David Hoffman & Crisis At Christmas
Almost by chance, at the end of the seventies, photographer David Hoffman found himself recording the formation of an organisation called Crisis at Christmas that opened up disused spaces and created temporary shelters staffed by volunteers to provide accommodation for the homeless through the holiday season when other shelters were shut.
As a participant rather than a visitor, David was able to take intimate photographs of those who sought refuge, capturing emotional images which are compassionate yet void of sentimentality.
There is a timeless quality to many of these pictures that could equally be of refugees from a war zone or in some apocalyptic dystopian vision of the future, yet this is London in the recent past and Crisis at Christmas is still with us and the work goes on.
“At the time, I was known for my photos of the homeless at St Botolph’s in Aldgate and I was going out with a girl named Peta Watts, who was working at Crisis at Christmas – so when she asked me to take pictures there, I leapt at the chance of becoming the Crisis photographer, and I did it for three years.
This was the early days of these shelters and they used derelict churches. One of them was St Philip & St Augustine in Whitechapel, round the corner from the squat where I lived in Fieldgate Mansions, and the next year it was at the Tradescant church of St Mary’s in Lambeth. So there were very little facilities – perhaps only a cold tap and one toilet for hundreds of people – and the whole thing was a chaotic feat of organisation, but somehow it all worked. They got donations of food and clothing and toys. And I remember some of the guys found an old bath tub in a skip and brought it in and filled it with water, so they could wash themselves. There was no regard to Health & Safety or regulation as we know it, but it all worked brilliantly and everyone was very well looked after. There was no hierarchy and the homeless people would be involved in the cooking and arranging the mattresses, and keeping the whole thing running.
I photographed it because it was a wonderful event and – like at St Botolph’s – some of the people were couples, and I took their pictures and brought them prints the next day. Many of these people had been living on the streets all year and the photographs helped them to have a more positive self-image.
Some would be shooting up and and others would be drinking, and an ambulance would come two or three times a day to pick people up. There were fights too, and I remember there was an unspoken rule that only one volunteer would approach to break it up by speaking softly – and it never failed. Many of the volunteers were middle class people who would work eighteen to twenty hours a day. What I liked about it was people coming together and doing things for themselves – and it just worked, and the homeless people looked after each other.”
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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Midwinter At Christ Church
Today is the shortest day of the year and, at eleven minutes past five this afternoon, we pass the solstice taking us back towards shorter nights and longer days. At this time when the sun is at its lowest angle, Christ Church Spitalfields can become an intricate light box with powerful rays of light entering almost horizontally from the south and illuminating Nicholas Hawksmoor’s baroque architecture in startling ways. Yesterday’s crystalline sunlight provided the ideal conditions for such phenomena and inspired me to attempt to capture of these fleeting effects of light.
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At The Lego Exhibition
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I were among the very first through the doors at BRICK 2015, the exhibition of all things Lego at the ExCeL Centre at Royal Victoria Dock recently. Once we passed the lone Lego Woolly Mammoth, awaiting extinction upon the frosty tundra, we could not resist becoming intoxicated by the collective enthusiasm of the milling crowds.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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Phil Maxwell At The London Hospital
Contributing Photographer Phil Maxwell was granted access to the former Royal London Hospital while it sits in limbo. inhabited only by the lonely ghost of Joseph Merrick, as the building awaits its new purpose as Town Hall for the Borough of Tower Hamlets
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
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Len Hoffman, Sports Coach
Today it is my pleasure to introduce the fifth of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist Professor Dick Hobbs, Author of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK
For sixty-seven years, Len Hoffman has given up his time to coach kids in East London and, even now at the age of ninety-one, he cannot stop. “It keeps me young,” claimed the sprightly nonagenerian as he went about his regular stint, coaching at Mossford table tennis club in Seven Kings.
Born in Bow, Len moved to Forest Gate as a child and left school at fourteen. “Dad worked on the Times, so he got me a job there working as a messenger boy. I went everywhere in London, including to Buckingham Palace.” After service in the RAF – “they sent me to Germany as the German prisoners of war were being sent back” – Len returned to work as a clerk on the Times, but could not settle. It was at this point that his obsession with sport kicked in and his long career in coaching commenced in 1947. Len worked as a school attendance officer in Newham and as a table tennis coach in schools in Newham and Barking and Dagenham.
