Hilary Haydon, Brother at Charterhouse
Unlike the hermit monks of the medieval priory that once stood upon this site, the current Brothers at the Charterhouse are a sociable bunch and thus I was able to pay a visit upon Hilary Haydon, the third-most senior Brother, who took me on a tour of the accommodation this week.
Seniority – in this instance – is based upon how long a Brother has been resident at the Charterhouse, not age. Yet Hilary has a rather more vivid way of expressing it. Gesturing to the pigeon holes for mail, he explained that as residents die the labels of those remaining get moved up. “You start here and then you move along, until you drop off the end,” he informed me with startling alacrity.
It made me realise that residence in the Charterhouse affects the Brothers’ sense of time – inhabiting these ancient stone walls induces a certain philosophical perspective upon mortality, setting the span of an individual’s life against the centuries of history that have passed here. It is both a consolation and an encouragement to recognise the beauty of the fleeting moment, as manifest in the immaculately-tended gardens alive with bluebells and tulips this week, and as illustrated upon the tomb of Thomas Sutton – the benefactor – by bubbles, symbolising the transitory nature of fame.
Upon a bright spring day, I crossed the wide lawn that sets the Charterhouse apart from the clamour of Smithfield, aware that my diagonal path, bisecting the velvet greensward, passed over the largest plague pit in the City of London in which sixty-thousand victims of the Black Death were interred. Arriving at the entrance, I cast my eyes up to the fifteenth century gatehouse of the former Carthusian Priory. Henry VIII met with greater resistance from the monks here than any other religious order and thus he had John Houghton, the prior, cut in four and his right arm nailed to the door.
Yet this grim history seemed an insubstantial dream, as I entered to discover Hilary Haydon waiting in the gatehouse to greet me and looking rather dapper in a linen jacket, ideally suiting the warmth of the April afternoon. He led me along stone passages and into hidden courtyards, through the cloisters and the Great Hall and the chapel, with its flamboyant monument of fairground showiness for Thomas Sutton.
My wonder at the quality, age and proportion of the architecture was compounded by my delight at the finely-conceived planting schemes of the gardens and it was not difficult to envisage this elaborate complex as a Renaissance palace, which it became for the Howard family through three generations until they sold it to Sutton in 1611. The wealthiest commoner in England, he endowed his fortune upon a school and almshouses here, entitled ‘King James’ Hospital in Charterhouse.’ Daniel Defoe described it as “the noblest gift that ever was given for charity, bu any one man, public or private, in this nation.”
Four centuries later, the school has moved out to Goldalming, leaving Smithfield in 1872, yet the almshouses still flourish – offering sheltered accommodation to forty Brothers. Formerly a barrister in the City, Hilary came here seventeen years ago when he became a widower. “I have never regretted it,” he assured me with an emphatic grin, “Meals appear, your room is cleaned and the community is supportive.” Hilary revealed to me that among the Brothers, there are solicitors, barristers and priests, as well as an actor currently understudying for ‘The Woman in Black,’ the stage manager of the original production of ‘Oliver!’ and – as we entered the refectory – he introduced a distinguished-looking gentleman as the ballet critic of The Sunday Times.
Each morning, the Brothers are woken by the chapel bell at ten to eight. “I use it as an alarm clock,” confessed Hilary in a whisper, “I attend chapel only for funerals and when I read the lesson.” Breakfast follows in the Great Hall at eight-twenty, succeeded by morning coffee at eleven, lunch at one and afternoon tea at three – and thus time is measured out in the benign conditions of the Charterhouse. “A very silent brother who sat next to me came into lunch one day and died beside me,” Hilary admitted, “As it happens, there was a doctor who was only at the other side of the table and he was across the table like lightning – it was a beautiful way to go.”
The fifteenth century gate to the monastery is encompassed by an eighteenth century structure
Doorway and cubby hole for passing food through at the entrance to the former priory, dissolved in the fifteen-forties and bricked up ever since.
Graffiti from the days this was the refectory for Charterhouse School
Chimney piece of the three graces and a chest that may have belonged to Thomas Sutton
The Great Hall
Bluebells and an ancient fig tree just coming into leaf at the entrance to the Charterhouse
Looking through to the chapel, with the relic of a door damaged an incendiary bomb
Thomas Sutton, the founder, has lain here for four centuries
Bubbles symbolise the futility of wordly fame
Vestments await the priest in the chapel
Graffiti carved by the bored schoolboys of the eighteen-fifties in the chapel
Note the spelling of “Clarkenwell” upon the memorial stone set into the floor
In the chapel
Eighteenth century dwelling built over the ancient gatehouse
Hilary Haydon in the cloister at the Charterhouse – “It’s always cool in here”
Around The City
Following the Billingsgate pictures I published earlier this week, these City photographs are a second selection from a cache of transparencies of unknown origin, recently acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute. We believe they date from the nineteen sixties but the photographer is unidentified. Can anyone tell us more?
