Simon Pettet’s Delft Tiles
Anyone who has ever visited Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St will recognise this spectacular chimneypiece in the bedroom with its idiosyncratic pediment designed to emulate the facade of Christ Church. The fireplace itself is lined with an exquisite array of Delft tiles which you may have admired, but very few know that these tiles were made by craftsman Simon Pettet in 1985, when he was twenty years old and living in the house with Dennis Severs. Simon was a gifted ceramicist who mastered the technique of tile-making with such expertise that he could create new Delft tiles in an authentic manner, which were almost indistinguishable from those manufactured in the seventeenth century.
In his tiles for this fireplace, Simon made a leap of the imagination, creating a satirical gallery of familiar Spitalfields personalities from the nineteen-eighties. Today his splendid fireplace of tiles exists as a portrait of the neighbourhood at that time, though so discreetly done that, unless someone pointed it out to you, it is unlikely you would ever notice amongst all the overwhelming detail of Dennis Severs’ house.
Simon Pettet died of Aids in 1993, eight years after completing the fireplace and just before his twenty-eighth birthday, and today his ceramics, especially this fireplace in Dennis Severs’ house, comprise a poignant memorial of a short but productive life. Simon’s death imparts an additional resonance to the humour of his work now, which is touching in the skill he expended to conceal his ingenious achievement. As with so much in these beautiful old buildings, we admire the workmanship without ever knowing the names of the craftsmen who were responsible, and Simon aspired to this worthy tradition of anonymous artisans in Spitalfields.
When I squatted down to peer into the fireplace, I could not help smiling to recognise Gilbert & George on the very first tile I saw – Simon had created instantly recognisable likenesses that also recalled Tenniel’s illustrations of Tweedledum & Tweedledee. Most importantly, the spontaneity, colour, texture and sense of line were all exactly as you would expect of Delft tiles. Taking my camera and tripod in hand, I spent a couple of hours with my head in the fireplace before emerging sooty and triumphant with this selection of photographs.
When I finished photographing all the tiles, I noticed one placed at the top right-hand side that was almost entirely hidden from the viewer by the wooden surround on the front of the fireplace. It was completely covered in soot too. After I used a kitchen scourer to remove the grime, I discovered this most-discreetly placed tile was a portrait of Simon himself at work, making tiles. The modesty of the man was such that only someone who climbed into the fireplace, as I did, would ever find Simon’s own signature tile.
Gilbert & George
Raphael Samuel, Historian of the East End
Riccardo Cinelli, Artist
Jim Howett, Carpenter whom Dennis Severs considered to be the fly on the wall in Spitalfields
Ben Langlands & Nikki Bell, Artists who made extra money as housepainters
Simon de Courcy Wheeler, Photographer
Julian Humphreys who renovated his bathroom regularly – “Tomorrow is another day”
Scotsman, Paul Duncan, worked for the Spitalfields Trust
Douglas Blain, Director of the Spitalfields Trust, who was devoted to Hawksmoor
The person in this illustration of a famous event in Folgate St cannot be named for legal reasons
Keith & Jane Bowler of Wilkes St
Her Majesty the Cat, known as ‘Madge,’ watching ‘Come Dancing’
Marianna Kennedy & Ian Harper who were both students at the Slade
Phyllis & her son Rodney Archer
Anna Skrine, Secretary of the Spitalfields Trust
Simon Pettet, Designer & Craftman (1965-93)
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Spitalfields, E1 6BX
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At The Blessing Of The River
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I arrived at St Magnus the Martyr yesterday morning to encounter the Bishop of London illuminated by shafts of winter sunlight as he emerged from a cloud of incense to bless a bowl of chalk, thus enabling the parishioners to mark their houses in advance of the imminent arrival of the three kings. Yet this exercise of spiritual power was a mere prelude to the main event – the annual blessing of the river, as a celebration of the baptism of Jesus.
The lavish brocade robes of the priests gleamed as they processed along Lower Thames St and up through the gloomy underpass – where the incense conveniently masked a noxious smell – before they emerged onto London Bridge in splendour. From the other side, the Bishop of Southwark led another procession and the two parties met in the centre to exchange greetings and declaim prayers.
