Yet More Of Hindley’s Cries Of London
In his History of the Cries of London, Ancient & Modern of 1884, Charles Hindley reused many woodblocks from earlier publications and these below date from much earlier in the century. Each one no larger than a thumbnail, this tiny series is remarkable for the sense of urgency conveyed as many of the sellers strive to sell their wares, and also for the incidental details – such as the cat in the potato seller print, the watchman’s rattle, the fins on the eels’ heads, the dog that wants a mutton pie and the child holding out a plate in hope of a muffin.
Come take a Peep, Boys, take a Peep! Girls, I’ve the Wonder of the World!
Water Cresses! Fine Spring Water Cresses! Three bunches a Penny, young Water Cresses!
Buy fine Kidney Potatoes! New Potatoes! Fine Kidney Potatoes! Potatoes, O!
Buy Images! Good and cheap! Images, very good – very cheap!
Fine China Oranges, sweet as sugar! The are very fine, and cheap, too, today
Kettles to mend! Any Pots to Mend?
Eels, fine Silver Eels! Dutch Eels! They are all alive – Silver Eels!
Buy my young chickens! Buy ’em alive, O! Buy of the Fowlman, and have ’em alive, O!
Toy Lambs to sell! Toy Lambs to sell!
Past twelve o’clock and a misty morning! Past twelve o’clock and mind I give you warning!
Golden Pippins of the right sort, boys! Golden Pippins of the right sort, girls!
Buy a Mop! Buy a Broom! Good today! Buy a Broom! Buy a Mop, I say!
Buy ’em by the stick, or buy ’em by the pound, Cherries ripe, all round and sound!
Oysters, fresh and alive, three a penny, O! When they are all sold I shan’t have any, O!
Muffins O! Crumpets! Muffins, today! Crumpets! Muffins! Fresh today!
Mutton Pies! Mutton Pies! Mutton Pies! Come feast your eyes with my Mutton Pies!
Door Mat! Door Mat! Buy a Door Mat! Rope Mat! Rope Mat! Buy a Rope Mat!
Clothes Props! Clothes Props! I say, very good Clothes Props, all long and strong, today!
Any Knives or Scissors to Grind today? Big Knives or little Knives, or Scissors to Grind, O!
Ripe Strawberries! A groat a pottle, today. Only a groat a pottle, is what I say!
Have pity, have pity upon the poor little birds, who only make music and cannot sing words!
You may like to take a look at the text I have written about the Cries of London upon the British Library’s DISCOVERING LITERATURE website
Peruse these other sets of the Cries of London I have collected
More John Player’s Cries of London
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
At Toynbee Hall
Arnold Toynbee was the Economic Historian who coined the phrase “Industrial Revolution” to describe the transformation that came upon this country in the first half of the nineteenth century as a result of technological advance. As early as the eighteen-seventies, he recognised that the free market system disadvantaged the poor, and he came to Whitechapel from Oxford to encourage the creation of trade unions and public libraries, as a means to give practical expression to his social beliefs.
When Toynbee died from exhaustion at the age of thirty in 1883, his friend Samuel Barnett, working in partnership with his wife Henrietta Barnett, established an experimental university settlement in the East End founded upon these ideals and they named it Toynbee Hall. Opening on Christmas Eve 1884, it attempted to recreate a collegiate environment where the educated intellects of Oxford & Cambridge might live and work among the poor. Already, Samuel had been vicar of St Jude’s in Whitechapel since 1873, while his wife Henrietta had worked with Octavia Hill on social housing projects and counted John Ruskin as a personal mentor.
Residents were encouraged to place citizenship above self-interest and dedicate themselves to relationships that overcame class barriers. Barnett believed that educational and social projects undertaken by the students encouraged a social conscience among future generations of political leaders. It was an ethos that became manifest when Clement Attlee who had been secretary at Toynbee Hall became Prime Minister in 1945. Thus the entire project of the Welfare State and attendant modern notions of Social Welfare in Britain can be traced back to their origin in the work begun in Commercial St – which explains why more recent Prime Ministers such as Tony Blair came to launch his campaign to end child poverty at Toynbee Hall in 1999 and David Cameron chose to announce his Welfare Reforms here in 2011.
True to his belief in the social value of culture, Samuel Barnett founded the Whitechapel Gallery round the corner, that opened its doors in 1901, and Henrietta Barnett created Hampstead Garden Suburb in 1907, as the embodiment of her notion of humane housing for Londoners.
