles of bellwire attached to alarms, because this was the Co-op Fruit & Vegetable Department and they kept all their valuables here, using staples for the wire that created thousands of tiny holes we had to fill. And they installed a particularly nasty nineteen thirties ceramic fireplace that looked like it should have china rabbits over it – behind that we discovered this original coved fireplace recess.
Then I had a disaster when I moved in and only stayed fifteen minutes because there was a fire! Later, I had just moved my record collection of thirty thousand odd LPs into the cellar when there was flood. After the fire and the flood, I was expecting an earthquake. At that time, the two plots next door were vacant, where the houses had fallen down, and there were baulks of timber holding this one up. I had a party for one hundred and fifty people when I finally moved in and there were so many people the building was rocking!”
Ted Greenfield dramatised his own life with an endearing humour borne of a life of fulfilment at the heart of the British music scene as longtime music critic at The Guardian and subsequently as editor of the Penguin Guide to CDs. A trusted authority who continued to review regularly for The Gramophone into his eighties Greenfield forged friendships with many musicians who were the subject of his writing – from William Walton (“My great hero and a dear friend”), Michael Tippett, Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich to Leonard Bernstein (“The most charismatic man I ever knew”.). Ted Greenfield’s magnanimous optimistic temperament partly accounted for this, but it was further explained by his philosophy of criticism, which he outlined thus,“The first duty of a critic is to appreciate, to try to understand what the artist is trying to do and how far he has succeeded. You just have to try and sympathise.” As a critic, Ted Greenfield wrote to explore the intentions of the work he was reviewing, rather than sitting in judgement.
“I always wanted to write about records, but then I thought ‘I’ll never be able to keep myself,’ so I did Law at Cambridge where I wrote the Cambridge Union reports, and then when I went to the Appointments Board, they said, ‘Why not journalism?’ I think I’ve been very lucky, but equally I know you have to make your own luck to an extent. I try to look for the best side of things and to make things happen. I’ve written about a lot of people and they’ve become good friends. I’ve known many of the greats in music and politics over the years.”
When I asked Ted what music he listened to for recreation, he opened Who’s Who’s and showed me his entry which listed his recreations as “music and work,” and I understood that music was simply his life. Looking around, I realised that it was unquestionably a bachelor’s dwelling he inhabited, with few luxuries and comforts, and an atmosphere that was collegiate as much as it was domestic, displaying the charismatic disorder of books and papers you might expect in an undergraduate’s chambers overlooking an old quad.
Indeed, many of Ted’s Cambridge contemporaries remained lifelong friends including ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe (“When he came to my party here, before all the buildings were put up, we were able to look across and see St Pauls”), ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie ( “When I first visited him at Lambeth Palace, his wife had him doing the washing up”) and ex-Prime Minister Edward Heath with whom he shared a love of music. “Ted became a dear friend, especially when Margaret Thatcher took over and he famously was in the big sulk – he was a frequent visitor to Spitalfields in those days. I realised how vulnerable he was. Although he was entirely incapable of expressing human emotions, whenever he saw me he was plainly delighted. It was very amusing to tease him and have him tease me back.”
In spite of his immense knowledge and his friendships with all these establishment types, Ted was refreshingly lacking in pomposity and even a little subversive, wearing britches and nicely polished riding boots when he had no intention of going riding or even leaving the house. Drinking spirits in the morning was a rare experience for me but I recognised at once it was a habit I could get accustomed to – What could be more civilised than to sit in an old house in Spitalfields sipping vodka with lemon and listening to classical CDs? This was the life of Edward Greenfield.
Edward Greenfield (1928-2015)
Portraits copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Inside Spitalfields’ Oldest Building
I wonder if those who work in the corporate financial industries in Bishop’s Sq today ever cast their eyes down to the cavernous medieval Charnel House of c. 1320 beneath their feet, once used to store the dis-articulated bones of many thousands of those who died here of the Great Famine in the thirteenth century.
Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Jane Siddell, believes starving people flooded into London from Essex seeking food after successive crop failures and reached the Priory of St Mary Spital where they died of hunger and were buried here. It was a dark vision of apocalyptic proportions on such a bright day, yet I held it in in mind yesterday as we descended beneath the contemporary building to the stone chapel below.
At first, you notice the knapped flints set into the wall as a decorative device, like those at Southwark Cathedral and St Bartholomew the Great. London does not have its own stone and Jane pointed out the different varieties within the masonry and their origins, indicating that this building was a sophisticated and expensive piece of construction subsidised by wealthy benefactors. A line of small windows admitted light and air to the Charnel House below, and low walls that contain them survive which would once have extended up to the full height of the chapel.
