An Introduction To East End Garden History
As a prelude to her lecture on The Floral Traditions of Spitalfields given as part of the HUGUENOT SUMMER festival this Saturday July 18th at 2pm at Tower Hamlets Local History Library, Margaret Willes author of The Gardens of the British Working Class offers this introduction to the horticultural history of the East End. Click here for tickets
Early twentieth century garden at the rear of WF Arber & C0 Ltd, Printing Works
Today Spitalfields and Shoreditch are intensely urban areas but, four centuries ago, the scene was very different. Maps of this era show that behind the main roads flanked by houses and cottages, there were fields of cattle and, close by the city walls, laundrywomen laying out their washing to dry.
Many craftsmen who needed to be near to the City of London, yet who did not wish to be liable to its trading restrictions, found a home here. At the end of the sixteenth century, Huguenot silk weavers fleeing from religious persecution in the Spanish Netherlands and France, and landing at ports such as Yarmouth, Colchester and Sandwich, made their way to the capital. Records of this first wave of Huguenots and their arrival in Spitalfields are sparse, but there are references to them in the rural village of Hackney for instance.
Just as these ‘strangers’ took up residence east of London, so too did actors and their theatres. William Shakespeare lodged just within the City walls in Silver St, in the fifteen-nineties, in the home of an immigrant family from Picardie, the Mountjoys, who were involved in silk and wire-twisting.
Tradition tells us that these refugees brought with them their love of flowers. Bulbs and seeds may easily be transported, so they could have brought their floral treasures in their pockets. The term ‘florist’ first appears in English in 1623 when Sir Henry Wotton, scholar, diplomat and observer of gardens wrote about them to an acquaintance. He was not using ‘florist’ in its modern sense as a retailer of cut flowers, but rather as a description of an enthusiast who nurtured and exhibited pot-grown flowers such as tulips and carnations. One flower that has been traditionally associated with the Spitalfields silk weavers is the auricula, with its clear-cut colours. Auricalas do not like rain, so those who worked at home were in an ideal position to be able to bring them under cover when inclement weather threatened.
Another ‘outsider’ living in Spitalfields in the mid-seventeenth century was the radical apothecary, Nicholas Culpeper. He set up home in the precincts of the former Priory of St Mary Spital with his wife Alice Ford in 1640, probably choosing to be outside the City in order to able to practise without a licence. A Nonconformist in every sense, he disliked the elitism of the medical profession and in his writings threw down a challenge by offering help to all, however poor they were. He developed his knowledge by gathering wild flowers and herbs, but it is likely he also cultivated them in his own garden. His English Physitian, later known as the Complete Herbal, is one of the most successful books published in the English language and is still available today.
Culpeper’s books are a reminder that the garden has been for centuries the vital source of all medicines and poultices in this country. As London expanded, and private gardens within the City walls were built over, so the supply of medicinal herbs for apothecaries and housewives became of vital importance. Some of the market herbwomen are mentioned by name in the records of 1739-40 of the Fleet Market along with their places of residence. Hannah Smith, for example, came from Grub Sin in Finsbury, but others from further afield, such as Bethnal Green and Stepney Green. The remedies of the period required large quantities of certain herbs, such as wormwood and pennyroyal, and these women cultivated these as market gardeners.
With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV, a fresh wave of Huguenot refugees arrived, this time from France rather than the Lowlands. We know much more about these people, including their love of flowers, along with singing birds and linnets, which until quite recently could still be bought from Club Row Market. The French king made a mistake in divesting his realm of some of the most talented craftsmen: gunsmiths and silversmiths as well as silk weavers. The skill of the weavers was matched by their love of flowers in the exquisite silks they produced for court mantuas, the ornate dresses made for aristocratic ladies attending the court of St James. In these designs, a genuine attempt was made to produce botanical naturalism rather than purely conventional floral motifs and although today the most famous designer was Anna-Maria Garthwaite, there were others working alongside her in these streets.