Despite damage by wartime bombing and the accretion of more recent buildings, the core structure of Samuel & Henrietta Barnett’s Toynbee Hall remains today. Built in the nineteenth-century Elizabethan style by Elijah Hoole, with gables, tall chimneystacks, mullioned windows and diamond-paned casements, and embellished with magnificent old fig trees, the dignified collegiate atmosphere prevails. At the heart of it are the oak-panelled Lecture Hall and the Dining Room (now the CR Ashbee Hall) with its original low table, conceived as a means to encourag those sitting around it into a more relaxed inter-relationship.
CR Ashbee, who later founded the Art Workers Guild in Bow, came here after graduating from Cambridge in 1886 and applied the principles of John Ruskin directly, by setting to work with his students to redecorate the dining room in the Arts & Crafts style. His tree of life design in relief upon the gilded plaster rondels became the symbol of Toynbee Hall. These medallions once punctuated murals painted by his students and early photos show his famous table surrounded by Morris’ Sussex chairs. Tantalisingly, murals in both of these major rooms have been painted out and, apart from the table, none of the original furnishings survive. Yet this sturdy old table, scratched and worn, evokes the presence of those who have gathered round it and the passionate discourse that has passed across it for over a century.
To visit Toynbee Hall is to be reminded of the origin of the notion of a modern compassionate society, the importance of universal education, and the duty of government to temper the excesses of the free market for the public benefit – and to recognise that these are ideas still worth striving for today.
Samuel Barnett with graduates of Oxford & Cambridge at Toynbee Hall c.1903-5
The Lecture Hall, c. 1900
Samuel Barnett
Henrietta Barnett
Painting a mural in the Lecture Hall in the nineteen-thirties
In the Lecture Hall today
Crests of Oxford and Cambridge colleges line the walls of the CR Ashbee Hall today
Busts of former luminaries – this one is John Profumo
The famous low table in sections designed by CR Ashbee as part of the room, to encourage a more relaxed relationship among those who sat around it
Rondels by CR Ashbee depicting the tree of life that became Toynbee Hall’s symbol – although a paint scheme based upon the original colours was introduced in the eighties, these walls were once painted with murals under the supervision of CR Ashbee
Sketch of the CR Ashbee Hall showing original furnishings including Sussex chairs by William Morris
Students’ common room
A scientific experiment
Elevation on Wentworth St
Original facade onto Commercial St
Bomb damage to the Commercial St facade
The clock tower of 1893
Bomb damage seen from the internal courtyard
The view from Commercial St once the bomb damage was cleared away
The view from Commercial St today
You may like to read about Toynbee Hall resident
King Of The Bottletops In Spitalfields
Robson Cezar
Have you seen the bottletop man at the corner of Hanbury St? You might not notice him among the regulars that gather on the pavement outside The Golden Heart but, when the crowds thin out, he is still there, standing sentinel and keeping watch along Commercial St after everyone else has gone home.
Yet, in the morning, he is ready to welcome visitors even before the pub opens and stands patiently like a Guardsman while tourists take each other’s photographs beside him. This new presiding spirit of the neighbourhood is the latest work of Robson Cezar, Artist and Spitalfields resident, known as the King of the Bottletops, pictured here by Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie.
Meanwhile just a hundred yards away, another beloved Spitalfields institution, Mama Thai the cafe and noodle bar in Toynbee St, has acquired a sparkling new fascia of seven thousand bottletops.
If you would like to meet Robson Cezar and learn how to do it yourself, you can visit him at Spitalfields City Farm where he is Artist-in-Residence from Thursday 21th August until Sunday 7th September. Come along to the farm any weekday (except Mondays) between 10am and 4pm. Introductory workshops take place between 11am & 1pm and between 2pm & 4pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Everyone is welcome to turn up at the free weekday sessions but places at the weekend workshops must be booked by email to Rossana@spitalfieldscityfarm.org
Robson Cezar and Sandra Esqulant, Landlady of the Golden Heart
Robson Cezar made the bottletop man in his own image
Robson Cezar conjures the bottletop man into life
Robson the bottletop physician
At the Golden Heart
Collecting bottletops at the Carpenters Arms
Robson and Raj Chawla at Mama Thai, before the new fascia – it all started with the sandwich board
The corner of Brune St and Toynbee St
The celebrated Pam Chawla, Mama Thai herself, stands holding Raj’s arm (standing second from left)
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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In Old Bermondsey
The horse’s head upon the fascia reveals that RW Autos was once a farrier
Twenty-five years ago I had reason to visit Bermondsey St frequently but I have hardly been there since, so I thought it was time to walk down across the river and take a look. Leaving the crowds teeming like ants upon the chaotic mound that is London Bridge Station in the midst of reconstruction, I ventured into Guy’s Hospital passing the statue of Thomas Guy, who founded it in 1721, to sit with John Keats in a stone alcove from old London Bridge now installed in a courtyard at the back.