Invoking Noah and the waters of Jordan, the Bishop of London blessed the Thames and then – after checking no boat was passing underneath – the bishops tossed a wooden cross off the parapet into the river and the congregation was sprinkled with holy water. As I watched the crucifix float away across the swollen muddy waters, it seemed to me that – after the recent catastrophic deluge – perhaps this year the ceremony acquired additional significance as a plea for respite from flooding.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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Beating the Bounds at the Tower of London
Hot Cross Buns at St Bartholomew the Great
On Sunday Mornings
On Sunday – when I was a child – my father always took me out for the morning. It was a routine. He led me by the hand down by the river or we took the car. Either way, we always arrived at the same place.
He might have a bath before departure and sometimes I walked into the bathroom to surprise him there lying in six inches of soapy water. Meanwhile downstairs, my mother perched lightly in the worn velvet armchair to skim through the newspaper. Then there were elaborate discussions between them, prior to our leaving, to negotiate the exact time of our return, and I understood this was because the timing and preparation of a Sunday lunch was a complex affair. My father took me out of the house the better to allow my mother to concentrate single-mindedly upon this precise task and she was grateful for that opportunity, I believed. It was only much later that I grew to realise how much she detested cooking and housework.
A mile upstream there was a house on the other riverbank, the last but one in a terrace and the front door gave directly onto the street. This was our regular destination. When we crossed the river at this point by car, we took the large bridge entwined with gryphons cast in iron. On the times we walked, we crossed downstream at the suspension footbridge and my father’s strength was always great enough to make the entire structure swing.
Even after all this time, I can remember the name of the woman who lived in the narrow house by the river because my father would tell my mother quite openly that he was going to visit her, and her daughters. For she had many daughters, and all preoccupied with grooming themselves it seemed. I never managed to count them because every week the number of her daughters changed, or so it appeared. Each had some activity, whether it was washing her hair or manicuring her nails, that we would discover her engaged with upon our arrival. These women shared an attitude of languor, as if they were always weary, but perhaps that was just how they were on Sunday, the day of rest. It was an exclusively female environment and I never recalled any other male present when I went to visit with my father on those Sunday mornings.
To this day, the house remains, one of only three remnants of an entire terrace. Once on a visit, years later, I stood outside the house in the snow, and contemplated knocking on the door and asking if the woman still lived there. But I did not. Why should I? What would I ask? What could I say? The house looked blank, like a face. Even this is now a memory to me, that I recalled once again after another ten years had gone by and I glanced from a taxi window to notice the house, almost dispassionately, in passing.
There was a table with a bench seat in an alcove which extended around three sides, like on a ship, so that sometimes as I sat drinking my orange squash while the women smoked their cigarettes, I found myself surrounded and unable to get down even if I chose. At an almost horizontal angle, the morning sunlight illuminated this scene from a window in the rear of the alcove and gave the smoke visible curling forms in the air. After a little time, sitting there, I became aware that my father was absent, that he had gone upstairs with one of the women. I knew this because I heard their eager footsteps ascending.
On one particular day, I sat at the end of the bench with my back to the wall. The staircase was directly on the other side of this thin wall and the women at the table were involved in an especially absorbing conversation that morning, and I could hear my father’s laughter at the top of the stairs. Curiosity took me. I slipped off the bench, placed my feet on the floor and began to climb the dark little staircase.
I could see the lighted room at the top. The door was wide open and standing before the end of the bed was my father and one of the daughters. They were having a happy time, both laughing and leaning back with their hands on each other’s thighs. My father was lifting the woman’s skirt and she liked it. Yet my presence brought activities to a close in the bedroom that morning. It was a disappointment, something vanished from the room as I walked into it but I did not know what it was. That was the last time my father took me to that house, perhaps the last time he visited. Though I could not say what happened on those Sunday mornings when I chose to stay with my mother.
We ate wonderful Sunday lunches, so that whatever anxiety I had absorbed from my father, as we returned without speaking on that particular Sunday morning, was dispelled by anticipation as we entered the steamy kitchen with its windows clouded by condensation and its smells of cabbage and potatoes boiling.