However, it was in a scruffy ex-army shed in Sebert Rd Forest Gate that Len established what became a hotbed for British table tennis. In this unlikely setting, three or four nights per week, and on Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons, the hut was packed solid with kids aged from five to sixteen, including Chester Barnes, who became English Junior and Senior champion, and put the sport both on the map and on the back pages. Essex and National champions followed, along with a succession of East End kids who represented England at Junior and Senior level including England Number One at Junior, Senior and Veterans level Stuart Gibbs, and Skylet Andrew a former Olympian, winner of three Commonwealth Gold medals, a World Cup Silver medal and fouerteen National titles, who is now a successful sports agent.
If table tennis was not your thing, there was always five-a-side football under floodlights. Thus, across various East End and Essex venues, Len encouraged the fledgling careers of professional footballers such as Frank Lampard senior, Chris Hughton and Harry Redknapp.
After a day’s work, Len coached table tennis and football five nights a week, “lucky I never got married, no wife would have put up with it,” he admitted to me. One of his venues included the much-missed Fairbairn House Boys’ Club in Canning Town. Founded in 1891 and with its origins in the Mansfield House University settlement, at its peak the club had a membership of nine hundred, and included facilities such as a library, theatre, workshops, gymnasium, and canteen. The club could also boast a sports’ ground at Burgess Rd East Ham, with a running track, football pitches, tennis courts and an open air swimming pool which boasted a gym, a theatre, an athletics track and an outdoor swimming pool.
Generations of young people have benefitted from the quiet unassuming dedication of Len Hoffman who is now the proud recipient of the British Empire Medal.
While we were chatting in his room he worked out on an exercise bike that he has adapted. “I do this every day, it’s good for me to keep moving,” he explained. When he was not working out on his Heath Robinson machine, Len regaled me with tales from a lifetime of coaching. “Chester (Barnes)was the best, no doubt about it. He just had that little something about him.” Yet most of his memories do not involve stars or sporting excellence, they typically involve the little details of people’s lives, of teams, players and muddy football pitches, cold church halls on a winter’s night and the reaction in 1964 of a young kid on seeing the twin towers of the old Wembley stadium exclaimed, “But it looks just like it does on the tele!” These little details recounted over half a century later are what Len Hoffman is all about.
And he is a long way from retiring. Every Saturday morning he is picked up by Mossford Secretary, John Spero, and delivered to the club, where with undimmed enthusiasm he organises the weekly tournament and coaches hordes of potential champions – along with their young brothers and sisters.
For someone like Len Hoffman, it is not solely about stars. He recognised that too often we focus on the elite end of sport, ignoring the wider benefits to be gleaned from participation. All over London and in a wide range of sports, volunteers like Len and his coaching colleagues Phil Ashleigh and Tony Cantale offer kids a chance to get out of the house and off the street, to learn a skill, make friends and build their confidence. For once, the term “unsung heroes” seems entirely appropriate.
Len Hoffman, Sports Coach
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Joe Baden & Open Book
Today it is my pleasure to introduce the fourth of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist Professor Dick Hobbs, Author of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK
Joe Baden
Growing up in Bermondsey, Joe’s childhood ambition was to be an armed robber. Even a stint as one of the ‘working class aristocracy’ in the print trade never deterred him from dreams of banditry.
Eventually, Joe found himself on remand in Belmarsh Prison charged with armed robbery and violent affray. Fortunately for Joe, the armed robbery charges were dropped because a witness could not pick him out at an identity parade, so he was given a two-year community service order for violent affray and possession of a firearm. Alongside Joe’s history with drugs and mental health problems, you might consider these unusual qualifications to find in the Director of the country’s most innovative higher education scheme, but these are the experiences that Joe Baden brings to Goldsmiths’ Open Book project.
Although Joe “thought education was for people from another world,” he agreed to join a basic skills programme in order to placate his probation officer and discovered, to his surprise, that academic work could be enjoyable. This was followed by an access course at Greenwich University and in 1998 he graduated with a BA in History from Goldsmiths College.
Joe worked as a tutor for the probation service and then on a number of projects aimed at encouraging ex-offenders to get into education, before Goldsmiths’Open Book projectwas launched in 2002 with the aim of helping ex-offenders and those with addiction and mental health problems to get into education. The project provides both practical and emotional support, offering mentoring, drop-in and study sessions, and an outreach programme that includes visits to prisons, hospitals and residential units. Open Book has helped more than two hundred students to find places on undergraduate courses and has five hundred people on its books, with students studying a range of degree subjects from foundation to postgraduate level.
Azra is about to commence his degree course in Anthropology, and is excited at the prospect of being a student, a status that stands in remarkable contrast to the chaos of his last twenty years – “Drugs, homelessness, prison, lots of crime, lots of drugs. In prison a drugs rehab course opened up my eyes where things were going wrong. Next stop – fix my life. I knew I needed education and Open Book was introduced by another prisoner. He gave me a brochure and said ‘check this out.’ I came here with no background in college or school. I got lots of help in coming to terms with who I am. They made me believe. I am positive what I can achieve. Joe is an inspiration.”