From here, I turned east through the narrow streets into Snowsfields, passing the evocatively named Ship & Mermaid Row, and Arthur’s Mission of 1865 annotated with “Feed my Lambs” upon a plaque. An instruction that has evidently not been forgotten, as the building adjoins the Manna Day Centre which offers refuge and sustenance to more than two hundred homeless people each day.
At the end of Snowsfields is the crossroads where Bermondsey St meets the viaduct carrying the railway to and from London Bridge, and the sonorous intensity of the traffic roaring through, combined with the vibration from the trains rattling overhead, can be quite overwhelming. Yet the long narrow street beckons you south, as it has done for more than a thousand years – serving as the path from the Thames to the precincts of Bermondsey Abbey, a mile away, since the eleventh century. When I first came here, I never ventured beyond Bermondsey Sq. Only when I learned of the remains of the medieval gatehouse in Grange Walk beyond, with the iron hinges still protruding from the wall today, did I understand that Bermondsey St was the approach to the precincts of the Abbey destroyed by Henry VIII in 1536.
There is an engaging drama to Bermondsey St with its narrow frontages of shops and tall old warehouses crowded upon either side, punctuated by overhanging yards and blind alleys. A quarter of a century ago, everything appeared closed down, apart from The Stage newspaper with its gaudy playbill sign, a couple of attractively gloomy pubs and some secondhand furniture warehouses. I was fascinated by the mysteries withheld and Bermondsey St lodged in my mind as a compelling vestige of another time. Nowadays it appears everything has been opened up in Bermondsey St, and the shabbiness that once prevailed has been dispelled by restoration and adaptation of the old buildings, and the addition of fancy new structures for the Fashion & Textile Museum and the White Cube Gallery.
Yet, in spite of the changes, I was pleased to discover RW Autos still in business in Morocco St with the horses’ heads upon the fascia, indicating the origin of the premises as a farrier. Nearby, the massive buildings of the former London Leather Exchange, now housing dozens of small businesses, stand as a reminder of the tanning industry which occupied Bermondsey for centuries, filling the air with foul smells and noxious fumes, and poisoning the water courses with filth.
The distinctive pattern of streets and survival of so many utilitarian nineteenth and eighteenth century structures ensure the working character of this part of Bermondsey persists, and you do not have to wander far to come upon blocks of nineteenth century housing and old terraces of brick cottages, interspersed by charity schools and former institutes of altruistic endeavour, which carry the attendant social history. Thus Bermondsey may still be appreciated as an urban landscape where the past is visibly manifest to the attentive visitor, who cares to spend a quiet afternoon exploring on foot.
John Keats at Guy’s Hospital
Arthur’s Mission in Snow’s Fields seen from Guinness Buildings 1897
In Bermondsey St
At the Woolpack
Old warehouses in Bermondsey St
St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey – the medieval tower is the last remnant of the Abbey founded in the eleventh century
In St Mary’s Bermondsey St
In St Mary Magdalen Graveyard
This plaque marks the site of the abbey church
Old houses in Grange Walk – the house on the right is claimed to be the Abbey gatehouse with hinges of the gates still visible
Bermondsey United Charity School for Girls in Grange Walk, 1830
In Grange Walk
Bermondsey Sq Antiques Market every Friday
A cottage garden in Bermondsey
The Victoria, a magnificent tiled nineteenth century pub with its original spittoon, in Pages Walk
London Leather, Hide & Wool Exchange built 1878 by George Elkington & Sons, next to the 1833 Leather Market, it remained active until 1912.
At the entrance to St Thomas’ Church
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Noel Gibson in Bow
Railway footbridge at Poplar
There is a rare chance to see the work of East End painter Noel Gibson (1928-2006) at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow until September 21st. These large paintings need to be seen in the gallery to fully appreciate the quality of impasto, with vivid black lines standing out in relief from the canvas and vigorous textures created with a palette knife, imparting a dramatic presence to these soulful visions.
Born in Glasgow, Gibson originally trained as an opera singer and then became House Manger at the London Opera Centre based in the Troxy Cinema in Commercial Rd. A self-taught artist, he painted in the evenings after work.
“I began as an abstract painter but when I came to Stepney, I found paintings on my doorstep. Though I think there’s still a quiet abstract quality to my paintings. I am trying to express the spirit of the buildings, the strength of them and the people who were there. This is why I don’t put people into my paintings. People turn them into an episode with a background – but I am painting the background! I love these buildings. I walk the dog and I look at them at different times of day and in different weathers, and I keep going back. In a way I am making a record of a changing, I wouldn’t say a dying area, but often I go back to check up on a detail, a colour and a whole street has gone.” Gibson said in an interview in the Times in 1972.