When you stand down in the cool of the Charnel House, several metres below modern ground level, and survey the neatly-faced stone walls and the finely-carved buttresses, it is not difficult to complete the vault over your head and imagine the chapel above. Behind you are the footings of the steps that led down and there is an immediate sense of familiarity conveyed by the human proportion and architectural detailing, as if you had just descended the staircase into it.
This entire space would once have been packed with bones, in particular skulls and leg bones – which we recognise in the symbol of the skull & crossbones – the essential parts to be preserved so that the dead might be able to walk and talk when they were resurrected on Judgement Day. Yet they were rudely expelled and disposed of piecemeal at the Reformation when the Priory of St Mary Spital was dissolved in 1540.
Brick work and the remains of a beaten earth floor indicate that the Charnel House may have become a storeroom and basement kitchen for a dwelling above in the sixteenth century. Later, it was filled with rubble from the Fire of London and levelled-off as houses were built across Spitalfields in the eighteenth century. Thus the Charnel House lay forgotten and undisturbed as a rare survival of fourteenth century architecture, until 1999 when it was unexpectedly discovered by the builders constructing the current office block. Yet it might have been lost then if the developers had not – showing unexpected grace – reconfigured their building in order to let it stand.
Around the site lie stray pieces of masonry individually marked by the masons – essential if they were to receive the correct payment from their labours. Thus our oldest building bears witness to the human paradox of economic reality, which has always co-existed uneasily with a belief in the spiritual world, since it was a yearning for redemption in the afterlife that inspired the benefactors who paid for this chapel in Spitalfields more than seven centuries ago
The exterior walls are decorated with knapped flints, faced in Kentish Ragstone upon a base of Caen Stone with use of green Reigate Stone for corner stones
Window bricked up in the sixteenth century
Inside the Charnel House once packed with bones
Twelfth century denticulated Romanesque buttress brought from an earlier building and installed in the Charnel House c.1320 – traces of red and black paint were discovered upon this.
Fine facing stonework within the Charnel House
Fourteenth century masons’ marks
The Charnel House is to be seen in the foreground of this illustration from the fifteen-fifties
The Charnel House during excavations
You may also like to read about
David Garrick In The East End
There are just a few tickets left for the rare opportunity of a tour of the Garrick Club tomorrow, Wednesday 1st July, as part of the HUGUENOT SUMMER Festival. Click here to book yours.
“Have mercy, Heaven” – David Garrick as Richard III
This modest Staffordshire figure of c.1840 upon my dresser illustrates a pivotal moment in British theatre, when David Garrick made his debut aged twenty-four as Richard III at Goodman’s Fields Theatre in Aldgate on Monday 19th October 1741. Based upon William Hogarth’s painting, it shows Garrick in the momentous scene on the night before the battle of Bosworth Field when those Richard has killed appear to him in a dream foretelling his death and defeat next day.
The equivocal nature of the image fascinates me, simultaneously incarnating the startling ascendancy of David Garrick, a new force in the British theatre who was to end up enshrined in Westminster Abbey, and the sudden descent of Richard III, a spent force in British monarchy who ended up buried in a car park in Leicester. You can interpret the gesture of Garrick’s right hand as attention seeking, inviting you to “Look at my acting” or, equally, it can be Richard’s defensive move, snatching at the air with fingers stretched out in horror. It is, perhaps, both at once. Yet my interest is in Garrick and how he became an overnight sensation, introducing a more naturalistic acting style to the London stage and leading the Shakespearean revival in the eighteenth century. And it all started here in the East End, just a mile south of Shakespeare’s first theatre up the road in Shoreditch.
Garrick’s family were Huguenots. His grandparents fled to London in 1685 and David was born in 1717 as the third of five children while his father Captain Garrick was travelling the country with a recruiting party. Suitably enough, at the age of eleven, David played the part of Kite in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. Then, in 1737, since there was no money to pay for university, David and his literary classmate Samuel Johnson left their school in Lichfield to walk to London and seek their fortunes. But the sudden death of Captain Garrick within a month delivered an unexpected legacy that permitted David to set up a wine business in the Strand with his brother Peter.
