Portraits From Philip Mernick’s Collection
In this selection from Philip Mernick‘s splendid collection of cartes de visite by nineteenth century East End photographers, amassed over the past twenty years, we publish portraits of men in which clothing and uniforms declare the wearer’s identity. All but two are anonymous portraits and we have speculated regarding their occupations, but we welcome further information from any readers who may have specialist knowledge.
Superintendent of a Mission c. 1880
Dock Foreman 1891-4
Merchant Navy Officer c. 1880
Policeman c. 1880
Sailor c.1880
Beadle in Ceremonial Dress c. 1900
Private in the Infantry c.1890
Indian Gentleman 1863-5
Naval Recruit c. 1900
Sailor Merchant Navy c.1870
Chorister c. 1890
Cricketer c. 1870
Merchant Navy Officer c. 1870
East European Gentleman c. 1910
Clergymen c. 1890
Telegram Boy c.1890
Member of a Temperance Fraternity c. 1884
Naval Recuit
Policeman c.1890
Merchant Navy c. 1870
Royal Navy 1887/8
This sailor’s first medal was given by the Royal Maritime Society for saving a life, his second medal is the Khedive Star Egyptian Medal and the other is the British Egyptian Medal. The ribbon on his cap tells us he served on HMS Champion, the last class of steam-assisted sailing warships. In the early eighteen-eighties, HMS Champion was in the China Sea but it returned to the London Dock for a refit in 1887 when this photograph was taken, before going off to the Pacific.
Photographs reproduced courtesy of Philip Mernick
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Christopher Marlowe In Norton Folgate
As part of the SAVE NORTON FOLGATE cultural festival, we are delighted to welcome Professor Lisa Hopkins who will be giving a lecture of the subject of one of our most celebrated local writers, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE IN LONDON, next Monday 23rd February at 6:30pm at The Water Poet in Folgate St. All events in the festival are free – Click here to book your ticket
“What nourishes me destroys me” – Christopher Marlowe aged twenty-one in 1585
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Shoreditch and Norton Folgate comprised theatre land for Elizabethan London, with a monument in St Leonard’s Church today commemorating the actors who once lived locally and tax records suggesting William Shakespeare was a parishioner of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, in 1598.
A warrant issued in September 1589 for the arrest of the mysterious yet charismatic tragedian & poet Christopher Marlowe confirms that the twenty-five year old writer was resident in the Liberty of Norton Folgate. He shared lodgings with fellow playwright Thomas Kyd and his Cambridge friend Thomas Watson, the poet, lived nearby. Marlowe’s plays were likely to have been performed at The Theatre in New Inn Yard and The Curtain in Curtain Rd at this time.
“Thomas Watson of Norton Folgate in Middlesex County, gentleman, and Christopher Marlowe of the same, yeoman….were delivered to jail the 18th day of September by Stephen Wyld, Constable of the same on suspicion of murder” reads the warrant.
The story goes that Marlowe was set upon in Hog Lane – now Worship St – by William Bradley, an innkeeper’s son, over a unpaid debt and Thomas Watson intervened with his sword to protect his friend, stabbing Bradley to death. Although Marlowe took flight, he was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate with Watson for a fortnight. On 3rd December, they were tried and, after Watson’s claim of self-defence was accepted, both were discharged with a warning to keep the peace.
But in May 1592, Marlowe was summoned again to appear at the Middlesex sessions for assaulting two constables in Holywell Lane, Shoreditch – when the constables attested that they went in fear of their lives because of him. Once more, Marlowe was required to keep the peace or to appear before the magistrates at the next general session and receive a penalty of twenty pounds. There is no record whether he ever answered to this charge.
The final years of Marlowe’s life are traced through a series of violent encounters with the law, yet between 1588 and his death at twenty-nine in 1593, Marlowe wrote Edward II, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and The Massacre of Paris – which means that we may conclude that all or at least part of these plays were written while he was a resident of Norton Folgate.