As Spitalfields grew more developed in the eighteenth century, so the pressure on land increased and many of the gardens were built over with new houses. Some residents appear to have taken to their rooftops, creating gardens and building aviaries for their birds up there. Thomas Fairchild, who cultivated a famous nursery in Hoxton, recommended the kind of plants that could survive at this height, including currant trees. Others created gardens upon grounds along the Hackney and Mile End roads. A commissioner reporting on the conditions of the handloom weavers in the early nineteenth century described one such area, Saunderson’s Gardens in Bethnal Green.
“They may cover about six acres of ground. There is one general enclosure round the whole, and each separate garden is divided from the rest by small palings. The number of gardens was stated to be about one hundred and seventy: some are much larger than the rest. In almost every garden is a neat summer-house, where the weaver and his family may enjoy themselves on Sundays and holidays …. There are walks through the ground by which access is easy to the gardens.
The commissioner found that vegetables such as cabbages, lettuces and peas were cultivated, but pride of place was given to flowers. “There had been a contest for a silver medal amongst the tulip proprietors. There were many other flowers of a high order, and it was expected that in due time the show of dahlias for that season would not fail to bring glory to Spitalfields. In this neighbourhood are several dealers in dahlias.”
The competitions held for the finest florists’ flowers were fiercely fought. The Old Bailey sessions records include cases where thieves had broken into gardens not only to steal from the summer houses, but to take prize bulbs too. The Lord Mayor’s Day, 9th November, was traditionally the time to plant the bulbs and, in the spring, judges visited the gardens to make their decisions.
But these gardens were doomed, for the eastern parts of London – Bethnal Green, Stepney Green and Hackney – were being overwhelmed by street after street of new terraced houses. The handloom weavers of the area were likewise doomed, as the silk industry was threatened by competition from overseas and by looms powered by machinery in this country. Their love of flowers, however, was not to be dimmed, and a picture of a Spitalfields weaver in 1860 working alongside his daughters in a garret shows plants on the windowsill, while a contemporary account describes a fuchsia in pride of place near a loom, with its crimson pedants swinging to the motion of the treadles.
Root plants could be bought from sellers, especially along the Mile End Rd, and cut flowers from Spitalfields Market. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a market specifically for flowers and plants was established in Columbia Rd in Shoreditch. This followed the failure of an elaborate food market built by the philanthropist, Angela Burdett-Coutts in the nineteenth century. Her project had been based on a prospective railway line to deliver fish, which never materialised, while the traders preferred to sell outdoors and their customers, many of whom were Jewish immigrants, wanted to buy on Sunday. Originally, Columbia Market traded on Saturday but a parliamentary act moved it to Sunday, enabling Covent Garden and Spitalfields traders to sell their leftover stock, and this market flourishes still, attesting to the persistent love of flowers in the East End of London.
London Herb Woman, late sixteenth century from Samuel Pepys collection of Cries of London
Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654), the Spitalfields Herbalist
An auricula theatre
The tomb of Thomas Fairchild (1667-1729) the Hoxton gardener
Rue, Sage & Mint – a penny a bunch! Kendrew’s Cries of London
Buy my watercress, 1803
Buy my Ground Ivy, 1803
Chickweed seller of 1817 by John Thomas Smith
This is John Honeysuckle, the industrious gardener, with a myrtle in his hand, the produce of his garden. He is justly celebrated for his beautiful bowpots and nosegays, 1819
Here’s all a Blowing, Alive and Growing – Choice Shrubs and Plants, Alive and Growing, eighteen-twenties
Selling flowers on Columbia Rd in the nineteen seventies Photo by George Gladwell
Mick & Sylvia Grover, Herb Sellers in Columbia Rd – Portrait by Jeremy Freedman
Margaret Willes in her garden – Portrait by Sarah Ainslie
The Gardens of the British Working Class by Margaret Willes is published by Yale University Press
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Nicholas Culpeper, Herbalist of Spitalfields
Thomas Fairchild, Gardener of Hoxton
The Antiquarian Bookshops of Old London
At Marks & Co, 84 Charing Cross Rd
When Mike Henbrey reminisced for me about his time working at Sawyer Antiquarian Booksellers in Grafton St and showed me these evocative photographs of London’s secondhand bookshops taken in 1971 by Richard Brown, it made me realise how much I miss them all now that they have mostly vanished from the streets.