Mappin & Webb, Poultry
Bishopsgate
Church of Allhallows The Great, Allhallows Lane
Figure of an Apprentice, Vinters Hall
Lincolns Inn Fields, window sign, 1693
Bollard at entrance to Fenchurch StStation, ‘London & Blackwall Railway’
Lincolns Inn Fields
Gas lamp off Castle Court outside Simpsons Tavern, Ball Court
Clock, St Dunstans-in-the-West, Fleet St
Prince Henry’s house, Fleet St
Lincolns Inn Fields, Bishops Court sign, July 1868
Staple Inn, Holborn
Old Cheshire Cheese, Fleet St
The King Lud, Ludgate Circus
Holborn Viaduct
Gas lamp in Amen Court
St Andrew’s House, St Andrew’s-by-the-Wardrobe Church, St Andrew’s Hill
Hydrant in St Mary Athill churchyard, 1841
Simpsons Tavern, Ball Court
Old shop, Eastcheap
Bin in Gracechurch St for gravel and litter, c.1920
Tobacconist in Castle Court
Barclays Bank, Gracechurch St
Old Blue Last, Great Eastern St
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to take a look at more of these pictures
The Return Of Nicholas Culpeper
Thanks in no small part to votes cast by readers of Spitalfields Life in the Tower Hamlets People’s Plaques Scheme and to my great delight, I cast my eyes up yesterday in Commercial St to discover a metal plaque for Nicholas Culpeper had appeared upon the building at the corner of Puma Court, close to the site of Red Lion House where Culpeper lived, ran his clinic, tended his herb garden and wrote his English Herbal in the seventeenth century.
Culpeper translated medical books into English from Latin so that people could diagnose themselves and he came to Spitalfields to be outside the jurisdiction of the College of Physicians. Through example, he was one of the first to propose that healthcare should be given free as a basic human right, treating local people without charge each day at his surgery in Red Lion House.
Red Lion House, Nicholas Culpeper’s home in Spitafields. Becoming the Red Lion Tavern after his death, the building was demolished in the eighteen-forties as part of road widening when Commercial St was cut through to carry traffic from the docks.
The plaque that was installed yesterday
By a strange piece of synchronicity, Spitalfields Organics stands upon the site of Red Lion House
“Culpeper’s house, of which there are woodcuts extant, it is of wood, and is situated the corner of Red Lion Court and Red Lion Street, Spitalfields. It is now and has long been a public house, known by the sign of the Red Lion, but at the time it was inhabited by the sage herbalist, it was independent of other buildings. While in the occupation of Culpeper, who died in 1654, this house stood in Red Lion Field and was as a dispensary of medicines (perhaps the first) of very considerable celebrity.” The European Magazine and London Review, January 1812. Red Lion St and Red Lion Court as shown on John Horwood’s map (1794-99) before Commercial St was cut through.
Sebastian Harding’s model of Nicholas Culpeper’s house in Spitalfields.
APPRECIATION OF CULPEPER BY PATRICIA CLEVELAND-PECK, Gardener & Writer
No Spitalfields resident deserves recognition better than the seventeenth century Physician, Herbalist and Astrologer, Nicholas Culpeper.
He first came here because, as an unlicensed medical practitioner, St Mary Spital was beyond the City walls and thus not under the jurisdiction of both the College of Physicians and the Society of Apothecaries. Neither had any liking for the young upstart who treated poor patients cheaply or for free and rejected the expensive herbs sold by the apothecaries, preferring to search for his own growing locally. Culpeper lived in troubled times and his own life was fraught with difficulties, but at the moment he came to Spitalfields things were looking up for him.
Without completing his degree at Cambridge, he began a seven year apprenticeship to the Apothecary Simon White at Temple Bar but the business failed and his master ran off to Ireland with the money Culpeper paid him. Left homeless and penniless, he was fortunate to find a new master, Francis Drake of Threadneedle St who – instead of charging – asked Culpeper for Latin lessons in exchange for the apprenticeship. Yet Francis Drake died within two years, leaving Culpeper and his fellow-apprentice Samuel Leadbetter ‘turned over’ to the elderly Apothecary Stephen Higgins and, shortly afterwards, Culpeper dropped out.
At the age of twenty-four, he fell in love with the young heiress Alice Field. They married in 1640 and it was her fortune which allowed him to buy the house in Spitalfields and set up his practice yet, soon after, he fought a duel which required him to pay his opponent’s medical expenses and flee to France until the rumpus died down.
When Culpeper got back, an accusation of witchcraft was levelled against him – such accusations were not uncommon at the time the Civil War broke out. A patient by the name of Sarah Lyne consulted Culpeper and after a month, when she was no better and began wasting away, she reported him and he was imprisoned. The accusation gained weight because Culpeper practised astrological as well as herbal medicine and this, with its associations of magic, counted against him. He was lucky to get acquitted.
As early as 1641, Culpeper had seen local soldiers practising drill upon the Artillery Ground in Spitalfields and, when the Civil War broke out, he joined the Parliamentarians. They invited him to be a Field Surgeon and, on the way to the battlefield, he collected medicinal herbs but at the Battle of Newbury he was shot in the chest and badly wounded.
Upon his return to Spitalfields, Culpeper did not receive a hero’s welcome – only more grief. Samuel Leadbetter, his fellow apprentice, had taken over the shop of their former master in Threadneedle St and they made an agreement which permitted Culpeper to use the premises as an alternative surgery and for preparation of medicines. But in January 1643, the College of Apothecaries,‘ordered and warned’ Leadbetter to ‘put away Nicholas Culpeper’ – which he did, bringing their long friendship to an end.
After the war, there was no censorship and books could be published more freely. Recognising the opportunity, Culpeper, who had always wanted to bring medicine within the reach of the poor, set about translating the handbook of the College of Physicians from Latin into English – The Physical Directory or Translation of the London Dispensary. More books followed and the College launched an abusive broadside against him entitled, A farm in Spittlefields where all knick-kacks of Astrology are exposed to open sale. Undeterred, in 1653, Culpeper published his English Physician known today as Culpeper’s Herbal, which has never been out of print since.
Nicholas Culpeper was only thirty-nine when he died and was buried beneath the site of Liverpool St Station. He never fully recovered from his chest wound but – even so – he treated hundreds of patients in Spitalfields and educated them in maintaining their own health, which was something quite new at that time. Out of his seventy-nine books and translations, Culpeper’s Herbal was amongst the books taken by pilgrims to the New World.
So let us remember Nicholas Culpeper in Spitalfields.
Read more
Around Billingsgate Market
These intriguing photographs are selected from a cache of transparencies of unknown origin, recently acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute. We believe they date from the nineteen sixties but the photographer is unidentified. Can anyone tell us more?
Fish Porters at Number One Snack Bar next to St Magnus the Martyr
Looking west along Lower Thames St and Monument St
Sign outside St Mary-At-Hill
Pushing barrows of ice up Lovat Lane
Passage next to St Mary-At-Hill
Carved mice on a building in Eastcheap
Old shop in Eastcheap
Billingsgate Market cat
Inside the fish market designed by Horace Jones
Old staircase near Billingsgate
The Coal Exchange, built 1847 demolished 1962
Part of London Bridge crossing Lower Thames St, now removed
The Old Wine Shades, Martin Lane
Sign of a Waterman, now in Museum of London
In All Hallows Lane
Derelict site next to Cannon St Station
Looking towards Bankside Power Station by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, now Tate Modern
Old Blackfriars Station
The Blackfriar pub
Sculptures upon the Blackfriar
Sunrise over Tower Bridge
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Inns Of Long Forgotten London
Leafing through the fat volumes of Walter Thornbury’s London Old & New is the least energetic form of pub crawl I know and yet I found I was intoxicated merely by studying these tottering old inns, lurching at strange angles like inebriated old men sat by the wayside. Published in the eighteen-seventies, these publications looked back to London and its rural outskirts in the early nineteenth century, evoking a city encircled by coaching inns where pigs roamed loose in Edgware Rd and shepherds drove sheep to market down Highgate Hill.
White Hart Tavern, Bishopsgate
Bell Tavern, Edmonton
Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead
Spaniards’ Hotel, Highgate
Old Crown Inn, Highgate
Gate House Tavern, Highgate
The Brill Tavern, Somers Town
The Castle Tavern, Kentish Town
Old Mother Red Cap Tavern, Camden
Queen’s Head & Artichoke, Edgware Rd
Bell Inn, Kilburn
Halfway House, Kensington
Black Lion Tavern, Chelsea
World’s End Tavern, Chelsea
Gun Tavern, Pimlico
Rose & Crown, Kensington
Tattersall’s, Knightsbridge
Three Cranes Tavern, Upper Thames St, City of London
The Old Queen’s Head, Islington
Old Red Lion, Upon the banks of the Fleet – prior to demolition
Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill – prior to demolition
Old Tabard Tavern, Southwark – prior to demolition
White Hart Tavern, Borough
Inns of the Borough
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to take a look at other engravings from London Old & New
and more pubs
Out of the blue, one of the readers sent me some photographs last summer taken by their friend Bob Mazzer on the London Underground in the eighties. I was immediately captivated by Bob’s irresistibly joyous pictures but I had no idea of the sensation they would create, drawing so many hundreds of thousands of readers from around the world. Within weeks, they were being published in national newspapers and the emergence of this previously-unknown photographer with these breathtaking images became a widespread news story.
Prior to this, Bob had spent decades trying to gain recognition for his work and being rejected by publishers and galleries. Yet the publication of his photographs on Spitalfields Life drew universal acclaim immediately – both for their excellence as photography, and for the humour and poetry of Bob’s vision of humanity.
Encouraged by the success of Phil Maxwell’s Brick Lane published last week, I am asking you to help me produce a beautiful two hundred page hardback book of Bob’s Underground pictures and enable Bob’s debut London exhibition at Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch. The plan is to publish the book and open the show on June 12th with a great party.
I am inviting any of my readers who are willing to invest the sum of no more and no less than one thousand pounds each to cover production costs. We will ask you to bring your cheque along to a celebratory dinner for Bob later this month and we will put your name in the book. In June, prior to publication, I will present you with a copy inscribed by Bob and, six months later, we will commence repayment of your investment – unless you choose to offer it as a donation towards the publication of further titles by Spitalfields Life Books.
Additionally, you can show your support by placing an order for the book now by clicking here and we will send you a copy upon publication.
Following Colin O’Brien’s Travellers’ Children in London Fields, The Gentle Author’s London Album and Phil Maxwell’s Brick Lane, Bob Mazzer’s Underground is the fourth title from Spitalfields Life Books – and Faber Factory Plus (part of Faber & Faber) will distribute it to bookshops nationwide.
If you are willing to be an investor and help me publish Bob Mazzer’s Underground, please drop me a line at Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com and I will be delighted to send you further details.
Photographs © copyright Bob Mazzer
Click here to pre-order Bob Mazzer’s UNDERGROUND
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The Apotheosis Of Phil Maxwell
On Thursday night at six o’clock, crowds poured in to the Rich Mix Centre to celebrate the work of Phil Maxwell and his extraordinary thirty years of photographing the East End, upon publication day of his new book.
Beginning in 1981, Brick Lane records the passing away of one world and the arrival of another in the span of a generation. Looking at Phil’s early pictures, you feel are witnessing the last lingering glimmer of the nineteenth century – the last shreds of Dickens’ London – yet, by the end, it is unquestionably the present day and our own time. Repeatedly this week, I have found myself leafing back and forth through the three hundred pages of ‘Brick Lane’ to seek a perspective upon the changes we have seen. Each time, I discover new details and I know I shall keep returning to Phil’s book for years to come.
Many hundreds came to carry off copies and meet the man responsible for this epic record of turbulent social change upon one street. Some suggested that Phil’s book documents how Brick Lane has been ruined, while others commented that it shows the place is in better repair these days and people on the street look healthier and happier – that the poverty apparent in the earlier photographs has gone. But the fascination and success of Phil Maxwell’s vision is that it defies any simple interpretation and, as guests stood around leafing through pages and studying the book, a consensus arose that these photographs comprise the historic record of our times.
Thanks to the generosity of Truman’s Beer, everyone was welcomed with a glass of ale and the collective excitement of this lively gathering, with many of those featured in the photographs present, conjured a strong community atmosphere – as captured in these pictures by Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney.
Phil Maxwell signed books for two hours without respite as the line of those awaiting his autograph grew no shorter, until eight o’clock when the crowd fell silent as Lola Perrin took to the stage for a performance at the piano accompanying film sequences of Phil’s photographs edited by Hazuan Hashim. Each one revealed alternative versions of the same shot, permitting us to see through Phil’s eyes as he sought the definitive image. We stood in rapture to see our familiar streets inhabited by the shades of the past and then watched as they faded like memories.
The culmination of the evening came at the end when Phil Maxwell appeared on stage for a short curtain call with his partner Hazuan Hashim and Lola Perrin the musician. A roar of thunderous applause and loud cheers filled the space from the floor to the balcony. It was a clamour of delight at a one man’s remarkable lifetime of achievement in photography. It was the apotheosis of Phil Maxwell.
Phil Maxwell, Lola Perrin and Hazuan Hashim take a bow
Photographs copyright © Simon Mooney
CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR COPY OF PHIL MAXWELL’S BRICK LANE FOR £10
Posters can be obtained free from Bishopsgate Library, Brick Lane Bookshop, Broadway Bookshop, Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, The Golden Heart, Rough Trade, SCP, Labour & Wait, Leila’s Shop, Newham Bookshop & Townhouse. Each outlet has 50 posters to give away.