A manuscript page from The Massacre at Paris, in Christopher Marlowe’s handwriting or that of his secretary Hugh Sanford, which may have been composed while Marlowe was resident in Norton Folgate
Worship St (formerly Hog Lane) where Christopher Marlowe was accosted in 1589 by innkeeper’s son William Bradley, over an unpaid debt, and Marlowe’s friend Thomas Watson killed Bradley
Holywell Lane where Christopher Marlowe assaulted two Constables in May 1592
MARLOWE IN LONDON, Monday 23rd February 6:30pm at The Water Poet, Folgate St
Click here to book your ticket
This lecture will explore how Christopher Marlowe came to be in Norton Folgate, how his surroundings helped shape his work and the traces that his work in turn left on the cultural geography of early modern London.
LISA HOPKINS is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University who has written extensively on Marlowe, including Christopher Marlowe, Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), A Christopher Marlowe Chronology (Palgrave, 2005), and Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave, 2000).
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In Search of Shakespeare’s London
The Metropolitan Machinists’ Co
The plethora of bicycle shops around Spitalfields today is not a new phenomenon as confirmed by this 1896 catalogue for The Metropolitan Machinists’ Co, yet another of the lost trades of Bishopsgate, reproduced courtesy of the Bishopsgate Institute
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Dickens At The City Of London Theatre, Norton Folgate
As part of the SAVE NORTON FOLGATE cultural festival, I am delighted to announce a trio of events in which three leading Dickensian scholars celebrate our greatest of nineteenth century novelists, whose works first reached the stage in Norton Folgate.
All events in the festival are free – click here to see the programe
The very first stage version of any of Charles Dickens’ works took place in Norton Folgate at The City of London Theatre, which opened on March 27th 1837 with a production of The Pickwick Club or The Age We Live In. It was produced even before all the installments of the novel had been published, requiring Edward Stirling, the playwright, to expend some imagination in resolving his hastily-composed drama.
Designed by Samuel Beazley, architect of Drury Lane, and managed by Christopher Cockerton, The City of London Theatre was described as “the handsomest house in London” in 1837. Accommodating an audience of more than a thousand, it displayed an imposing facade onto Bishopsgate, dignified with tall Corinthian columns.
Their production of ‘The Pickwick Club’ was only the first of many pirated stage versions of Dickens’ novels to be presented throughout his long writing career yet – despite their author’s displeasure – audiences flocked to see these popular dramas.
By November 1838, The City of London Theatre was presenting ‘Nicholas Nickelby,’ followed shortly in December by ‘Oliver Twist or The Life of a Workhouse Boy’ with scenes advertised including ‘Fagin’s Den in Field Lane,’ A Beer Shop in Clerkenwell’ and ‘Garret of Bill Sykes, the Flash Burglar.’
In later years, the theatre declined, largely due to the proximity of The Standard nearby in Shoreditch. By 1868, it had become a Music Hall and finally, in 1870, it was converted to a Temperance Hall before being destroyed by fire in 1871. Yet The City of London Theatre in Norton Folgate deserves to be remembered for its early successes, as the location of the first flourishing of Charles Dickens’ works in dramatic form.
The City of London Theatre, Norton Folgate, 1860
(reproduced courtesy of Theatre & Performance Collection, University of Kent)
(Reproduced courtesy of East London Theatre Archive)
(Reproduced courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
(Reproduced courtesy of East London Theatre Archive)
(Reproduced courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
(Reproduced courtesy of East London Theatre Archive)
(Reproduced courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
(Reproduced courtesy of East London Theatre Archive)
(Reproduced courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
(Reproduced courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
The facade of the City of London Theatre survived on Norton Folgate until 1915 (photograph courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute)
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Inside The Nicholls & Clarke Buildings
In Norton Folgate, the magnificent array of nineteenth century warehouses on Blossom St and the adjoining handsome showrooms on Shoreditch High St form a unique composition of buildings – that was, from 1875 and until quite recently, the headquarters of Nicholls & Clarke, supplying hardware and ironmongery of all kinds.