In that same year, the Licensing Act closed all the playhouses in London except Drury Lane and Covent Garden, yet the management of the unlicenced Goodman’s Fields Theatre managed to get a dispensation to present concerts. Far enough east to avoid the eye of the Lord Chamberlain, they bent the rules with posters declaring concerts – even if the performances they advertised were actually plays. Thus Richard III is advertised as a “A concert of vocal and instrumental music” at “the late theatre in Goodman’s Fields.” David Garrick’s name as the leading actor is not given, he is merely referred to as “A GENTLEMAN (Who never appeared on any stage)” – a common practice at this theatre.
Next day, the London Post & General Advertiser reported that Garrick’s “Reception was most extraordinary and the greatest that was ever known upon such an occasion.” And he wrote to his brother Peter immediately, quitting the wine business,“Last night, I play’d Richard ye Third, to ye Surprize of Every Body & as I shall make near £300 p Annum by It & as it is really what I doat upon I am resolv’d to pursue it.”
Garrick continued playing Richard throughout his career, essaying the role as many as ninety times, and this account written years later for The Gentlemen’s Magazine may give us some notion of his performance. “His soliloquy in the tent scene discovered the inward man. Everything he described was almost reality, the spectator thought he heard the hum of either army from camp to camp. When he started from his dream, he was a spectacle of horror. He called out in a manly tone, ‘Give me another horse.’ He paused, and, with a countenance of dismay, advanced, crying out in a tone of distress, ‘Bind up my wounds,’ and then falling on his knees, said in a most piteous voice, ‘Have mercy, Heaven.’ In all this, the audience saw the exact imitation of nature.”
By 27th November 1741, Garrick’s performance had turned into a phenomenon which all of London had to see, as The London Daily Post described, “Last night there was a great number of Persons of Quality and Distinction at the Theatre in Goodman’s Fields to see the Play of Richard the Third who express’d the highest Satisfaction at the whole Performance, several hundred Persons were obliged to return for want of room, the house being full soon after Five o’Clock.”
Yet the success that Garrick brought to the Goodman’s Fields drew attention to the unlicensed theatre – forcing its closure within six months by the authorities, encouraged by the managements of Drury Lane and Covent Garden who were losing custom to their East End rival. Meanwhile, Garrick considered his options and, after a triumphant summer season in Dublin, he walked onto the stage of Drury Lane as an actor for the first time on October 5th 1742 and he had found his spiritual home.
The myth of Garrick as the gentleman who stepped onto the stage, drawn magnetically by his powerful talent and declared a genius of theatre upon his first appearance, concealed a more complicated truth. In fact, Garrick had taken his first professional speaking role on the stage that summer in Ipswich, appearing under the name Lyddall. His own play, Lethe or Aesop in the Shades, had been produced at Drury Lane the year before. And, having played Harlequin in an amateur performance in the room above St John’s Gate in Clerkenwell, he took over at Goodman’s Fields Theatre one night when the actor performing the role became sick. So Richard III was far from Garrick’s first time in front of an audience, although it was the moment he chose to declare his talent, and it is likely that he made significant preparation.
Whenever I look at my Staffordshire figure of Garrick, whether he appears to be waving joyfully or reaching out in despair at the universe is an unfailing indicator of my state of mind. Ironically, Garrick’s monument in Westminster Abbey follows a similar design with a tent rising to a central apex, surrounding an effigy of the great actor making his final curtain call, yet here the proud gesture is entirely unambiguous, he’s saying “Look at me!”
William Hogarth’s painting of David Garrick as Richard III, 1745.
The playbill for David Garrick’s debut at Goodman’s Fields Theatre.
The Goodman’s Fields Theatre, Ayliffe St.
William Hogarth’s painting of The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay, performed as the closing production at Goodman’s Fields Theatre on May 27th 1742.
David Garrick’s monument in Westminster Abbey is to be seen on the top right of this glass slide.
Watercolour of Goodman’s Fields Theatre copyright © Victoria & Albert Museum
Glass slide of Garrick’s monument copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to read about
A Petition Against The Goodsyard Towers
Just recently, Hammerson & Ballymore, who want to build the monster development on the Bishopsgate Goodsyard that threatens to blight the neighbourhood for generations to come, have submitted their revised proposals which make only token response to concerns about the overblown height of the towers, the pitiful amount of social housing and lack of any real commitment to provision for smaller businesses. In response, More Light More Power have launched a petition against the scheme which has already gained a thousand signatures and you can sign it by clicking here.
You may also like to read about
Objecting to the Goodsyard Proposals
At St Pancras Old Churchyard
The Hardy Tree
As I arrived at Old St Pancras Churchyard yesterday, the Verger was sweeping leaves from the steps and she informed me there was a wedding taking place inside the church. Yet I was more than happy to explore this most ancient of central London churchyards for an hour while the nuptials were in progress.
