Spitalfields Life

Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien took these portraits at this week’s launch of Bishopsgate Voices, the new oral history CD featuring people from Spitalfields & Bishopsgate, produced by the Bishopsgate Institute.

Alan Griver, Printer & Boxing Coach – “I can remember walking out at lunchtime and seeing a film being shot in Fournier St. It was about the American Revolution and it was supposed to be a Boston street, Boston at that time. All their old buildings had gone, so they couldn’t shoot it in Boston and they looked at Fournier St which looked exactly like one of the roads in Boston. I watched the redcoats marching up and down.”

Alan Griver was born in 1938 on Underwood St. His parents were originally from the Ukraine, his father arriving in London at five years old. Alan’s father worked in the timber trade and later owned a sweet shop on Well St, Hackney. Alan was evacuated to Luton in World War II but returned to attend Holcroft Rd School. He trained to be a Boxer and went on to teach boxing and start his own gymnasium.

Mavis Bullwinkle, Secretary at Royal London Hospital – “You can’t imagine it now, but every fish had a different taste. When you buy fish now, it’s all got the same taste because it’s all been frozen. But you used to get your plaice that used to be as big as that on your plate and it would cost hardly anything.”

Mavis Bullwinkle was born at the London Hospital on 18th May 1932. Her father was a Clerk and her mother worked in the office of a clothing company before leaving to become a Housewife. She attended the Sir John Cass School before being evacuated to Aylesbury and returning to London when she was thirteen. Mavis was Christ Church Sunday school teacher for thirty years and worked as a Short-Term Typist before moving to the London Hospital, where she worked for forty years.

Sid Joseph, Bus Driver & Postman – ‘We used to have a paper man, selling papers, and when I went down there he knew my name. He said… “Tell Mum and Dad that Hitler’s invaded Russia.” I didn’t know what Russia was! I goes, “Is there a place called Russia?” Me mum said, “Yes. Why?” I said, “Hitler’s invaded ‘em”.  I’m not gonna repeat what my mother said.”

Sidney Joseph was born in Windsor House, Wenlock St in 1931. His mother was a Housewife and his father worked as a Porter in Spitalfields Market. The family later moved to Brunswick Buildings, Goulston St and he attended the Jewish Free School. During the war, Sid was first evacuated to Bishops Stortford and then to Padstow. Upon his return to London he attended Christ Church School, leaving at age fourteen to work as a Hatmaker. He completed his two year long National Service, starting at age eighteen, stationed in Dusseldorf. Leaving the army in 1951, Sid came back to the East End, where he worked as a Van Driver delivering smoked salmon, then as a Bus Driver and finally as a Driver for the Post Office.

Lesley Keeper, Machinist & Barmaid – “In the middle of our street, we had a great big square [bomb] debris which led to the next street and all the kids used to play on there and that was our playground. And I always remember Mrs Dexter who lived opposite, she had two daughters Patsy & Jean, and she used to call with arms folded out the top window, ‘Pat! Jean! Go and play nicely on the debris.'”

Lesley Keeper was born on 15th November 1947 at Mile End Hospital. Her father was  a Coalman and her mother was a Machinist. Her first job at age fifteen was at the office of the clothes-making company, Ellis & Goldstein. Lesley later worked at a Chemist in Houndsditch and as a Clerk at Bethnal Green Hospital, before marrying at age eighteen and having two kids before she was twenty.

Norah Pam, Clerical Officer & PA to Director of Redbridge Health Authority – “From the top of the building you could see the red glow in the sky, you could see the planes coming over and the German planes had a completely different sound from ours. You could hear them, you know, chug-chug-chug as they came along – and you’d hear the bombs.”

Norah Pam was born on 31st May 1925 near the Tower of London. She lived at Howard Buildings in Deal St and attended All Saints School. In 1932, she contracted scarlet fever and diphtheria and spent a total of twelve weeks in the isolation ward at the hospital in Homerton. She later attended Sir John Cass School and worked at Ferguson Radio after leaving school. She met her husband, a navy man, in 1948. They married in 1950 and had two children.