Immensely successful in his day, enjoying acclaim and sell-out shows – one of which at St Botolph’s in Bishopsgate was opened by Tubby Isaac the jellied eel king – Noel Gibson was featured on BBC’s “Nationwide,” a popular current affairs programme in 1972. In 1974, he moved to South London, working at Morley College and appointed Provost’s Verger at Southwark Cathedral, yet in 1985 he admitted, “I regard Tower Hamlets as the area of inspiration for my work and I will always return to it.”
Hessel St – “If this street were in Paris, everyone would have wanted to paint it.”
Brick Lane, looking north towards the Truman Brewery
St Anne’s, Limehouse
St John’s Tower
Small Red House in Bow
Street Scene in Poplar
The Victory in Poplar
Chilton St, Spitalfields
Tower House, Fieldgate St, Whitechapel
Arbour Sq
Noel Gibson
Images courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
Empty Streets: Noel Gibson’s East London (1967-75) is at the Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 21st September
Ray Newton, Historian Of Shadwell
Ray Newton at the churchyard gate of St Paul’s Shadwell
You do not meet many people who can say they come from Shadwell these days, not in the way that Ray Newton can when he tells you his family have been there since at least 1820 – which is only as far he chooses to probe, yet more than sufficient to claim Shadwell as his place of origin.
Ray has dedicated himself to learning the history of Shadwell and, for the past thirty years, he has run the local history trust with Madge Darby who is his counterpart in Wapping. Between the pair of them they are able to enjoy specialist conversations that trace niceties of historical detail, especially concerning the boundary between their adjoining Thames-side parishes. “Madge will tell you that the Prospect …” Ray began, referring to the ancient Prospect of Whitby riverside pub by its familiar name, “Madge will tell you that the Prospect is in Wapping because, since the early nineteenth century when the Docks were built, the Wapping people have said that you have to cross water to get to Wapping – yet prior to that the Prospect was in Shadwell.”
In confirmation of this assertion, Ray took me round the back of St Paul’s Church in Shadwell and gestured significantly towards a blank wall before turning one hundred and eighty degrees to indicate a route crossing the Basin towards the Thames. “This used to be Fox’s Path, from the Highway down to the Prospect,” he informed me, “it was raised on stilts across the marshes that were here before the Docks.”
Thus Ray’s thesis about the shifting boundary of Shadwell and Wapping was proven, though it left me with an unfulfillable yearning to cross Fox’s Path upon the long-gone stilts over the marshes and down to the Prospect of Whitby.
“My father, Thomas Newton, was born in 1904 in Cornwall St off Watney St Market but he lived his early life in Juniper St, which was swarming with hundreds of children then. Although it was a big family, my grandfather John Newton had a good job, he was a foreman in a cold store at Bankside, so my father got educated and he could read and write letters for people in Juniper St.
We were lucky because my dad had a secure job and even in the thirties, when there were no jobs, he worked. At twelve years old, my father left school and went to work with my grandfather at the cold store, and his brothers worked there with him too. When he was fourteen, he went to Broad St Boys’ Club in the Highway that was run by the son of Bombardier Billy Wells (the man who wielded the hammer on the gong at the start of J. Arthur Rank films) and, at eighteen years old, my father became a professional boxer. He fought against Raymond Perrier, the Champion of France, and beat him and he topped the bill in the twenties. He fought all over the East End but, because he was boxer not a fighter, he had trouble with his eye and he had to have an operation. After that, he couldn’t box anymore so he became a manager and ran a gym in Davenport St above the Roebuck.
My mother, Maria Edgecombe, was born in Gravesend. Her mother was a farmer’s daughter who married my grandfather, who was a waterman who came from Shadwell and worked for the Tilbury Dock Company. When it was taken over by the Port of London Authority, he moved out and worked on the Pierhead and they lived in Cable St, where my mother met my father and they had three boys and a girl. On my dad’s side, they were all dockers and on my mother’s side they all worked for the Port of London Authority. They were different people, because in the docks it was all casual labour whereas the Port of London Authority was regular employment. It was very hard work in the docks but I never met anyone that didn’t love working there. The docks could find a job for anyone.
When the War came, my dad was still working in the cold store and it was a reserved occupation. He joined the Home Guard and his job was to guard the London Dock and the King Edward VII Memorial Park which was the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel – and he was given five rounds of ammunition. I remember him in his uniform because I was born just before the War.