After I left college and came to London, I rented a small windowless room in a basement off the Portobello Rd and I spent a lot of time trudging the streets. I believed the city was mine and I used to plan my walks of exploration around the capital by visiting all the old bookshops. They were such havens of peace from the clamour of the streets that I wished I could retreat from the world and move into one, setting up a hidden bedroom to sleep between the shelves and read all day in secret.
Frustrated by my pitiful lack of income, it was not long before I began carrying boxes of my textbooks to bookshops in the Charing Cross Rd and swapping them for a few banknotes that would give me a night at the theatre or some other treat. I recall the wrench of guilt when I first sold books off my shelves but I found I was more than compensated by the joy of the experiences that were granted to me in exchange.
Inevitably, I soon began acquiring more books that I discovered in these shops and, on occasion, making deals that gave me a little cash and a single volume from the shelves in return for a box of my own books. In this way, I obtained some early Hogarth Press titles and a first edition of To The Lighthouse with a sticker in the back revealing that it had been bought new at Shakespeare & Co in Paris. How I would like to have been there in 1927 to make that purchase myself.
Once, I opened a two volume copy of Tristram Shandy and realised it was an eighteenth century edition rebound in nineteenth century bindings, which accounted for the low price of eighteen pounds. Yet even this sum was beyond my means at the time. So I took the pair of volumes and concealed them at the back of the shelf hidden behind the other books and vowed to return.
More than six months later, I earned an advance for a piece of writing and – to my delight when I came back – I discovered the books were still there where I had hidden them. No question about the price was raised at the desk and I have those eighteenth century volumes of Tristram Shandy with me today. Copies of a favourite book, rendered more precious by the way I obtained them and now a souvenir of those dusty old secondhand bookshops that were once my landmarks to navigate around the city.
Frank Hollings of Cloth Fair, established 1892
E. Joseph of Charing Cross Rd, established 1885
Mr Maggs of Maggs Brothers of Berkeley Sq, established 1855
Marks & Co of Charing Cross Rd, established 1904
Harold T. Storey of Cecil Court, established 1928
Henry Sotheran of Sackville St, established 1760
Andrew Block of Barter St, established 1911
Louis W. Bondy of Little Russell St, established 1946
H.M. Fletcher, Cecil Court
Harold Mortlake, Cecil Court
Francis Edwards of Marylebone High St, founded 1855
Stanley Smith of Marchmont St, established 1935
Suckling & Co of Cecil Court, established 1889
Images from The London Bookshop, published by the Private Libraries Association, 1971
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Mike Henbrey’s Collection Of Dividers
A few smaller examples from Mike Henbrey’s collection
Yesterday, I went back to visit Mike Henbrey and we photographed his collection of pairs of dividers. “Once every trade needed dividers to make measurements,” Mike informed me, “but when I worked in the secondhand tool shop nobody was interested to buy them.”
Yet this neglect became Mike’s gain and now the walls of his flat are lined with beautiful pairs of dividers of all kinds. As you can see from the two thousand-year-old Roman pair, the design has barely changed over time and Mike was the first to admit that some of the examples he describes as ‘nineteenth century’ could be two hundred years earlier.
Once you start to compare dividers, you eye becomes attuned to the subtleties of design – whether the knops are octagonal or round, the tiny design flourishes, the marks that indicate ownership and, above all, the elegant sculptural forms and proportions. As I handled them, I became aware of the weight and balance of each pair, all designed to sit comfortably in the hand.
It is impossible not to recognise an anthropomorphic quality and gender in the forms of dividers too. Curvaceous ones for measuring outside of things appear undeniably feminine while the straight pairs for measuring inside of things appear masculine. The matching nineteenth century interior and exterior measuring dividers illustrated below even have the proportion of a human couple standing side by side.