My mother was absent from the scene, so I ran upstairs in a surge of delight – calling to find her – and there she was, standing at the head of the bed changing the sheets. I entered the bedroom smiling with my arms outstretched and, laughing, tried to lift the hem of her pleated skirt just as I saw my father do in that other house on the other side of the river. I do not recall if my father had followed or if he saw this scene, only that my mother smiled in a puzzled fashion, ran her hands down her legs to her knees, took my hand and led me downstairs to the kitchen where she checked the progress of the different elements of the lunch. For in spite of herself, she was a very good cook and the ritual of those beautiful meals proved the high point of our existence at that time.
The events of that Sunday morning long ago when my father took me to the narrow house with the dark staircase by the river only came back to me as a complete memory in adulthood, but in that instant I understood their meaning. I took a strange pleasure in this knowledge that had been newly granted. I understood what kind of house it was and who the “daughters” were. I was grateful that my father had taken me there, and from then on I could only continue to wonder at what else this clue might reveal of my parents’ lives, and of my own nature.
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The Roman Ruin At The Hairdresser
Nicholson & Griffin, Hairdresser & Barber
The reasons why people go the hairdresser are various and complex – but this week Jane Sidell, Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and I visited a salon in the City of London for a purpose quite beyond the usual.
There is a hairdresser in Gracechurch St at the entrance to Leadenhall Market that is like no other. It appears unremarkable until you step through the tiny salon with room only for one customer and descend the staircase to find yourself in an enormous basement lined with mirrors and chairs, where busy hairdressers tend their clients’ coiffure.
At the far corner of this chamber, there is a discreet glass door which leads to another space entirely. Upon first sight, there is undefined darkness on the other side of the door, as if it opened upon the infinite universe of space and time. At the centre, sits an ancient structure of stone and brick. You are standing at ground level of Roman London and purpose of the visit is to inspect this fragmentary ruin of the basilica and forum built here in the first century and uncovered in 1881.
Once the largest building in Europe north of the Alps, the structure originally extended as far west as Cornhill, as far north as Leadenhall St, as far east as Lime St and as far south as Lombard St. The basilica was the location of judicial and financial administration while the forum served as a public meeting place and market. With astonishing continuity, two millennia later, the Roman ruins lie beneath Leadenhall Market and the surrounding offices of today’s legal and financial industries.
In the dark vault beneath the salon, you confront a neatly-constructed piece of wall consisting of fifteen courses of locally-made square clay bricks sitting upon a footing of shaped sandstone. Clay bricks were commonly included to mark string courses, such as you may find in the Roman City wall but this usage as an architectural feature is unusual, suggesting it is a piece of design rather than mere utility.
Once upon a time, countless people walked from the forum into the basilica and noticed this layer of bricks at the base of the wall which eventually became so familiar as to be invisible. They did not expect anyone in future to gaze in awe at this fragment from the deep recess of the past, any more than we might imagine a random section of the city of our own time being scrutinised by those yet to come, when we have long departed and London has been erased.
Yet there will have been hairdressers in the Roman forum and this essential human requirement is unlikely ever to be redundant, which left me wondering if, in this instance, the continuum of history resides in the human activity in the salon as much as in the ruin beneath it.
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The First Hundred Penguin Books
I came across this set of the first hundred Penguin books in my attic when I was unpacking a box that has been sealed since I moved in. With their faded orange, indigo, green, violet and pink spines they make a fine display and I am fond of this collection that took me so many years to amass.
When I left college, I wrote to companies all over the country seeking work and asking if they would give me an interview if I came to see them. Then I travelled around on the cheap, through a combination of buses, trains and hitchhiking, to visit all these places – the industrial towns of the North and the Cathedral cities of the South – staying in bus stations, youth hostels and seedy B&Bs, and going along filled with hope to interviews that were almost all fruitless. It was the first time I encountered the distinctive regional qualities of Britain and in each city, to ameliorate the day of my interview, I took the opportunity to visit the museums, civic art galleries, cathedrals and castles that distinguish these places. Arriving at each destination, I would consult the directory and make a list of the second-hand booksellers, then mark them on a tourist map and, after the job interview, I would visit every one. There were hundreds of these scruffy dusty old shops with proprietors who were commonly more interested in the book they were reading behind the counter than in any customer. Many were simply junk shops with a few books piled in disorder on some shelves in the back or stacked in cardboard boxes on the pavement outside.