However, not everybody shared the belief that Joe Baden was an inspiration from the start, indeed Neil Bradley, a clerk at Goldsmiths College thought he was,“a spiv, too good to be true, selling me a timeshare. Joe knew that I wrote for The Lion Roars (Millwall fanzine), and he asked me to teach a two hour session on creative writing. I didn’t fancy it. I had always wanted to be a writer but from my background you were just told to get a proper job. I came from a Trade Union background, old school socialist. I thought that criminals should be locked up, and that drug addicts got what they deserved. But he went on about it and I gave it a go. They were a really nice group of people, and within three to four weeks I had bought into it totally.”
With Joe’s support, and despite the fact that he did not have an undergraduate degree, Neil registered for a part-time Masters, and on completing his MA degree took up a full-time post as an Open Book tutor. Last year he published his first book entitled Four Funerals and a Wedding. “Joe is the most generous person I have ever met.” Neil confided to me,
When Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I visited Goldsmiths College, the other Open Book tutors we met were Fiona Taylor, James Carney and Sue Hallisey. Fiona, from the Pepys Estate in Deptford worked alongside Joe from the beginning of the project. While struggling with her course at Goldsmiths, she was told about someone running a scheme at the college who “speaks just like you.” That was Joe, and Fiona has been Open Book mainstay ever since – and along the way, she has gained a Masters degree in Art History.
James arrived at Open Book through an addiction project. Now a History graduate, he is a trained Dyslexia Specialist and works for the project as a Dyslexia Development Worker. Inspired by their personal experiences and their immersion in the often-unruly lives of their students, the Open Book team are united by a powerful shared belief in the transformative power of education
Marguerita, a vital Liverpuddlian woman, is equally enthusiastic, “My life was carnage, total chaos. Seven kids, ten years in temporary accommodation, drink, drugs. Most of us at Open Book are working class people from bad spaces, but here everybody is a mentor, everybody is like your brother and sister.” Marguerita is shortly to fulfil her ambition to be an actor, in Gimme Shelter at the Omnibus Theatre, Clapham. The play is produced by Open Stage which was established in 2008 to further Open Book’s ethos of introducing Arts to its members. This aspect of their work is typified by the experience of Sue Hallissey who, before coming to Open Book, told me she “had a good drinking career, I felt at home with the chaos. I had never been to an art gallery or ever felt that I had an opinion.” But Open Book is about encouraging confidence in people who feel excluded from the mainstream and so, with the encouragement of tutors and fellow students alike, Sue has become an Open Book tutor, a qualified teacher, and a playwright with a successful production under her belt.
Open Book manifests an approach to working class education that has been bypassed by the market-led academic production lines for whom the notion of widening participation can be little more than a badge of convenience. Joe and his team studiously avoid patronising the often-vulnerable individuals who come to them. “We don’t make excuses for people or try to forgive people. No one has the right to forgive me or to say they are ’empowering’ me. People can only empower themselves,” he admitted.
Remarkably, after years of struggle, the prospects of future funding look good. Open Book has opened a branch in Chatham and plans to extend the reach of the project through ambitious collaborations with a wide range of academic partners and community organisations. “We’re not trying to reform people or turn them into middle-class clones. The strength of the Open Book project is that we all share similar experiences,” says Joe.
Empathy, expertise and the determination to instil confidence into people who can render the cliché of “non-traditional student” as an understatement are what Open Book is about. For instance, one student telephoned Joe in the middle of the night recently after a serious shooting incident at her home, yet her concern was not the horrendous violence that had been inflicted on her family, but rather the prospect that the shooting and its aftermath might result in late submission of her essay.
Fiona Taylor, Open Book Tutor
Azra, Open Book Student
Sue Hallisey, Open Book Tutor
Neil Bradley, Open Book Tutor
Marguerita, Open Book Student
James Carney, Open Book Tutor
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
OPEN BOOK, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW
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Bobby Cummines, Not A Gangster
Today it is my pleasure to introduce the third of five stories by the distinguished Criminologist, Professor Dick Hobbs, Author of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK in which he writes – “My concern is primarily with deviance as an everyday feature of life, an activity that is integral to urban existence, and which I believe justifies academic attention in its own right, without being hampered by any conceits regarding helping the police with their enquiries.”