Henrietta Keeper, Ballad Singer & Sample Machinist – “My husband died fourteen years ago of emphysema from smoking and he ate a lot of hydrolized fat. So when he died, I threw away the biscuits and I bought a book on Nutrition and studied it, and now I’ve got strong. I only eat wholemeal bread – white bread’s a killer. I am keeping well, to stay alive for the sake of my children because I love them. I don’t want to go the same way my husband did.”

Henrietta Keeper was born and lived her whole life in Bethnal Green, apart from when she evacuated to Little Saxham, near Bury St Edmunds, at the beginning of World War II. Henrietta worked as a Sample Machinist and joined the Tate & Lyle Concert party for thirty years. Today she may still be heard singing each Friday afternoon at E. Pellicci in Bethnal Green.

Reg Denny, Policeman – “You take Commercial St, not too far from here… you’d walk past the wholesale market and most of the time you’d get the sort of sweet smell of the fruit and then the not-so-good smell at the end of the day when you had the stale cabbage and the rotten beetroot and whatnot.”

Reg Denny was born in 1942 in Clapham. His father was in the fruit & vegetable trade, and his mother worked in a sweet shop in Clerkenwell. He moved to the East End in 1961 to join the police, working at the Commercial Rd Station and living in a police hostel nearby.

Emily Shepherd, Waitress, Clerk & Machinist – “And we had the radio on and then Neville Chamberlain came on and I remember him saying, ‘We are at war with Germany.’  I didn’t know what war was all about much but I knew it was gonna be bad, you know.”

Emily Shepherd was born in 1927 in Bethnal Green. Her father was a Horse and Cart Man and her mother was a Cleaner. Emily worked as a Waitress, Clerk & Machinist in a clothing factory and she has never lived outside the East End.

Keith Martin, Bank Officer – ‘Christmas Eve was the day and it was probably highly illegal – even in those days – but the people on the first floor who did all the back office work used to get a barrel for Christmas and they had this keg of beer up there, and people would go and help themselves to it from time to time.’

Keith Martin was born in 1953 in Forest Gate Hospital and brought up on Newcomen Rd, Leytonstone. He lived at home until his marriage at age twenty-six, when he moved to Dagenham. His first job was at a department store in Leytonstone but he later worked for Midland Bank in the City and Canary Wharf.

Joyce Ward, Teacher & Foreign Office Civil Servant – “My oldest aunt was working as a domestic in a large house somewhere or another. She had quite a good job and she always looked extremely smart. One Christmas, she got the chauffeur of her house to drive her to our house. Now can you imagine, the whole street of people poured into the road to see this – it was probably a Rolls Royce or something in front of our house…”

Joyce Ward was born in 1926 at 13 Columbia Rd, her father was a Tailor and her mother a Housewife. She went to school on Virginia Rd and Rusher St, was evacuated to Bishops Stortford, but later returned and attended Clapton County Secondary School. Joyce read Maths at University College and worked in a semi-secret post for the Foreign Office where she met her husband.

Hannah Jacobson, Civil Servant – “I lived with my grandmother… but across the road… my other grandmother lived, my paternal grandmother, she had so many children that I was more over there than with my grandmother because I used to play with them.”

Hannah Jacobson was born in the Maternity Hospital, Hackney in 1927. Her father was a Fishmonger, working all over London and later owning his own shop. Due to her father moving around for work, she attended twenty-five different schools as a child. Between the ages of five and twelve she lived at 22 Eric St, Mile End, where – during the Blitz – a landmine hit her house and her neighbours were killed.

Joy Harris, Dressmaker – “I was fifteen and he was seventeen. And then we got engaged when I was seventeen-and-a-half and got married at nineteen. I was an average age but Larry was probably a bit older to get married. He was twenty-two.”

Joy Harris was born in Barking in 1946. Her father was a Greengrocer who owned two shops and her mother worked in a factory. After leaving school, she had an apprenticeship as a Dressmaker and worked in Fashion St. Later in life, she worked in a hospital for the mentally ill and became an Occupational Therapist.

Larry Harris, Teleclerk in London Docks – “I think we had the last horse and cart that used to come in… The reference for his number plate was HC1, horse and cart one… Very fond memories of it.”