My father was always into everything sporty and boxing was his life so, when his father died, he become a bookmaker and set himself up as a turf accountant and gave up the docks. Next, he decided to be a publican and bought a pub on the Highway opposite Free Trade Wharf called the Cock but, while I was doing National Service, he became ill. At fifty-one, he was told he had lung cancer and had five years to live, and he died at fifty-six. He was a lad but he wasn’t a criminal. He was a hard man and he could fight anyone just like that, yet he was also very generous. He was into everything, he organised dances and sold tickets.
We had a boxing gym in the cellar of the pub and he gave away all the equipment to the St Georges Boxing Club in the church crypt – where they produced a world champion, Terry Marsh. I didn’t want him to give it away because I thought they’d damage it but he said to me, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have no money.’
At twenty-three years old, I took over the pub and I was a publican right on the docks, serving seamen and dockers. So you had to be a little hard – but I’m not. During the days, it was dockers, lightermen and ships’ captains but at nights, and at weekends, local families came. We had a piano player and everyone knew the words, they had competitions – one song in the Saloon Bar then one in the Public Bar. In the Saloon, you could charge what you pleased but in the Public Bar the drinks’ prices were set. Ships’ officers, customs’ men and the management of Free Trade Wharf went into the Saloon and dockers and lightermen went in the Public Bar – they never met, that was the class system.
I ran the pub until it was pulled down to make way for the widening of the Highway and I was rehoused in Gordon House, where I still live today. After the pub came down, I worked for my elder brother – he was a bookmaker – in his betting shops, but it wasn’t me. When he decided to sell the shop in Walthamstow, I stayed 0n and worked for the new people – for the company which became City Tote.
Yet I realised I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life so, at thirty-two, I decided to get an education and, after the shop closed at night, I used to go to evening classes. I enrolled for a basic English class and the teacher said, ‘Write something down so I can look at it,’ and when he saw it he said, ‘This ain’t your class but if you help me with teaching the other students, I’ll mark your essay each week.’ So I got a year of personal tuition.
Then I was doing my homework in the betting shop one day, when two young men who were different from the other punters asked what I was doing. I said, ‘I’m doing O levels.’ They were lecturers and they said, ‘We’ll help you with your O levels if you’ll teach us gambling.’ After I did my O levels and A levels, I realised that if I don’t go to university, I’d be disappointed for the rest of my life, so I went to Middlesex Polytechnic and did a four year degree in Social Sciences. While I was a student, I was working as an Adult Literacy volunteer and after I got my degree I became a lecturer in Social Sciences at West Ham College, but the most rewarding thing I did was teaching partially blind people.
After thirty-six years of teaching, I retired and for the past ten years I’ve had an allotment in Cable St Gardens, and I’m secretary of the History of Wapping Trust. I used to teach a Local History class and one day Madge Darby came along, there’s nothing about Wapping she didn’t know. We published over twenty books. We never set out to make money, it is a thing we did for love.
Once upon a time, we were all in the same boat, we all went to the same school, we all went to the same pub, we all had the same doctor and everybody knew everybody. Now nobody knows anybody. I think I was lucky because I worked in a pub at twenty-three and I met the full range of people, and it got me interested in local history.”
Ray upon the steps overlooking Shadwell Basin
Ray shows the stone plaque in the churchyard wall of St Paul’s Shadwell, placed after it was shored up when Shadwell Basin was being excavated between 1828-32 and the church began to slide downhill
Ray pointed out these early nineteenth century doors facing the Highway, in the side of the Vestry at St Paul’s Shadwell, which were once the entrance to Shadwell’s first Fire Station
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Truman’s Spitalfields Pub Crawl
Fancy a couple of pints on Friday night? You are invited to come along on Truman’s pub crawl in Spitalfields this Friday in the company of Derek Prentice former Master Brewer in Brick Lane and Jack Hibberd of Truman’s Beer to learn the history of the rise and fall and rise again of brewing in the East End, and enjoy the opportunity to sample some of fine ales now being brewed by Truman’s. To join the party, simply meet at at 6:30pm this Friday 15th August at the Pride of Spitalfields in Heneage St and look forward to visiting some of the celebrated hostelries in these pictures.
The Pride of Spitalfields, Heneage St
Sandra Esqulant at The Golden Heart, Commercial St
Ten Bells, Commercial St
You may also like to read my stories about Truman’s Beer
First Brew at the New Truman’s Brewery
Tony Jack, Chauffeur at Truman’s Brewery
Truman’s Returns to Spitalfields
and take a look at
The Gentle Author’s Next Pub Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Pub Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Next Dead Pubs Crawl
The Gentle Author’s Wapping Pub Crawl