“The Queen told me I had a really colourful background”
Forty years ago, working class London was a cluster of self-contained villages boasting their own distinct occupations, football teams, and skulduggery. Indeed, every neighbourhood had its own villains and theft, robbery and a little light extortion were their crimes of choice. On a rainy day on the Southbank recently, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I met a friend of mine who was an enthusiastic and prominent player in this world.
By the late sixties, most of the big names of London’s underworld were buried deep in the prison system and any neighbourhood crime firm raising its head above the parapet was quickly crushed by a police force fearing attempts to fill the vacuum left by the Krays and the Richardsons. The days of the high profile self-congratulatory London gangster were over and anybody serious about a career in crime learnt the hard way to keep a low profile. Consequently, for a non-insider to hear about villains from another manor was most unusual. However, the name ‘Bobby Cummines’ was increasingly being mentioned in somewhat hushed tones in pub conversations across London.
Brought up as part of a big law-abiding family in Kings Cross, by the time Bobby Cummines left school at the age of sixteen he was already honing his reputation through a range of scams and schemes. But with a recently-acquired job in a shipping office and the prospect of a career in Customs & Excise ahead of him, Bobby’s life took a turn for the worse upon his first serious encounter with the police. “I was in a park with my mates when somebody let off a starting pistol. The police were called and began bullying these younger kids. They were aggressive and shouldn’t have been talking to these kids without an adult present, so I stood up to them. “ The police left and returned soon after. “They pointed to a cut-throat razor that was on the ground and claimed it was mine that I had took it out of my pocket and threw it on the floor. It was a fit-up. My dad was a straight-goer and thought the police were like Dixon of Dock Green. He said the police would never plant evidence. He told me to plead guilty and that I’d get a fine and it’ll be forgotten about in a few years.”
Bobby did as he was told and his dad paid the ten shilling fine. However, Bobby’s bosses at the shipping office found out about the case and sacked him. “I was gutted, I thought, if you want me to be bad, ‘I’ll show you how bad I can be.'” Within a year, he was in the Old Bailey charged with possession of a shotgun and armed robbery. While he waited for his case to come up, he met the Kray Twins who were about to be tried for murder. The twins were sentenced to life imprisonment and Bobby was sent to a Detention Centre for the possession of a sawn off shotgun. “It was supposed to be a short sharp shock, but it was just violence practised against vulnerable kids. I came out of there tougher and angrier than ever.”
Bobby became a committed and violent professional criminal. “We used to give local kids a few bob to chuck a brick through the window of some business. They would claim on the insurance, but if they made three claims their premium would go up. So after two bricks we would move in and for a few quid no more bricks and no upping of the premium.” Bobby and his crew were soon “minding” a wide range of businesses in a territory “that stretched from Highbury Corner to the Archway, across to Finsbury Park, and the edge of Caledonian Rd.” But this territory was fiercely contested with other groups of violent predators, and Bobby led a tight-knit group of co-offenders through several years of violent confrontation. At five foot six inches tall, Bobby learnt early on that he had to be more violent than the opposition, and his weapon of choice was a sawn-off shotgun. “When people ask why I used guns, I always tell them I was sick of getting my nice suits messed up. Anyway guns save time.”
Quickly, Bobby became a highly dangerous offender prepared to use violence to obtain money. However, he stood trial for murder when a robbery went wrong and a man that he tied up choked to death. Bobby was found not guilty of murder, but served five years of a seven and a half year sentence for manslaughter. “Over the years that unnecessary death has haunted me.”
On his release ,Bobby continued in his chosen career, showing considerable ability as an organiser, and becoming deadly serious about the crime business. “I made sure that there was never any photos of us floating about, and I didn’t drink, I always had bitter lemon. I needed to stay sharp.” But while he eschewed alcohol, Bobby did develop a penchant for armed robbery. At this time, bandits were pillaging large bundles of cash from banks, building societies and security vans, and Bobby and his crew were particularly successful.
Inevitably, Bobby was arrested by armed police and sentenced to twelve years in prison – “In the end it was almost a relief. I’ve done some horrendous things – extreme violence – I never deny that. I deserved every day I got in prison because it was lunacy. If I had carried on, I would either have been shot dead by the police or innocent members of the public could have been shot.”
In prison, he enhanced an already formidable reputation for violence and confrontation, and at one time held the governor of a maximum security prison as a hostage. “Well, they said that but he was on his rounds and I knew they was taking prisoners down the wing and giving out beatings. So I pulled him about it and he screamed that he was being taken hostage.” This incident added considerably to his reputation.