Retaining only fragments of exteriors, British Land want to obliterate this complex under monolithic corporate office blocks of eleven to thirteen storeys, but thanks to Photographer Rachael Marshall we are able to assess the quality and appeal of these flexible spaces through her atmospheric pictures taken in 2010.
“My starting point was the fact that the creation of new buildings involves the destruction of landscapes and consumption of energy but 9% of property in the United Kingdom lies empty. In some parts of London this is 28%,” Rachael explained to me,”Shouldn’t bringing unused buildings back to life be expected in the same way that recycling a tin can is expected?”
Photographs copyright © Rachael Marshall
You will be able to visit these historic buildings for yourself between June 26th & 28th, when they host Best of Brittania 2015, featuring a dazzling array of British design and manufacture. Britain’s largest pop-up Department Store promises jewellery, shoes, mens’, womens’ & childrens’ clothes, home furnishings, bicycles & motorcars, food & drink, all produced in this country.
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Click here for a simple guide to HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY prepared by The Spitalfields Trust
Follow the Campaign at facebook/savenortonfolgate
Follow Spitalfields Trust on twitter @SpitalfieldsT
The Spitalfields Trust’s SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition curated by The Gentle Author is at Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, E1
My Love Letter To London
Photograph of Fashion St 1990 by Alan Dein
London my love,
I loved you from the first moment I saw you and I can never forget how beautiful you were then.
Over all these years, as I have got to know you closely and we shared a life together, I grew to believe that you belonged to me.
Yet you have changed – and sometimes now I feel you are being taken away from me – but my love for you has never wavered even if, when I no longer recognise you, it fills me with grief.
Looking at old pictures of you, I realise you have always been changing and I was infatuated when I believed you belonged to me, because I thought foolishly that I had discovered you for my own.
Please understand, I do not blame you for seducing me, because I wanted to be seduced – and knowing I am one of countless thousands that have been seduced by you does not lessen my affection for you.
If I am possessive, it is because I want to protect you from those that would exploit you.
You have been through a lot – things that have formed you and things that have damaged you, but they are part of who you are and I cherish it all.
My old love, please have the courage to resist those who tell you need facelifts and want to tart you up with expensive trinkets.
They want to pimp you out and put your prices up, so you will be only for the rich.
Then you will have to turn people away, when you have always embraced all comers, including me – and that is what I love about you.
TGA xxx
Lush Life In Norton Folgate
As part of the SAVE NORTON FOLGATE cultural festival, we are delighted to welcome Professor Dick Hobbs, Criminologist & Ethnographer, who will be talking about his study of criminality at Nicholls & Clarke in Norton Folgate, LUSH LIFE, next Monday 16th February at 6:30pm at The Water Poet in Folgate St. All events in the festival are free – click here to book your ticket
Professor Dick Hobbs on Blossom St where he once dealt in sanitary ware
Niclar House, the labyrinthine warehouse complex occupying the block between Norton Folgate and Blossom St, is boarded up and awaiting an uncertain future at present. Yet until recently this space was occupied by Nicholls & Clarke, an empire of ironmongery and sanitaryware that contained a hidden warren of semi-criminal subcultures. Dick Hobbs came here as a young man employed to lift toilets, yet he became so fascinated by the creative intricacy of the illicit activities which he encountered that it inspired him to become an Ethnographer and Criminologist.
“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,” he writes – with appealing irony – in the introduction to his book Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK.
Making a sentimental pilgrimage to Spitalfields on his way to an important meeting in Whitehall, Professor Hobbs took me on a stroll over to Blossom St in search of a lost world and we were lucky enough to step inside the empty building. The cavernous basements of Nicholls & Clarke that fan out beneath Spitalfields, in which the workers once hunted rats at two shillings a tail, offered a natural metaphor for the nefarious culture that is the Professor’s special field of expertise and interest. “All ethnographers should bring their biographies to the research table,” he told me.
“It all started at Nicholls & Clarke in Blossom St. My dad got a job here at fourteen years old and worked for forty-seven years as a clerk and warehouseman. He went away for five years to the war, but he wanted to go back afterwards and stayed until he was sixty-three.