There is a sense of power when you wield dividers and, most of all, I thought of William Blake and his magnificent illustrations of Newton and the Ancient of Days. Several of the dividers in Mike’s collection resemble those in Blake’s paintings and are contemporary with him, so it was a small wonder to see dividers as Blake would have known them.
The Ancient of Days from ‘Europe – A Prophecy’ by William Blake
Pair of Roman dividers – two and a half inches tall
Late eighteenth/early nineteenth century pair with hexagonal knop – five inches tall
Twentieth century dividers by Thewlis & Griffith for interior and exterior measurement – six inches tall
Nineteenth century pair for measuring pipes or rods – twelve inches tall
One of Mike’s favourites, a tiny eighteenth century brass pair with steel pins and octagonal knop – one and a half inches
Blacksmith made – thirteen inches tall
Blacksmith made, this pair are marked with the initial ‘W’ on the handle – seven and a half inches tall
Large-scale nineteenth century dividers, large enough to measure beams or a ship’s mast
‘Very pleasing and functional heavy-duty, general purpose engineer’s dividers with notches to indicate ownership’ – thirteen inches tall
Large, early nineteenth century pair in brass and steel – eighteen inches – ‘I bought these for the lovely shape’
Unusual early twentieth century pair – possibly workshop made
Late eighteenth, early nineteenth century pair – ‘I bought these from a cello-maker’s workshop and they fit inside a cello’
Pair with decorative detail and wing-nut bolt – eleven inches tall
Cartographers’ dividers designed to be used with one hand – early twentieth century – eight inches tall
Nineteenth century pair with filed blade used for marking circles in wood – seven inches tall
Small nineteenth century pair with decoration and marked with initials ‘W H’ – seven inches tall
Unusual nineteenth century dividers for both inside and outside measurements – three and a half inches tall
Early twentieth century for engineering use – a wing nut on one side extends the dividers and a wing nut on the other side locks them – seven and a half inches tall
Very crude blacksmith made nineteenth century dividers – four inches tall
Five inch pair for measuring inside a tube – nineteenth century
Five and half inches tall with initials WH and wing nut
‘Nicely-detailed nineteenth century pair’ – six inches tall
The largest in Mike’s collection – eighteen inches tall and blacksmith made
A couple of ‘female’ and ‘male’ dividers by the same maker
A collection of tiny twentieth century dividers
William Blake’s Newton
In Mike Henbrey’s flat
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Mike Henbrey, Collector of Books, Epherema & Tools
The Cockney Novelists
It is that time of year when you may be seeking some summer reading material and so today Contributing Writer Jonathon Green introduces the forgotten works of the Cockney Novelists
The ‘Cockney’ – that is the born East Ender – has long since been a regular figure in fiction. Originally, in appearances from Jacobean plays to mid-nineteenth century sporting fiction, the type was not working-class. It was the geography not the sociology that mattered. Wealthy merchants were still Cockneys and revelled in the name.
The East End of modernity, which (at least until recently) meant primarily poverty, is a mid-nineteenth century invention. Its citizens emerge, struggling and insecure, via the pages of Henry Mayhew’s pioneering sociological study, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). They are further investigated by Mayhew’s many successors, notably James Greenwood, but not until the nineteenth century was nearly over, were they fictionalised.
Dickens had portrayed Cockneys, but mainly as comic walk-on parts or, as in Oliver Twist, criminals who properly spoke cant. Other novelists, often temperance advocates whose ‘novels’ may as well have been tracts, looked East, but they made no attempt to put flesh on their caricatures. They were all in dreary earnest, propagandizing the proles, permitting neither smiles, jokes nor amusements, and certainly no drink or tobacco. For them, the East Ender was either debased or respectable, and the aim of their one-dimensional tales was to move him by whatever necessary means from the first to its sober antithesis.
What the historian P.J. Keating has labelled as the Cockney Novelists flourished towards the end of the nineteenth century and spilled over into the next. They included Arthur Morrison, Edwin Pugh, William Pett Ridge and – even if his bestseller purported to be reportage – Clarence Rook. While they dealt with their subject matter in different ways, all can be seen in at least one aspect of their work as combining a fictional form with a new concern with the London working classes, not as comedy cameos like Dickens or as objects about which one might preach and on whom one might prey, but as three-dimensional characters in their own right.