In Parkhurst Prison, Bobby negotiated a truce between Reggie Kray and Charlie Richardson in order to prevent serious violence between members of the two gangs who had been imprisoned over a decade earlier. He achieved this by carrying the blade from a pair of garden shears up his sleeve. “Everybody was walking around tooled up. It was a brutal place, one of my friends was killed over an onion. There was another bloke who had murdered his child as he felt the world was too cruel and nasty for his beautiful son to live in. Others reckoned they were being visited by angels. We had IRA, UDA, allsorts, Colonel Gaddafi’s top man in the Libyan army. The ‘p’ in prison stands for paranoia. Some of the people in there are pathetic. You have 50/60 year old men doing a ten stretch strutting about in boxer shorts and trainers trying to look nineteen, talking about jobs they are going to do when they get out. I’ve never understood why they do that. I never saw a lot of rehabilitation going on”.
Charlie Richardson had a huge impact on Bobby. “He told me I had a good brain but if I carried on I would end up dead or on a life sentence. He told me to get into education – it would earn me money without hurting anyone. Charlie got me reading. Education was my liberation. Prison brutalises people. When you’re inside, you don’t serve a sentence—you survive a sentence. I’m grateful that education humanised me.” Bobby successfully lobbied for a transfer to Maidstone Prison which had an education unit. Here he became education orderly, and with the support of his Probation Officer and a sympathetic Prison Governor, enrolled on an Open University course and started to think about the future.
On leaving prison, Bobby at first struggled to make a living, finding potential employers reluctant to take on an ex-con. “To live an honest life, I had to be dishonest about my past.” He persevered, taking a £100-a -week job stacking shelves and dealing with hostage negotiations and suicide management as a volunteer with the Kent Probation Service. Bobby went on to hold responsible positions in various companies and gained a degree in Housing from Greenwich University.
However, his initial struggles to gain employment inspired Bobby to join Mark Leach, the founder of Unlock, the National Association of Reformed Offenders, becoming CEO when Mark stood down. Initially operating from Bobby’s garage, and boasting Sir Stephen Tumim, a former judge and Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons as its founding President, Unlock became a powerful force in the rehabilitation of offenders, and when Bobby teamed up with the ex-Chief Inspector of Prisons Sir David Ramsbottom who succeeded Tumin, the pair provided an effective authoritative political voice. “I became media savvy. Few people seemed to know what they was talking about when it came to the needs of somebody coming out of prison. How to get a job, insurance, a bank account. Employers were saying that they couldn’t employ ex offenders as staff were paid through the BACS system and former offenders didn’t have bank accounts.”
Unlock provided practical support and advice and developed a particular expertise in tackling the financial exclusion of ex-offenders. Bobby is a very persuasive man, and gradually the banks and insurance industry – sectors not renowned for their social awareness – came on board, and the lives of some of the most excluded were materially changed for the better, largely as the result of the energy and intellect of an ex-offender who left school at the age of sixteen. The one time violent dynamo of pre-gentrified seventies Islington had become an eloquent advocate of social reform.
Bobby has been invited to sit upon numerous government committees and policy reviews. For instance, he was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the Rehabilitation of Offenders’ Act, becoming an expert witness to the Home Affairs Select Committee on prisoner education, and a specialist adviser in the 2004 public inquiry into murder of Zahid Mubarek in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution. He also served on the board of HM Inspector of Prisons and advised the Irish government on their Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. In 2006, Bobby travelled to South Africa on a fact-finding mission to look at how their prisons were run, as part of a trip sponsored by a firm of solicitors.
Bobby likes to speak to groups of young people in schools and colleges and, at these events, this ex-violent criminal does not pull his punches. “Tools (weapons) are for fools, drugs are for mugs,” he assures them. A regular speaker at conferences and events, when Coutts Bank awarded £10,000 to Unlock, Bobby revealed, “one of the directors said he was pleased to see me in his bank without a crash helmet and a gun.”
In 2011, Unlock won The Guardian’s Charity of the Year Award and the same year Bobby received the OBE. “The Queen told me I had a really colourful background and she was pleased to award me the OBE. That’s the nicest way I can think of someone telling me I’ve got a lot of form.” From working class Kings Cross to Buckingham Palace via a solitary cell has been quite a journey. Bobby has proved to be a more successful campaigner, fund raiser and government advisor than he ever was a criminal.
Just before we parted, I asked Bobby if he had time for a drink, but he declined by explaining, “I need to be back, I agreed to meet up with a young boy who is going off the rails a bit. I know what he is doing, what he is up to. I told him bring his little firm with him. I will sort them out.” I have no doubt he will do just that.
Bobby Cummines in the seventies – “When I was well at it”
Bobby receiving the OBE in 2011 – “She was pleased to award me the OBE”
Bobby Cummines OBE
Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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