In these shabby old shops, I sometimes came upon Penguin books with a podgy penguin on the cover, quite in contrast to the streamlined bird familiar from modern editions. These early titles, dating from 1935 had a clean bold typography using Eric Gill’s classic sans typeface and could be bought for just twenty or thirty pence. So, in the manner of those cards you get in bubblegum packets, I began to collect any with numbers up to one hundred. In doing so, I discovered a whole library of novelists from the nineteen thirties and reading these copies passed the time pleasantly on my endless journeys. In particular, I liked the work of Eric Linklater whose playful novel “Poet’s Pub” was number two, Compton Mackenzie whose novel of the Edwardian vaudeville “Carnival” was ten, Vita Sackville-West whose novel “The Edwardians” was sixteen, T.F.Powys whose “Mr Weston’s Good Wine” was seventy-three and Sylvia Townsend Warner whose novel “Lolly Willowes” was eighty-four. After these, I read all the other works of these skillful and unjustly neglected novelists.
Eventually I found a job in Perthshire and then subsequently in Inverness, and from here I made frequent trips to Glasgow, which has the best second-hand bookshops in Scotland, to continue my collection. And whenever I made the long rail journey down South, I commonly stopped off to spend a day wandering round Liverpool or Durham or any of the places I had never been, all for the purpose of seeking old Penguins.
The collection was finally completed when I moved back to London and discovered that my next door neighbour Christine was the daughter of Allen Lane who founded Penguin books. She was astonished to see my collection and I was amazed to see the same editions scattered around her house. From Christine, I learnt how her father Allen was bored one day on Exeter St David’s Station (a place familiar to me), changing trains on the way to visit his godmother Agatha Christie. When he searched the bookstall, he could not find anything to read and decided to start his own company publishing cheap editions of good quality books. I presume he did not know that, if he had been there half a century earlier, he could have bought a copy of Thomas Hardy’s first published novel “Desperate Remedies”, because Exeter St David’s was where Hardy experienced that moment no writer can ever forget, of first seeing their book on sale.
I do not think my collection of Penguins is of any great value because they are of highly variable condition and not all are first editions, though every one predates World War II and they are of the uniform early design before the bird slimmed down. While I was collecting these, I thought that I was on a quest to build my career – a fancy that I walked away from, years later. Now these hundred Penguin books are the only evidence of my innocent tenacity to create a life for myself at that time.
Allen Lane’s idealistic conception, to use the mass market to promulgate good writing to the widest readership in cheap editions that anyone could afford, is one that I admire. And these first hundred are a fascinating range of titles, a snapshot of the British public’s reading tastes in the late thirties. Looking back, the search for all these books led me on a wonderful journey through Britain. If you bear in mind that I only found a couple in each city, then you will realise that my complete collection represents a ridiculously large number of failed job interviews in every corner of these islands. It was a job search than became a cultural tour and resulted in a stack of lovely old paperbacks. Now they sit on my shelf here in Spitalfields as souvenirs of all the curious places I never would have visited if it were not my wayward notion to scour the entire country to collect all the first hundred Penguins.
William Smith & Charles Eaton, Forgers
William Smith & Charles Eaton – better known as Billy & Charley – were a couple of Thames mudlarks who sold artefacts they claimed to have found in the Thames in Shadwell and elsewhere. Yet this threadbare veil of fiction conceals the astonishing resourcefulness and creativity that these two illiterate East Enders demonstrated in designing and casting tens of thousands of cod-medieval trinkets – eventually referred to as “Shadwell Shams” – which had the nineteenth century archaeological establishment running around in circles of confusion and misdirection for decades.
“They were intelligent but without knowledge,” explained collector Philip Mernick, outlining the central mystery of Billy & Charley, “someone told them ‘If you can make these, you can get money for them.’ Yet someone must also have given them the designs, because I find it hard to believe they had the imagination to invent all these – but maybe they did?”