The first such writer was Henry Nevinson (1856-1941) a socialist, feminist and a campaigning journalist who in time covered the Boer War, Russia’s 1905 Revolution and – much against establishment wishes – the First World War (in which his son C.R.W. Nevinson was a war artist). In 1893, he was commissioned to write a series of sketches on working-class life. Following its author’s hands-on researches in the East End, where he had already run a mission and given classes in English literature, this appeared in 1895 under the title of Neighbours of Ours. There are a dozen stories, all narrated by the same Cockney speaker. What Nevinson offers is a portrait of a community, as realistic as he can make it, and without falling into stereotypes. He covers a variety of aspects, good and bad, and in Sissero’s Return even looks at a cross-race relationship. The book lay the groundwork for those who followed.
Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) began his professional life as a sports writer (boxing and bicycling) before moving on to fulltime work at The Globe in 1885. A year later, he became a clerk to the Beaumont Trustees, a charitable trust that administered the People’s Palace – a philanthropically designed educational and cultural centre for the local community – in Mile End. Here he began writing a series entitled Cockney Corners for the Palace’s magazine, the People’s Journal and it was these sketches that would lead him to further writings on the area. A short story, The Street was published by Macmillan’s in October 1891, followed by fourteen more tales of London’s most impoverished area, collected in book form in 1894 by W. E. Henley (who was already working with John Farmer on their slang dictionary) as Tales of Mean Streets. The book, with its unblinking depiction of East End squalor and the violence, crime and desperation that it engendered, was a controversial success, especially the story of Lizerunt (i.e. Liza Hunt), a young woman, once blithe and flirtatious, who is first beaten by her boyfriend and then forced by him into prostitution.
A Child of the Jago (1896) was even more controversial, with its exploration of life in an area known as The Jago (in reality the notorious Old Nichol slum off Bethnal Green Rd). This story of the street Arab Dicky Perrott laid out even more unmediated violence, criminality, dysfunctional family life and aggressive, fearful insularity. Drunkenness was a given. Despite the presence of a muscular Christian parson (Morrison’s portrait of the real-life Revd A. Osborne Jay, vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch, and author of Life in Darkest London, 1891) Dicky cannot escape his environment and is murdered, refusing, as the Jago code demands, to ‘nark’ on his killer. In Morrison’s bleak portrait, death is the only escape the Jago will permit.
Henley, reviewing Child of the Jago, described it as ‘masterly’ but equally as ‘that terrible work.’ Against it he set another book, the popular journalist Richard Whiteing’s No 5. John Street, which he saw as ‘a fairy-tale [and] no mere debauch in sentiment, but— a refined and moving expression of reality.’ Richard Whiteing (1840–1928) was a foster child, apprenticed to a maker of seals and medals, and later attending art school at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond St, where he met F.D. Maurice, John Ruskin and Frederick Furnivall, one of the pioneers of the OED. Furnivall’s ladies’ rowing eight, recruited from the New Oxford St ABC restaurant, featured in Whiteing’s novel Ring in the New (1906). His journalistic career began in 1866, on the Evening Star, where he wrote a column, supposedly in the persona of one Mr Sprouts, who rose to become an MP and embodied the principles of common sense and plain talk. The collected columns appeared as a book in 1867, but No 5 John Street was his best-seller. Somewhere between a sociological investigation and a Cockney novel, it followed the author as he lived in the East End slums in order ‘to learn what it is to live on half a crown a day, and to earn it.’
While Morrison may be seen as a descendant of Mayhew or Greenwood, a reformer’s zeal permeating his work. The remaining ‘Cockney’ writers are far more allied to Dickens, most of whose Cockneys were far from ‘savage’. For all that her home turf is The Cut, near Waterloo, no-one could epitomise the ‘chirpy cockney sparrer’ of popular myth more than the eponymous heroine of William Pett Ridge’s Mord Em’ly (1898). Mord is poor, her mother a nervous wreck and her father away (i.e. in prison) but if she runs in the streets as the junior member of the all-girl Gilliken Gang, there is no malice or hard-core criminality in her. Mord Em’ly is above all a feisty young woman, enjoying life, and giving as good, if not better than she gets. In her ‘happy ending’ Mord, now married, leaves for a new life in Australia. The book was a bestseller and a film appeared in 1922.