Larry Harris was born in 1943 at home in Dagenham. His father worked as an Electrician and his mother was a Cleaner and then worked at a sweets factory in Clerkenwell. Larry left school at fifteen to work for Arbuck Smith in the City and later for the Port of London Authority in 1959. He worked there for twenty years before joining Tate & Lyle in Silvertown for a further thirty years.

Sandra Scotting, Copyright Executive – “I’d come home from school sometimes and I’d find a crab or a lobster on the floor because my uncle used to work at the fish market. And he’d come home after his shift, put a load of things in the sink… and sometimes they’d get out… There they’d be crawling along the hallway!”

Sandra Scotting was born in Bethnal Green in 1947. Her mother was a Dressmaker and her father a Tailor. The family lived in Crown House on Bonner Rd, moving to Gore Rd in Hackney when Sandra was eleven. She attended Central Foundation Grammar School and trained as a Doctor, working at the Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital when she was newly qualified.

Jeff Borsack, Antiques Dealer – “I had to go to the poor board with my grandmother so that they could give me a uniform to go to the school. That was the dire straits we were in. And I always remember overhearing a lady say to the other gentlemen on the panel… “Children like this shouldn’t go to grammar school.” And I think that actually gave me quite a steely resolve in my life, that I was going to show this woman that children like me could benefit from it.”

Jeff Borsack was born on City Rd in 1937. After his parents died in the Blitz, Jeff went to live with his grandmother until he was evacuated to Berkhamstead. Upon his return to London, he attended Central Foundation Grammar School and studied Hebrew in the evenings, before taking Accountancy and Law at university. He became an Antiques Dealer with an office in Stamford Hill and has worked in markets throughout London.

Linda Simmons, Charities Administrator – “There’s one [rhyme] I remember – I can’t remember the beginning of it – but it ended “Betty Grable is a star. S. T. A. R.” Well, the thing was, we still used to say “Betty Grable is a star” but none of us had ever seen Betty Grable because she was a wartime pin-up, you know.”

Linda Simmons was born in 1949 to a Docker father and a Machinist mother. She spent her childhood in Bethnal Green and for the first three years of her life she lived with her grandparents on Chiltern St, later moving to a council flat in Teesdale St. Linda attended Christ’s Hospital School in Sussex for two years, retuning to the East End to attend John Howard Girls’ Grammar School. She later went on to Oxford University to read English and met her husband, before returning to London to work in publishing until leaving work to raise two children. Later, she returned to work for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau in 1981 and volunteered for the Terrence Higgins Trust, then joined for the Central London Action on Street Health, supporting sex workers, drug users and homeless people.

Copies of the CD cost £5 and are available to purchase at the Bishopsgate Library or may be ordered direct from Stefan.Dickers@bishopsgate.org.uk

Portraits copyright © Colin O’Brien

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Colin O’Brien’s Gina’s Restaurant Portraits

Colin O’Brien’s Pellicci Portraits

Can you spot Monty Meth in this photograph of the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club Summer camp at Greatstone in Kent in 1939? Wearing the jacket in the front row, Monty is distinguished by his ear-to-ear smile – a distinctive expression of a generous spirit that still graces his visage seventy-five years later.

Already, when this was taken, Monty was attending photography classes given by Harry Tichener, Member of the Royal Photographic Society and Manager of the Boys Club, who took this picture recording that glorious fleeting moment in the last summer before World War II. Today Monty credits his experience at the Club as the first step towards his career in Fleet St, firstly as a Photographer and then as a Journalist, winning him the News Reporter of the Year in 1970. Yet he is equally aware that it could all have turned out very differently.

“There is no doubt that without the Club, I should have become a bit of a ‘tea leaf,'” he confessed to me,“We used to knock things off from shops – I’m not proud of what we did, but you had no choice other than to be one of the boys. Not only did the Club give me some principles, it showed me how to think and act.”

When I visited Monty this week at his home in Oakwood, North London, I found – even at eighty-eight years old – he had already been up since five-thirty and out for his morning swim at six o’clock at the pool, long before I arrived. Monty met me at the Underground station and we walked together through the suburban streets with their carefully-tended gardens to reach the well-appointed home he shares with Betty his wife, where we settled down to chat.