Working in Rosemary Lane, significantly placed close to the Royal Mint, Billy & Charley operated in an area where small workshops casting maritime fixtures and fittings for the docks were common. Between 1856 until 1870, they used lead alloy and cut into plaster of paris with nails and knives to create moulds, finishing their counterfeit antiquities with acid to simulate the effects of age. Formerly, they made money as mudlarks selling their Thames discoveries to a dealer, William Edwards, whom Billy first met in 1845. Edwards described Billy & Charley as “his boys” and became their fence, passing on their fakes to George Eastwood, a more established antiques dealer based in the City Rd.
Badges, such as these from Philip Mernick’s collection, were their commonest productions – costing less than tuppence to make, yet selling for half a crown. These items were eagerly acquired in a new market for antiquities among the middle class who had spare cash but not sufficient education to understand what they were buying. Yet many eminent figures were also duped, including the archaeologist, Charles Roach Smith, who was convinced the artefacts were from the sixteenth century, suggesting that they could not be forgeries if there was no original from which they were copied. Similarly, Rev Thomas Hugo, Vicar of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, took an interest, believing them to be medieval pilgrims’ badges.
The question became a matter for the courts in August 1858 when the dealer George Eastwood sued The Athenaeum for accusing him of selling fakes. Eastwood testified he paid £296 to William Edwards for over a thousand objects that Edwards had originally bought for £200. Speaking both for himself and Charley, Billy Smith – described in the record as a “rough looking man” – assured the court that they had found the items in the Thames and earned £400 from the sale. Without further evidence, the judge returned a verdict of not guilty upon the publisher since Eastwood had not been named explicitly in print.
The publicity generated by the trial proved ideal for the opening of Eastwood’s new shop, moving his business from City Rd to Haymarket in 1859 and enjoying a boost in sales of Billy & Charley’s creations. Yet, two years later, the bottom fell out of the market when a sceptical member of the Society of Antiquaries visited Shadwell Dock and uncovered the truth from a sewer hunter who confirmed Billy & Charley’s covert means of production.
As they were losing credibility, Billy & Charley were becoming more accomplished and ambitious in their works, branching out into more elaborate designs and casting in brass. It led them to travel beyond the capital, in hope of escaping their reputation and selling their wares. They were arrested in Windsor in 1867 but, without sufficient ground for prosecution, they were released. By 1869, their designs could be bought for a penny each.
A year later, Charley died of consumption in a tenement in Wellclose Sq at thirty-five years old. The same year, Billy was forced to admit that he copied the design of a badge from a butter mould – and thus he vanishes from the historical record.
It is a wonder that the archaeological establishment were fooled for so long by Billy & Charley, when their pseudo-medieval designs include Arabic dates that were not used in Europe before the fifteenth century. Maybe the conviction and fluency of their work persuaded the original purchasers of its authenticity? Far from crude or cynical productions, Billy & Charley’s creations possess character, humour and even panache, suggesting they are the outcome of an ingenious delight – one which could even find inspiration for a pilgrim’s badge in a butter mould. Studying these works, it becomes apparent that there is a creative intelligence at work which, in another time, might be celebrated as the talent of an artist or designer, even if in Billy & Charley’s world it found its only outlet in semi-criminal activity.
Yet the final irony lies with Billy & Charley – today their Shadwell Shams are commonly worth more than the genuine antiquities they forged.
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The Ceremony Of The Baddeley Cake
Harry Nicholls cuts the Baddeley Cake with the cast of ‘Babes in the Wood’ in 1908
Tonight, an excited throng at Drury Lane will celebrate London’s oldest theatrical tradition, the cutting of the Baddeley Cake, which has been taking place on Twelfth Night since 1795.
After the performance, members of the cast will gather for the ceremony in the palatial neo-classical theatre bar dating from 1821, in front of a large party of fellow actors and actresses who have trod the boards of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in former years, and Alex Jennings – who currently stars as Willy Wonka – will cut the cake. Liberal servings of strong punch containing wine, brandy and gin, concocted by the Theatre Manager to a secret recipe handed down through the centuries, always ensure that the evening goes with a swing. In recent years, the cake has been themed to the show running at the theatre and this year a huge chocolate cake will be cunningly baked in the shape of a Wonka bar by a Master Chocolatier.