Edwin Pugh(1874–1930), whose titles include Tony Drum: A Cockney Boy (1898), Harry the Cockney (1912), and The Cockney at Home (1914), is the antithesis of Morrison. He allows for no irony and makes no attempt at the ultra-realism that his predecessor offers. Pugh is a sentimentalist and his affections veer unashamedly East. His own background – the son of a theatrical prop maker and a wardrobe mistress – may have been an influence. He sympathises with his characters’ problems, and they almost invariably have to battle (often unsuccessfully) against ill-fortune and tough lives, but there is no crime, no violence. His Cockneys are the ‘deserving’ poor – they are prey, not predators.
Clarence Rook (1862-1915), American but London-based and prolific in his time, remains something of a mystery, with one bestseller to his name, and a great deal of second-rate work to accompany it. George Bernard Shaw praised him as ‘very clever fellow’ but E.V. Lucas, another contemporary, saw him as one who ‘never fulfilled his many talents.’ A freelance journalist, Rook wrote the ‘By the Way’ column for The Globe, had a number of short stories published and in 1898 launched the career of one of fiction’s earliest female detectives – Miss Nora Van Snoop of the New York Detective Force
All of which was geared to a middle-class audience, but Hooligan Nights (1899) was very different, even though the readers again were doubtless middle-class, many of whom might have already read Morrison or Pugh. According to Rook, this was no novel but a piece of reportage based on ‘some sheets of manuscript’ shown to him by his publisher. ‘They contained certain confessions and revelations of a boy – named in the book as ‘Young Alf’ – ‘who professed to be a leader of Hooligans’. All else aside, Rook was using his journalistic instincts – the word hooligan, still of unknown origin, had only emerged – first recorded in police court reports – a year earlier. Such early uses were capitalised, suggesting a gang, but no evidence of this has survived. Rook claimed that Irish Court, in the same area, had once hosted an actual Patrick Hooligan who led the first such gang, and that Alf was ‘one on whom a portion at least of […] his mantle had fallen’ but he was touting an unproven etymology.
Young Alf, the star and supposed author of this Life and Opinions of a Young and Impenitent Criminal Set Down by Himself is a south Londoner and lives just down the road from Mord Em’ly, in the Elephant & Castle. Rook describes him as a ‘young man who walks to and fro in your midst, ready to pick your pocket, rifle your house or even bash you in a dark corner if it is made worth his while. […] It would, I think, be very difficult to persuade young Alf that honesty is the best policy.’ Alf is a professional, on however limited a scale, and since there is no moralising, he declares a frank delight in his occupation. He has, after all, a philosophy:
‘Look ’ere […] if you see a fing you want, you just go and take it wivout any ’anging abart. If you ’ang abart you draw suspicion and you get lagged for loiterin’ wiv intent to commit a felony or some damn nonsense like that. Go for it, strite. P’r’aps it’s a ’awse and cart you see as’ll do you fine. Jump up an’ drive away as ’ard as you can and ten to one nobody’ll say anyfink. They’ll think it’s your own prop’ty. But ’ang around and you mit jest as well walk into the next cop you see and arst ’im to ’and you your stretch. See? You got to look after yourself; and it ain’t your graft to look after anyone else, nor is it likely that anybody else’d look after you — only the cops. See?’
Nine years later, Rook published London Side-Lights, consisting of thirty brief sketches. In the twentieth, To Him Who Waits, we read again of Young Alf who has ‘gone away and laid his bones upon a battlefield – for he enlisted in a moment of enthusiasm – and his colonel announced that he had died as a good soldier.’