When I belatedly became an academic, I based much of the data for my PhD on life and larceny at Nicholls & Clarke. I worked in the warehouse as a young man in the seventies, I’d be doing all sorts of things, carrying toilets, sinks and cast iron baths around. At the time I worked there, the place was full of war heroes from El Alamein, Arnheim and the Atlantic Crossings. Some of these men were quite damaged but they were the enterprise of the firm until the eighties. They were sophisticated and dynamic in the way they did business. It was a wonderful place where I learnt about ducking and diving, and life in general, from a workforce consisting of rough sleepers, bankrupt furriers, degenerate gamblers, fighters, ex-war heroes, and a few ordinary people.
After I left school, I worked as an office boy in Great Eastern St. That was awful, I couldn’t stand office work, so I worked as a dustman and street sweeper. I did all sorts of things, but whenever I needed work I could always ask my father to call up one of the Directors at Nicholls & Clarke, Cyril Wakeman – father of Rick Wakeman – and get me work at twenty pounds a week, cash in hand, to pick up toilets. Cyril liked to talk about Rick’s success, his latest hit and how much the latest tour in America made and which page three girl he was dating. And at the end, he’d always ask how I was doing but I wasn’t dating page three girls, I was lifting toilets.
Working there, it had the biggest influence upon me. I was fascinated by how these ordinary people found a little niche for themselves. They were paid almost nothing but they found a way to make it work for their benefit and win a little self-esteem. They had customers. Plumbers would come round and they would go off into corners doing deals on damaged or old stock.
As a kid, I really enjoyed myself and I loved it there – the characters were amazing. There was Bob a gambler who worked in Blossom St but used to slip out through the shop in Norton Folgate to place bets. Everyone else wore dirty overalls, but he wore a pristine white coat and he looked like a dentist. He put his head down and walked purposefully out through the shop. Once a posh woman who wanted to buy some paint asked, ‘Do you work here?’ and without missing a step he said, ‘Not if I can help it.’ It was a magic moment.
There were elderly Jewish men who had been left behind when everyone else moved out to Forest Hill or wherever. One was Yossul, a furrier who had fallen upon hard times and whenever a manager came along he’d slip into a dark corner, whispering, ‘The Cossacks are coming!’ There was a young man in the office who was unusually ugly and acquired the nickname ‘The young Burt Lancaster,’ which became shortened to ‘Burt Lancaster’ that became shortened to ‘Burt’ and eventually he answered to it. Then there was Charlie Nails who spent all his days in the nail room. Nails were bought by weight and there was always spillage so the firm sent round a scrap metal dealer to collect it once a month. But Charlie sold the boxes of nails direct to the scrap metal dealer who resold them back through the front of the building again. It was sharp. A guy who had nothing found a way to make a life for himself.
While at Nicholls & Clarke, I started to go to night school and I picked up two O levels and an A level. Then I went to teacher training college and qualified as a teacher and worked in Newham for three to four years, before I got a place at the London School of Economics to study Sociology where I was taught by David Downs who had written about East End kids and that’s where I came across the work of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew writing about nineteenth century London and Raphael Samuel’s ‘East End Underworld, the life of Arthur Harding,’ which outlined the world of East End criminality that was familiar to my dad. I showed it to him and he was able to correct some of it, such was his level of scholarship. I could talk to him about a scholarly work.
What was once labelled as delinquency is seen as making a good deal these daysl. The world has caught up with the East End and we are all Arthur Daleys now. The East End was always based upon entrepreneurship albeit within a framework of trading connections and communality, but today we’re all traders and encouraged to be entrepreneurs, except there’s little to temper the competitive edge.”
Niclar House, the frontage of Nicholls & Clarke in Norton Folgate.
Professor Dick Hobbs in the former sanitary department of Nicholls & Clarke
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Billy Frost, the Krays’ Driver
The SAVE NORTON FOLGATE exhibition curated by The Gentle Author for The Spitalfields Trust is at Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, E1 6BX, from tomorrow -Saturday 14th February.