The churchyard itself is upon a raised mound that is the result of all the hundreds of thousands of burials upon this ground which is claimed to be one of the earliest sites of Christian worship in London, recorded by the Maximilian Mission as already established by the year 324. Such is the proximity of St Pancras Station, you can hear the announcements from the platforms even as you wander among the tombs, yet an age-old atmosphere of tranquillity prevails here that cannot be dispelled by the chaos and cacophony of contemporary King’s Cross and St Pancras.
However, the railway has encroached upon the churchyard increasingly over the years and, in the eighteen-sixties, architect Arthur Blomfield, employed Thomas Hardy as his deputy, responsible for exhumations of the dead. Tombstones were arranged around an ash tree which has absorbed some of them into its trunk over time and acquired the name ‘The Hardy Tree,’ commemorating this unlikely employment for the young novelist whose subsequent literary works express such an inescapable morbidity.
Once the bride and groom emerged from the church door, the Verger ushered me in through the back and I was delighted by the intimate quality of the church interior, studded with some impressive old monuments. The Verger relished telling the tale of St Pancras, beheaded by the Emperor Diocletian in Rome in 304 at the age of fourteen for refusing to renounce his faith.
When the cloth had been removed from the altar after the ceremony, I was able to view the small sixth century altar stone, marked with five crosses of curious design, of which the only other examples are upon the tomb of Eithne, mother of St Columba, on the Hebridean island of Luing, dated to 567. A modest piece of Kentish rag stone, there is a legend this once served as an altar for St Augustine.
“We try to fall down every two hundred years,” explained the Verger breezily, drawing my attention to the alarming cracks in the wall and outlining the elaborate history of collapse and rebuilding that has produced the appealing architectural palimpsest you discover today.
Outside in the June sunshine, the newly-married couple were getting their wedding photographs taken, while rough sleepers slumbered among the graves just as the long-gone rested beneath the grass. A text carved nearby the entrance of the church reads “And I am here in a place beyond desire and fear,” expressing the quality of this mysterious enclave in the heart of London perfectly.
The Vestry
St Pancras Coroners
Sir John Soane’s tomb of 1837 inspired Giles Gilbert Scott’s design for the telephone box
Baroness Burdett Coutts was responsible for the vast gothic memorial sundial
Mary Wollstonecraft, born in Spitalfields and buried in Bournemouth, but commemorated here with her husband William Godwin
The grave of Charles Dickens’ school teacher, William Jones, believed to be the inspiration for the ferocious Mr Creakle in David Copperfield. “By far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know … one of the worst tempered men perhaps that ever lived.”
Norman stonework uncovered in the renovation of 1848
The seventh century altar stone is incised with crosses of Celtic design
“O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!”
“We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
‘I know not which I am!’”
Thomas Hardy, The Levelled Churchyard (1882)
You may also like to read about
Visit Norton Folgate’s Victorian Warehouses
This weekend, Norton Folgate hosts Best of Britannia, a pop-up department store showcasing the best of British manufacturing and permitting the opportunity to visit the wonderful nineteenth century warehouse interiors that British Land want to destroy.
This event illustrates the flexibility of the existing spaces and proposes one possible use for the buildings if they can escape demolition. Tower Hamlets Planning Committee vote on British Land’s proposal to obliterate Norton Folgate under a hideous corporate plaza on July 21st, so there is still time to object – and you have until 8pm today and 6pm this Sunday to take a look for yourself at what could be lost.
In 2010, Photographer Rachael Marshall took these atmospheric pictures of the buildings which were the headquarters of Nicholls & Clarke from 1875 until quite recently, supplying hardware and ironmongery of all kinds.
Photographs copyright © Rachael Marshall.
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
You may also like to read about
Dan Cruikshank in Norton Folgate
Restoration At Wilton’s Music Hall
Yesterday, I spent the morning exploring Wilton’s Music Hall and visiting all the secret corners to record the progress of the major restoration project which aims to preserve as much of the original fabric and patina as possible, whilst also securing the building and delivering the requirements of a working theatre to ensure the long-term future of this magnificently atmospheric survival.
Where Champagne Charlie once played
Marc Almond lingers in the foyer
In a secret workshop in the basement
The space between the former terrace of houses and the music hall that was built behind them
Old lamp stored in the cellar
Nineteenth century boiler beneath the auditorium
In the Mahogany Bar
Visit Wilton’s Music Hall, Grace’s Alley, E1 8JB
You may also like to read about