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Learn more about the Cockney Novelists in Jonathon Green’s history of slang Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue
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Dicky Lumskull’s Ramble Through London
Courtesy of Mike Henbrey, it is my pleasure to publish this three-hundred-year-old ballad of the London streets and the trades you might expect to find in each of them, as printed and published by J. Pitts, Wholesale Toy & Marble Warehouse, 6 Great St Andrew Street, Seven Dials
Copyright © Mike Henbrey Collection
GLOSSARY
by Spitalfields Life Contributing Slang Lexicographer Jonathon Green
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Mike Henbrey, Collector Of Books, Ephemera & Tools
Mike Henbrey
On the outside, Mike Henbrey’s council flat looks like any other – but once you step inside and glimpse the shelves of fine eighteenth century leather bindings, you realise you are in the home of an extraordinarily knowledgeable collector. High up in the building, Mike sits peacefully in his nest of books, brooding and gazing out at the surrounding tree tops through his large round steel glasses and looking for all the world like a wise old owl.
Walls lined with diverse pairs of steel dividers and shelves of fat albums testify to his collections of tools and ephemera. It is all the outcome of a trained eye and a lifetime of curiosity, seeking out wonders in the barrows, markets and salerooms of London, enabling Mike to amass a collection far greater than his means through persistence and knowledge.
The Vinegar Valentines I published earliest this week came from Mike’s albums of ephemera. “Of all my collections, they are the one that gives me the most pleasure,” he assured me with characteristic singularity, despite his obviously kind nature. Immensely knowledgeable yet almost entirely self-educated, Mike is drawn to neglected things that no-one else cares for and this is the genius of his collecting instinct.
Of course, I wanted to pore through all of Mike’s books and albums, but I had to resist this impulse in order to discover his own story and learn how it was that he came to gather his wonderful collection.
“I was born in Chingford in 1943 but, unfortunately, we moved to Norfolk when I was eight. I never liked it there, it was a lonely, cold and draughty place. My father James was a furrier and his father – who was also James – had been a furrier before him in the East End, but they moved out. My mother, Laura Lewis, was a machinist who worked for my father and I think she came from the East End too. I grew up playing in the furriers because my father had his factory in the back garden and the machinists gave me sweets. I think that’s where I got my love of tools.
There was quite a lot of bombing in Chingford during the war and the house next to us got a direct hit which left a great big crack in our wall. I played on bomb sites even though I was told not to, and somehow my mother always seemed to know. I think it must have been the mixture of brick dust and soot on my clothes.
It was a filthy dirty job, being a furrier, and, although my father was a good furrier, he wasn’t a good businessman and he ended up in bankruptcy when I was eight. So that’s how we ended up in Mundesley by the sea in North Norfolk in the early fifties.
As soon as I left school at sixteen, I headed back to London. Ostensibly, it was to complete my training in the catering trade but I hated it, I had already done a year at catering college in Norwich. In reality, I was taking lots of drugs – dope and speed mostly – and working at a night club. I got a job on the door of club called The Bedsitter in Holland Park Avenue. I actually had a bedsitter off Holland Park itself for five pounds a week with a gas ring in the corner. That was a good time.
I worked at a hotel in Park Lane for a few months. The chef used to throw things at me. They fired me in the end for turning up late. I drifted through life by signing on and working on the side, and the club gave me a good social life. I’m a vicarious hedonist. I’ve always read a lot, I taught myself to read by reading my brother’s copies of Dandy and Beano. He was ten years older than me and he died in his early thirties.
A hippy friend of mine was a packer at a West End bookshop in Grafton St and he got me a job there. I worked for Mr Sawyer, he was a nice man. He employed hippies because they didn’t mind his cigar smoke and he never noticed the smell of pot in the packing room. He employed me as a porter but he told me to buy a suit and I got a job in the bookshop itself. I learnt such a lot while I was there. It was nice to be around books, so much better than working for a living.
Mr Gibbs was the shop manager, he taught me how to catalogue. He couldn’t understand why he kept finding more money in his pay packet. It was because we youngsters kept asking for a pay rise and Mr Sawyer couldn’t give it to us without giving it to Mr Gibbs too.