It is an occasion coloured with sentiment as the performers, still flushed from the night’s performance, recognise their part in this theatre’s long history while retired actors fill with nostalgic emotion to be reunited with old friends and recall happy past times at Drury Lane. This splendid event is organised annually by the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund which was founded by the great actor-manager David Garrick in 1766 to provide pensions to performers from Drury Lane and still functions today, for this notoriously most-uncertain of professions, offering support to senior actors down on their luck.
Twelfth Cake was a medieval tradition that is the origin of our contemporary Christmas Cake. Originally part of the feast of Epiphany, the cake was baked with a bean inside and whoever got the slice with the bean was crowned King of Misrule. The Baddeley Cake is the last surviving example of this ancient custom of the Twelfth Cake and – appropriately enough – owes its name to Robert Baddeley, a pastry chef who became a famous actor, and left a legacy to the Drury Lane Fund to “provide cake and wine for the performers in the green room of Drury Lane Theatre on Twelfth Night.”
A Cockney by origin, Robert Baddeley was pastry chef to the actor Samuel Foote when he grew stage-struck and asked his employer, who was performing at Drury Lane, if he could join him on the stage. “You are a good cook, why do you want to be a bad actor?” queried Foote, dismissing the request, but offering to find him a role on the stage if Baddeley was still keen in a year’s time.
With theatrical daring, Baddeley left his employer, travelled the continent for a year and returned to marry Sophia Snow, the glamorous daughter of George III’s State Trumpeter. On the anniversary of his original request, he presented himself at the Stage Door of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and asked Foote for the job which he had been promised. In fact, Baddeley turned out to be a talented actor and quickly made a name for himself in comic roles, playing foreigners. The attractive Sophia Baddeley was also offered roles, exploiting her musical abilities and natural charms, and her husband arranged with the management to pocket both their salaries himself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it proved to be a volatile marriage, especially when she took revenge on her husband by working her way through all the male members of the company.
The situation came to crisis in a duel over Sophia Baddeley’s honour between George Garrick (David’s brother) and Robert Baddeley in Hyde Park, yet she managed to reconcile the opponents with a suitably theatrical demonstration of her astonishing powers of persuasion. It appears that the constant tide of marital scandal published in the newspapers did no harm to the careers of either Mr & Mrs Baddeley.
Eventually, Robert Baddeley became a permanent member of His Majesties Company of Comedians at Drury Lane at a salary of twelve pounds a week. He was best known for originating the role of Moses in ‘The School for Scandal’ which premiered at Drury Lane in 1777, and it was in costume for this character that he collapsed on stage on November 19th 1794 and died at home in Store St next morning.
Baddeley’s will extended to seventy pages, including the legacy of his house in Moulsey as an asylum for decayed actors and a three pound annuity for the provision of an annual Twelfth Cake and punch for the performers at Drury Lane. The asylum failed because the old actors did not like being labelled as decayed, so the property was sold and his estate merged with the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund – but the annual ceremony of the cake which bears his name lives on.
Each year before the Baddeley Cake is cut, the Master of the Fund proposes a toast to Robert Baddeley and everyone raises their glasses of punch in celebration of London’s oldest living theatrical tradition and in remembrance of the Cockney pastry chef who fulfilled his dream of becoming an actor.
Robert Baddeley (1733-1794) The pastry chef who became a famous actor
Painted by Zoffany, Robert Baddeley as Moses in Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal,” which premiered at Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1777
Robert Baddeley “I have taken my last draught in this world” Henry IV Part II
Baddeley’s Twelfth Cake
William Terriss cuts the Baddeley cake in 1883
Cutting the Baddeley Cake on the stage of Drury Lane in 1890
Alex Jennings (currently starring as Willie Wonka) cuts the Baddeley Cake, accompanied by the cast of “Charlie & The Chocolate Factory”
Theatre Royal Drury Lane
New photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Click here to learn more about the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund
