William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker
William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker of Bermondsey
Everyone knows Cheddar, Stilton, Wensleydale and Caerphilly, but now there is an unexpected new location on the cheese map of Great Britain. It is Bermondsey and the man responsible is William Oglethorpe – seen here bearing his curd cutter as a proud symbol of his domain, like a medieval king wielding a mace of divine authority.
Photographer Tom Bunning & I went along to Kappacasein Dairy under the railway arches beneath the main line out of London Bridge early last Tuesday morning to investigate this astonishing phenomenon. As we stepped from the chill of the autumn morning, we entered the humid warmth of the dairy and encountered a line of empty milk churns.
Already Bill had been awake since quarter to four. He had woken in Streatham then driven to Chiddingstone in Kent and collected six hundred litres of milk. Beyond us, in a separate room with a red floor and a large glass window sat a hundred-year-old copper vat containing that morning’s delivery of milk, which was still warm. Bill with his fellow cheesemakers Jem and Agustin, dressed all in white, worked purposefully in this chamber, officiating like priests over the holy process of conjuring cheese into existence. I stood mesmerised by the sight of the pale buttery liquid swirling against the gleaming copper as Bill employed his curd cutter, manoeuvring it through the milk as you might turn an oar in a river.
Taking a narrow flexible strip of metal, he wrapped a cloth around it so that the rest extended behind like a flag. Holding each end of the strip and grasping the corners of the cloth, Bill leaned over the vat plunging his arms deep down into the whey. When he lifted the cloth again, Agustin reached over with practised ease to take two corners of the cloth as Bill removed the sliver of metal and – hey presto! – they were holding a bundle of cheese, dredged from the mysterious depth of the vat. It was as spellbinding as any piece of magic I have ever seen.
“Cheesemaking is easy, it’s life that is hard,” Bill admitted to me with a disarming grin, when I joined the cheesemakers for their breakfast at a long table and he revealed the long journey he had travelled to arrive in Bermondsey. “I grew up in Zambia,” he explained, “And one day a Swiss missionary came to see my father and asked if I’d like to go to agricultural school in Switzerland.”
“I earned a certificate of competence,” he added proudly, assuring me with a wink, “I’m a qualified peasant.” Bill learnt to make cheese while working on a farm in Provence with a friend from agricultural college. “It was simply a way to sell all the milk from the goats, we made a cheese the same way the other farmers did,” he informed me, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”
Bill took me through to the next railway arch where his cheeses are stored while they mature for up to a year. He cast his eyes lovingly over the neat flat cylinders each impressed with word ‘Bermondsey’ on the side. Every Wednesday, the cheeses are attended to. According to their type, they are either washed or stroked, to spread the mould evenly, and they are all turned before being left to slumber in the chilly darkness for another week.
It was while working for Neals Yard Dairy that Bill decided to set up on his own as cheese maker. Today, Kappacasein is one of handful of newly-established dairies in London producing distinctive cheeses and bypassing the chain of mass production and supermarkets to distribute on their own terms and sell direct to customers. Yet Bill chooses to be self-deprecating in his explanation of why he is making cheese in London. “It’s just because I can’t buy a farm,” he claims, shrugging in enactment of his role of the peasant in exile, cast out from the rural into the urban environment.
“I’m interested in transformation,” Bill confided to me, turning serious as he reached his hand gently down into the vat and lifted up a handful of curds, squeezing out the whey. These would form the second cheese to come from the vat that morning, a ricotta. All across the surface, nodules of cheese were forming, coming into existence as if from primordial matter. “I don’t want to interfere,” Bill continued, thinking out loud and growing philosophical as he became absorbed in observing the cheese form, “Nature’s that much more complicated – if you let it do its own thing that’s much interesting to me than trying to impose anything. It’s about finding an equilibrium with Nature.”
Let me confess I had an ulterior motive for being there. A few weeks ago, I ate a slice of Bill’s Bermondsey cheese and became hooked. It was a flavour that was tangy and complex. One piece was not enough for me. Two pieces were not enough for me. Eventually, I had to seek the source of this wonder and there it was in front of me at last – the Holy Grail of London cheese in Bermondsey.
Cutting the curd
The curds
Squeezing the curds
Scooping out the cheese
The second batch of cheese from the whey is ricotta
Jem Kast, Cheese Maker
Ana Rojas, Yoghurt Maker
Agustin Cobo, Cheese Maker
The story of cheese
William Oglethorpe, Cheese Maker of Bermondsey
Photographs copyright © Tom Bunning
Visit KAPPACASEIN DAIRY, 1 Voyager Industrial Estate, Bermondsey, SE16 4RP
John Thomas Smith’s Rural Cottages
Near Battlebridge, Middlesex
Once November closes in, I get the urge to go to ground, hiding myself away in some remote cabin and not straying from the fireside until spring shows. With this in mind, John Thomas Smith’s twenty etchings of extravagantly rustic cottages published as Remarks On Rural Scenery Of Various Features & Specific Beauties In Cottage Scenery in 1797 suit my autumnal fantasy ideally.
Born in the back of a Hackney carriage in 1766, Smith grew into an artist consumed by London, as his inspiration, his subject matter and his life. At first, he drew the old streets and buildings that were due for demolition at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Ancient Topography of London and Antiquities of London, savouring every detail of their shambolic architecture with loving attention. Later, he turned his attention to London streetlife, the hawkers and the outcast poor, portrayed in Vagabondiana and Remarkable Beggars, creating lively and sympathetic portraits of those who scraped a living out of nothing but resourcefulness. By contrast, these rural cottages were a rare excursion into the bucolic world for Smith, although you only have to look at the locations to see that he did not travel too far from the capital to find them.
“Of all the pictoresque subjects, the English cottage seems to have obtained the least share of particular notice,” wrote Smith in his introduction to these plates, which included John Constable and William Blake among the subscribers, “Palaces, castles, churches, monastic ruins and ecclesiastical structures have been elaborately and very interestingly described with all their characteristic distinctions while the objects comprehended by the term ‘cottage scenery’ have by no means been honoured with equal attention.”
While emphasising that beauty was equally to be found in humble as well as in stately homes, Smith also understood the irony that a well-kept dwelling offered less picturesque subject matter than a derelict hovel. “I am, however, by no means cottage-mad,” he admitted, acknowledging the poverty of the living conditions, “But the unrepaired accidents of wind and rain offer far greater allurements to the painter’s eye, than more neat, regular or formal arrangements could possibly have done.”
Some of these pastoral dwellings were in places now absorbed into Central London and others in outlying villages that lie beneath suburbs today. Yet the paradox is that these etchings are the origin of the romantic image of the English country cottage which has occupied such a cherished position in the collective imagination ever since, and thus many of the suburban homes that have now obliterated these rural locations were designed to evoke this potent rural fantasy.
On Scotland Green, Ponder’s End
Near Deptford, Kent
At Clandon, Surrey – formerly the residence of Mr John Woolderidge, the Clandon Poet
In Bury St, Edmonton
Near Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead Heath
In Green St, Enfield Highway
Near Palmer’s Green, Edmonton
Near Ranelagh, Chelsea
In Green St, Enfield Highway
At Ponder’s End, Near Enfield
On Merrow Common, Surrey
At Cobham, Surrey – in the hop gardens
Near Bull’s Cross, Enfield
In Bury St, Edmonton
On Millbank, Westminster
Near Edmonton Church
Near Chelsea Bridge
In Green St, Enfield Highway
Lady Plomer’s Place on the summit of Hawke’s Bill Wood, Epping Forest
You may also like to take a look at these other works by John Thomas Smith
John Thomas Smith’s Ancient Topography of London
John Thomas Smith’s Antiquities of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
Three Events To Delight You Next Week
On Monday 2nd November at 9am, The Gentle Author’s CRIES OF LONDON exhibition opens at Bishopsgate Institute and runs during the Institute’s opening hours until January 29th, 2016
On Tuesday 3rd November at 7:30pm, Phil Maxwell gives a MAGIC LANTERN SHOW at Bishopsgate Institute – showing his photography of BRICK LANE since 1981 and tracing the changing nature of the street from a place of work to a place of recreation. Click here to book
On Thursday 5th November at 6:30pm, Charles Pertwee & The Gentle Author are at Waterstones, Trafalgar Sq, talking about Baddeley Brothers and the history of printing in London over the last two hundred years, and signing copies of BADDELEY BROTHERS. Admission is free but booking essential, ring 020 7839 4411 or email trafalgarsq@waterstones.com
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If there is any problem viewing the film please click this link
(Please note the BILLINGSGATE MARKET CHIT-CHAT at Bishopsgate Institute on Wednesday 4th November is completely sold out)
The Dead Man In Clerkenwell
At Halloween, it suits my mood to contemplate the dead man in the crypt in Clerkenwell
This is the face of the dead man in Clerkenwell. He does not look perturbed by the change in the weather. Once Winters wore him out, but now he rests beneath the streets of the modern city he will never see, oblivious both to the weather and the wonders of our age, entirely oblivious to everything in fact.
Let me admit, although some might consider it poor company, I consider death to be my friend – because without mortality our time upon this earth would be worthless. So I do not fear death, but rather I hope I shall have enough life first. My fear is that death might come too soon or unexpectedly in some pernicious form. In this respect, I envy my father who always took a nap on the sofa each Sunday after gardening and one day at the age of seventy nine – when he had completed trimming the privet hedge – he never woke up again.
It was many years ago that I first made the acquaintance of the dead man in Clerkenwell, when I had an office in the Close where I used to go each day and write. I was fascinated to discover a twelfth century crypt in the heart of London, the oldest remnant of the medieval priory of the Knights of St John that once stood in Clerkenwell until it was destroyed by Henry VIII, and it was this memento mori, a sixteenth century stone figure of an emaciated corpse, which embodied the spirit of the place for me.
Thanks to Pamela Willis, curator at the Museum of the Order of St John, I went back to look up my old friend after all these years. She lent me her key and, leaving the bright October sunshine behind me, I let myself into the crypt, switching on the lights and walking to the furthest underground recess of the building where the dead man was waiting. I walked up to the tomb where he lay and cast my eyes upon him, recumbent with his shroud gathered across his groin to protect a modesty that was no longer required. He did not remonstrate with me for letting twenty years go by. He did not even look surprised. He did not appear to recognise me at all. Yet he looked different than before, because I had changed, and it was the transformative events of the intervening years that had awakened my curiosity to return.
There is a veracity in this sculpture which I could not recognise upon my previous visit, when – in my innocence – I had never seen a dead person. Standing over the figure this time, as if at a bedside, I observed the distended limbs, the sunken eyes and the tilt of the head that are distinctive to the dead. When my mother lost her mental and then her physical faculties too, I continued to feed her until she could no longer even swallow liquid, becoming as emaciated as the stone figure before me. It was at dusk on the 31st December that I came into her room and discovered her inanimate, recognising that through some inexplicable prescience the life had gone from her at the ending of the year. I understood the literal meaning of “remains,” because everything distinctive of the living person had departed to leave mere skin and bone. And I know now that the sculptor who made this effigy had seen that too, because his observation of the dead is apparent in his work, even if the bizarre number of ribs in his figure bears no relation to human anatomy.
There is a polished area on the brow, upon which I instinctively placed my hand, where my predecessors over the past five centuries had worn it smooth. This gesture, which you make as if to check his temperature, is an unconscious blessing in recognition of the commonality we share with the dead who have gone before us and whose ranks we shall all join eventually. The paradox of this sculpture is that because it is a man-made artifact it has emotional presence, whereas the actual dead have only absence. It is the tender details – the hair carefully pulled back behind the ears, and the protective arms with their workmanlike repairs – that endear me to this soulful relic.
Time has not been kind to this figure, which originally lay upon the elaborate tomb of Sir William Weston inside the old church of St James Clerkenwell, until the edifice was demolished and the current church was built in the eighteenth century, when the effigy was resigned to this crypt like an old pram slung in the cellar. Today a modern facade reveals no hint of what lies below ground. Sir William Weston, the last Prior, died in April 1540 on the day that Henry VIII issued the instruction to dissolve the Order, and the nature of his death was unrecorded. Thus, my friend the dead man is loss incarnate – the damaged relic of the tomb of the last Prior of the monastery destroyed five hundred years ago – yet he still has his human dignity and he speaks to me.
Walking back from Clerkenwell, through the teeming city to Spitalfields on this bright afternoon in late October, I recognised a similar instinct as I did after my mother’s death. I cooked myself a meal because I craved the familiar task and the event of the day renewed my desire to live more life.
At Tjaden’s Electrical Service Shop
Contributing Writer Rosie Dastgir celebrates a favourite electrical repair shop in Chatsworth Rd
Keith Tjaden
It is easy to miss Tjaden’s Electrical Service Shop, sandwiched between a chic restaurant and the Star Discount Store on Chatsworth Rd in Clapton, but I am on a mission. These days it is hard to find anyone trained in the art and craft of lamp repair and restoration, so I was delighted to discover such a place existed. Keith Tjaden’s shop, like an infirmary for injured lamps, a safe haven for ones like mine that have suffered rough times abroad, was just what I had been seeking.
One evening last summer, I lugged in a batch of battered lamps that had travelled back and forth across the Atlantic with me, and were in need of conversion back to English ways and English voltage. Were they beyond hope of repair?
I return to collect them in early autumn. The radio chunters away in the background as I gingerly push open the shop door. Mr Tjaden himself emerges from the back of the shop with an air of quiet triumph. My pair of skittle shaped lamps, sky blue and pale cream, were damaged on the sea crossing to America and consequently left standing unused in a basement for seven years, half converted, half broken, with the wrong plugs and flimsy cardboard fittings. Designated PIA. by the shop technicians – Previous Inexperienced Attention – they had cut a tatty and sorry sight. Restored to gleaming perfection, Mr Tjaden’s fine workmanship is evident in their transformation. Even so, he is swift to credit the original design and craftsmanship of the lamps, Made in England, for Heal’s – they benefit from good bones, at least, in spite of suffering from PIA.
“The finish is so perfect,” he says, “that all I had to do was run the wax polish over the surface; they’ve not been sanded.” Apparently, it is all about the quality of the molding. The bases are made with powder-loaded resin, using an adhesive mixed with blue powder to get a solid base that won’t chip like a painted version.
Mr Tjaden brings out my beloved pair of thirties lamps that he has restored for me: stacked up glass baubles on chrome cigarette tray bases that I found in a vintage shop in New York’s East Village. The glass baubles are cast, and therefore display no joint lines whatsoever, not something that I’d clocked till he points it out to me. Polished and sparkling, they are even prettier than when I first acquired them. The smart new flex is black. “We use it on almost everything because it matches everything – brass, wood, ceramics.” I learn that electrical flex has a dogged memory, so it retains its kinks and curves. Which is why cable coiling is such an art, flex refuses to repress its memories without a struggle. “Make sure the wire comes out from the inverted cigarette tray, so it doesn’t tip over,” Mr Tjaden tells me.
Meticulous in his work, both aesthetically and technically, Mr Tjaden is very safety conscious and it dawns on me that I am lucky to have escaped with my life after seven years surrounded by such ill-converted lamp and light fittings while I lived in New York.
“Despite the life they’ve had and the travelling they’ve done, they’ve been restored to new,” he says. He shows me the safety label he’s stuck to the newly refurbished base. I feel a glow of pleasure and relief.
After doing national service in the RAF, working on navigational instruments, Mr Tjaden started the business in 1958 with his colleague and senior partner, Mervin, who had a background in TV and radio engineering. They took over the premises on Chatsworth Rd in 1990, moving here from Leystonstone High Rd, when the street was a still a bustling mix of greengrocers and washing machine repair shops, locksmiths and pet shops, carpet dealers and newsagents. Jim’s Café opposite has closed down now, after Dave the proprietor died. The place was a favourite lunch spot serving home made meat pies to all manner of people from the area. Road workers, who parked their barrows outside, sat beside men in suits and teachers who nipped out for a much needed break from Rushmore School up the road.
When families and young people started moving back into Clapton in the nineties, many of the old Victorian and Georgian houses had not been touched since the fifties. ‘They were literally in the dark ages,’ Mr Tjaden recalls, ‘requiring a huge amount of work rewiring from top to bottom. Of course, everyone wanted to be modernized in the fifties and sixties and seventies, but nowadays people want to hold onto their old light bulbs from the past.”
Part of the shop’s appeal and longevity lies in Mr Tjaden’s ability to fuse the old and the new – he enthusiastically embraces change and modern technology, yet clearly retains an affection for antiques and vintage pieces. There is a pre-Weimar lamp being restored for a young barrister couple. A leather box from the twenties, a family piece, used for storing white wing collars, is on display. An old British microphone from the thirtie’s stands in the shadows in the back of the shop, waiting to be hired for a film or photo shoot.
I spot a small gizmo I do not recognize sitting in a glass display cabinet. It is a 1945 radio valve, found inside old radios and radiograms, TVs and amplifiers. It has a heater that warms up the cathode which produces the electrons and comes out on the plate as a rectified signal. The radio valve, like the light bulb, is an endangered species.
Nowadays all lamps repaired in the shop are fitted with the latest incarnation of LED bulb, lighting semi-conducted diode devices. “Filament bulbs or incandescent bulbs are strictly speaking off the market,” says Mr Tjaden, “unless they are extra long life or decorative. They waste energy and don’t produce much light.” I cannot argue with that, though I feel a pang of nostalgia. A typical LED bulb of a mere 4 watts, or 470 lumens, to use the newfangled measure, is rated to last 15,000 hours and provides ample light. The old bulbs are scorching to the touch, and burn out their fixtures. Their days are numbered, and not just because of European Union directives.
There are some happy endings to the demise of the old bulbs. An elderly couple, barely able to discern the dimly-lit surroundings of their living room, were delighted when Mr Tjaden came to the rescue with a dazzling new LED bulb. A single pendant of 1,500 lumens. It did the trick. They will never have to mount a rickety chair to change a bulb again.
“A god send,” Mr Tjaden says. And for a brief flicker, I picture the old couple, instant converts to the new illumination, gathered in the bright circle of light thrown by their thoroughly modern bulb.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
TJADEN RETRO & VINTAGE ELECTRICAL REPAIRS, 62A Chatsworth Rd, E5 0LS. Vintage, Retro Electrical Light Fitting & Repairs
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Tony Hawkins & The Cries Of London
I worked through last night to send my CRIES OF LONDON book to the printer today and I am proud to announce it will be published on 26th November. Here I present a film by Contributing Filmmaker Sebastian Sharples on the subject of the Cries, alongside my interview with Tony Hawkins – the retired pedlar who inspired me to study the history and politics of street trading.
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Tony Hawkins testified to me that he sold peanuts and roasted chestnuts in the West End streets for ten years but – after getting arrested and roughed up by the police eighty-seven times – his health failed and he retired.
Whereas Tony used to visit Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, regularly to buy thousands of bags for his thriving business, after retirement he came simply to pass the time of day with his old friend Paul Gardner. And it was Paul who effected my introduction to Tony, a man with a defiant strength of character, frail physically yet energised by moral courage. Brandishing the dog-eared stack of paperwork from his eighty-seven court cases, he was immensely proud that he won every one and it was proven he never broke the law once.
Tony’s pitiful catalogue of his wrangles with Westminster Council – who went to extreme lengths just to prevent him peddling nuts in Piccadilly – reveal that the age-old ambivalence and prejudice against those who seek to make a modest living by trading in the street persists to the present day.
“I was unemployed as a labourer in Manchester, so I started off as a pedlar. I sold socks, balloons – anything really. A pedlar trades as he travels, and the will to support myself and the bright lights brought me to London. I was peddling around the West End selling peanuts mostly but also chestnuts. I sold flags at football matches too, Chelsea and Arsenal.
“In the nineteen-eighties, a sergeant took me to Bow Street Magistrates Court for selling peanuts in Piccadilly. So I went along, it was no big deal. I admitted I was trading and I was a licenced pedlar.
“In Court, they were amazed because thay hadn’t seen many pedlars, there were only half a dozen in the West End. I won the case and I went to shake the sergeant’s hand afterwards, but he pushed me away and said it wasn’t the end of it. He told me he’d do everything in his power to make sure I never worked again and he hounded me after that. He said, “If you’re going to do it again, we will arrest you again,” and I’ve been arrested more than eighty times and spent nights in cells. I’ve been roughed up so many times by policemen and council enforcement officers that I had to get a hidden camera because I feared for my safety.
“They confiscated my stock and equipment from me every time I was charged with the offence of street trading without a licence, when I had a Pedlar’s Licence issued in accordance with the Pedlar’s Act of 1871. The original Act was passed in the eighteenth century so that veteran soldiers could trade in fish, fruit, vegetables and victuals, and be distinguished from vagabonds. Anyone over the age of seventeen can get a pedlar’s licence as long as you have no criminal record. According to the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, every person in this country has the right to trade.
“I went to the High Court once when they found against me and the judge overturned it in my favour. But then in 2000 they brought in the Westminster Act because of people like myself. Westminster Council juggled the words so that it states that pedlars are only allowed to go door-to-door.
“Prior to that Act, we were allowed to peddle lawfully anywhere in the United Kingdom but now the Act is also being used to stop pedlars in Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, Warrington and Balham. Yet Acts and Statutes are not laws, they are rules for the governance, accepted only by consent of the populace.
“Once, I went to get my stuff back from Westminster Council and I met the Manager of Licencing & Street Enforcement. I asked him, “Why do you continue to waste the money of the council tax payers with so many cases against me when you haven’t won a single one?”
“Your lawyer, Mr Barca, I’m sick of him,” he said, “He only represents the lower end of the market like you, and pimps and prostitutes.” Later, he denied it and said he had a witness too, but I had recorded him and he had to pay four thousand pounds in damages to Mr Barca.
“After being hounded by the council and the police so many times, I’ve become narked and with good reason. Over the years, it has cost me a fortune to pay the legal costs. I had to work to earn all the money to pay for it. I regard myself as downtrodden because I was never allowed to benefit from my hard work, but if I had been allowed to continue trading, I could have owned a house by now and have some money in the bank.”
People say to me,“Why have you done it?” I have done it because I believe in the right to trade freely as a human right.”
Tony is now retired, living comfortably in sheltered housing, and has become a self-taught yet highly articulate expert in the law regarding pedlars and street trading, and he is involved with the Pedlars Information & Resource Centre.
Despite losing his health and his livelihood, Tony has acquired moral stature, passionate to support others suffering similar harassment because they exercise their right to sell in the street. With exceptional perseverance, acting out of a love of liberty and a refusal to be intimidated by authority, Tony Hawkins is an unacknowledged hero of the London streets.
Sarah Ainslie’s Wardrobe Portraits
Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie has been taking portraits of people in their wardrobes since 2002 and she has done over fifty. Today I publish a selection and you can see the whole set on exhibition at 7 Ezra St, E2 7RH for the next two Sundays – October 1st & 8th from 11am until 5pm
Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green
Emily Shepherd
Julie Begum
Hydar Dewachi
Madeleine Ruggi
Sara Sheppard
Luke Dixon
Lara Clifton
Shakila
Brand Thumim
Jo Ann Kaplan
Sid Dixon
Penny Woolcock
Prue Ainslie
Simon Hoare-Walter
Jenny Carlin
Lel McIntyre
Ryan-Rhiannon Styles
Ruhela
Francine Merry
Sabeha Miah
Kassandra & Dan Isaacson
Andrew Dawson
Shelagh Ainslie
“Wardrobes are private places where personal belongings are kept, not only clothes but also objects with special meanings and memories. Children see them as spaces where adults hide secrets and I always felt there were secrets in my parents’ wardrobes. As a child, my grandmother’s knicker drawer fascinated me, and we would search for sweeties that she kept in jars and beautiful evening dresses in her wardrobe that she let us touch. My father had a bespoke wardrobe with special racks for shoes and drawers for all his different garments, and my mother had a big walk-in wardrobe. I conceal letters and strange memorabilia, like casts of my teeth, in mine.” – Sarah Ainslie
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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