Mr Gibbs taught me not to speak to Mr Sawyer until he’d been around to Brown’s Hotel for his ‘breakfast’ and I presume this was because ‘breakfast’ consisted of at least three gin and tonics. He was a kind employer, he didn’t pay much but you learnt a lot. He had a tiny desk hidden behind a bookcase with two old spindly chairs that were permanently on the brink of collapse. The place was a university of sorts. I learnt so much so quickly. You can’t always recognise good stuff until you’ve had it pass through your hands.
Mr Sawyer would go through the auction catalogue of books and mark how much you were to bid and send you off to Sotheby’s. You had to stay on the ball, because sometimes he’d make an agreement with other booksellers not to let him get a lot below a certain price, because he’d be bidding for a customer and he’d be on commission. In those days, it was possible to make living by frequenting Sotheby’s and buying books. You learn a lot about the peculiarities of the bookselling trade. I think I was earning fourteen pounds a week. It was positively Dickensian.
By then I had met my wife Jeanna. We got married in 1965 and moved around between lots of flats we couldn’t afford. Jeanna & I started a book stall in Camden Passage called Icarus. I love the street markets like Portobello and Brick Lane. We made a lot of sales and I bought some wonderful stuff in street markets when you could discover things, and I’ve still got some of it.
We had two daughters, Samantha & Natasha, but Jeanna died young. We were living in Islington in Highbury Fields and I was left on my own to bring up the kids, who were eight and three years old at the time. That’s when I got this council flat, on account of being a single parent, and I’ve been here thirty-eight years. I lived on benefits with bookselling on the side to bring in some extra money and brought up my kids with the help of girlfriends.
A friend of mine had a secondhand tool shop and I worked there for a while. You could buy old tools from the sixteenth and seventeenth century for not very much money then, and we had some that no-one ever wanted to buy, so I brought them home. I am fascinated by tools for specialist professions, each one opens a door to a particular world. I still have my father’s furriers’ tools and they pack into such a small box.
From then on I’ve been a book dealer. Once you fall out of having a regular job, it’s difficult to go back. I think my kids regard me with mixture of mild disappointment and tolerance. On occasion, they have generously put up with me spending money on books instead of dinner.
I’ve always been a collector, reference books mainly, and from there I’ve become a dealer. I’m not interested in fiction but I do love a good reference book.”
Sawyer, the bookseller in Grafton St where Mike Henbrey once worked
Mr Gibbs, bookshop manager
Mike Henbrey, Collector of books, ephemera and tools
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Join Hands To Save Norton Folgate
PLEASE COME AND JOIN HANDS WITH ME to create a circle around Norton Folgate as a symbolic gesture of our shared wish to see these buildings restored for new use instead of being demolished by British Land.
Three days before Tower Hamlets Planning Committee meet to decide the fate of Norton Folgate on July 21st, we want to show that large numbers of people care sufficiently to turn up and create a human chain around this historic neighbourhood.
We hope this event will be a focus for everyone who believes old buildings should be repurposed rather than destroyed, as is happening across London at this moment.
As you know, this is a subject close to my heart and so, as a gesture of gratitude to those who are willing to join hands with me on 19th July, I will give a copy of THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S LONDON ALBUM as a gift to the first five hundred people to turn up.
Registration will commence on Sunday July 19th at 2pm at a desk in Elder St, when you can sign in and be given a map of where to stand and a numbered ticket. At 3pm precisely, we ask everyone to join hands while a film camera travels the entire length of the circle around Norton Folgate. We are also keen that people take photos of themselves and share these through social media to publicise the event using the hashtag #savenortonfolgate
Afterwards, I shall be swapping the five hundred numbered tickets for copies of THE LONDON ALBUM and the event will be dispersed by 3:30pm.
If you care about the future of Spitalfields, if you care about the future of East End, if you care about the future of London, come to join hands in this historic event and bring your family, your friends and neighbours – and please spread the word.
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Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust (Objections close 20th July)
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
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Taking Liberties in Norton Folgate