“I was born in Bethnal Green at 10 Columbia Rd, above a barber’s shop where two families shared a few rooms. It was opposite the triangle where taxis waited and my memory is of horses and carts. My mother Millie came to London from Newcastle as a domestic servant to a Jewish family in Stepney and my father Max came from Austria. He was a bread roundsman and that’s how they met. They married in 1918 at New Rd Synagogue and had three sons, Arthur in 1919, Ron in 1921 and me in 1926. We moved from Columbia Rd to a new block of flats opposite the Children’s Hospital in the Hackney Rd in 1938 and I used to go after school to learn Talmud and Torah at the synagogue on the corner of Chance St. Afterwards, at seven o’clock, I used to bunk into the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club in the Blue Anchor on the next corner, and I got thrown out regularly until I was twelve.

In 1938, when I was old enough, I join the Club but I only stayed until 1944 when I went into the Royal Navy, yet I am absolutely certain that my career as a photographer which followed came as a result of my experiences there. I worked on the newsheet with David Roxan who preceded me in Fleet St and became a reporter at the News of the World, and I attended Harry Tichener’s Photography Class. As a result of my contacts with Bernard Collier and Bobby Gray, who were also in his class but had taken jobs at a picture agency in Fleet St called Photopress, I joined the agency when I left school at fourteen years old as a Messenger Boy, delivering photographs to newspapers for ten shillings a week. A year later, the Topical Press Agency offered me double the wages and I stayed with them until I went into the Navy.

When I returned to the Topical Press Agency after the war, I worked first in the dark room and then as a Photographer. I won an award for my work from Encyclopaedia Britannica but, in 1954, I didn’t see a future as a Photographer in Fleet St. I was writing and doing photo-stories for magazines on subjects like the Cornish china clay industry, the trug makers of Herstmonceux and traditional bookbinders, when I took a job as a feature journalist in Leeds. Betty came down from Scotland and we decided to set up home there, until 1965 when I became Industrial Correspondent for the Daily Mail – which was much less right wing in those days.

I was made Industrial Editor and, in 1970, I won Newspaper Reporter of the Year, before being recruited by Beecham as head of Communications where I stayed seventeen years, leaving in 1989 when they were bought by the Americans and became Smith Kline Beecham. Then in my sixties, I started a consultancy business that I ran with a colleague from the Daily Mail until 1999 when I was seventy-four.

I was a good Photographer and a pretty good Journalist. I had a good education and, at ten years old ,we were writing essays – what the Club gave me was the confidence to stand up and speak, I learnt how to take minutes, be part of a committee and accept responsibility.”

Determined to apply his skills to benefit others, Monty took over the Enfield Over-Fifties Forum upon his retirement and built up the membership from seventy to six thousand, mobilising a significant campaigning group to advocate the interests of seniors in his neighbourhood. And, returning to where it all started, Monty became Chairman of the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Old Boys from 2000 until 2012, raising £37,000 for charities dedicated to maintaining the kind of youth club culture from which he once drew such benefit so long ago.

Monty Meth with his Macintosh Classic of 1990, from which he runs the Enfield Over-Fifties Forum

The ‘intruder’ at the Queen’s visit – photograph by Montagu Meth of Topical Press Agency, published in Daily Mirror 4th March 1951

Winston Churchill goes to vote  – photograph by Montagu Meth of Topical Press Agency, published in Daily Telegraph 26th October 1951

10 Columbia Rd where Monty Meth was born above the barber’s shop (now a cafe) in 1926

Monty Meth when he joined the Royal Navy in 1944 at eighteen

Monty (centre) with his brothers, Arthur and Ron

Monty as Industrial Editor of the Daily Mail

Monty is News Reporter of the Year in 1970

Monty and Betty

Monty Meth has asked me to announce that this year’s 90th Cambridge & Bethnal Green Anniversary Dinner on September 1st, celebrating the foundation of the Club in 1924, will also be the last.

You may also like to read these other stories of members of Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club

Ron Goldstein

Aubrey Silkoff

Aubrey Goldsmith

Manny Silverman

Lennie Sanders

Maxie Lea

and watch

Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club Films