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So Long, Butler & Tanner

May 14, 2014
by the gentle author

When I started publishing books, I knew we must print them in England and support the survival of our home print industry. It was my privilege to work with Butler & Tanner, one of the greats of the golden age of British printing, which sadly went into administration yesterday with the loss of one hundred jobs. Thus a company that started in 1845 is no more and its history ends here.

For Spitalfields Life Books, they produced The Gentle Author’s London Album, Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell, and a week ago I visited them for the printing of Underground by Bob Mazzer – one of the very last books to be produced by Butler & Tanner – which is to be published on 12th June.

W.T.Butler’s Steam Printing works in Frome, 1857

Everyone who loves books knows the name of Butler & Tanner, Britain’s oldest and foremost colour printer – established in Frome in 1845 and recently known as Butler, Tanner & Dennis. This was the printer that Allen Lane went to in 1935 to print Ariel, the first Penguin Book, and it was my great delight to go down to Somerset with Book Designer, David Pearson, and Contributing Photographer, Patricia Niven, to see the pages of The Gentle Author’s London Album roll off the presses at the same print works last year.

We met at Paddington Station before dawn and the sun was just rising as the train sped through the West Country to deliver us to Frome, where we walked from the station to our destination in the aptly-named Caxton Rd. Upon arrival at the unexpectedly quiet print works, we were ushered into a waiting room and told that the first page would be ready shortly. Once we were led through into the factory we encountered the clamour of the machines, where vast presses – each one the size of whale – were spewing forth huge pages of print.

Here we met printers Paul Wrintmore and Clive Acres, and I saw pages of the Album for the first time, laid upon a brightly-lit table that simulated daylight. To my right, the great machine sat humming to itself with impatience as it waited to run off thousands of copies. But first we had to give our approval and I had to sign off the sheet. Each sheet contains twenty-four pages and here, in these unfamiliar surroundings, I was delighted to find my old friends The Dogs of Old London, The Pointe Shoe Makers, The Car Crashes of Clerkenwell and The Spitalfields Nippers. This was one of those moments when you confront something entirely familiar as if you are seeing it for the first time. It all looked well to me, with sharp details and good definition even within the darker areas of the pictures and, where there were flat areas of colour, the tones were even. I could find no flaw.

Yet I stood back, deferring to David Pearson as the design professional, and he leaned over close, casting his critical gaze upon his beautiful pages. The printers stood behind us, exchanging expectant glaces in silence. This was not a moment to discover a mistake and thankfully we did not find any. Most importantly, we were both satisfied with the quality of the printing and I signed the sheet, setting the great press in motion. After a tour of the factory, we came back to see the second sheet and were satisfied again and I signed it off too, content now to leave the rest of the book in the safe hands of the printers.

The early start and the emotionalism of the occasion caught up with us, and we were happy to climb back onto a train and, feeling relieved, we dozed all the way back to Paddington. Yet I took copies of each of the sheets of the Album with me as souvenirs and, when I got back to Spitalfields, I examined them for errors – but I did not find any.

Book Designer, David Pearson, with pages of The Gentle Author’s London Album

W.T. Butler, 1850

Early print specimen from Butler & Tanner

Joseph Tanner went into partnership with W.T. Butler in 1863

Early print specimen by Butler & Tanner

Butler & Tanner Print Works, 1905

Paper to print The Gentle Author’s London Album

Setting up the type, 1920

A special colour of ink mixed for The Gentle Author’s London Album

Adjusting the press, 1930

Pumping the ink to print The Gentle Author’s London Album

Typesetting, 1950

David Pearson inspects one of the plates to print The Gentle Author’s London Album

Printing machine, 1935

Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 162 printing press, standing by

Printing Works Beano, 1950

Paul Wrintmore, one of the printers of The Gentle Author’s London Album, with the first page

Plate making, 1950

Clive Acres, one of the printers of The Gentle Author’s London Album

Printing press, 1950

The first page of the Album to come off the press

Digital typesetting, 1970

David Pearson scrutinises the first page

Printing press, 1978

Sewn-together copies heading for the bindery

Digital printing, 1988

In the bindery

1912, Sherlock Holmes

1935, Ariel – the first Penguin Book

1950, The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe

1965, James Bond

2013, The Gentle Author’s London Album

2014, Brick Lane

2014, Underground

Colour photographs copyright © Patricia Niven

Archive images courtesy of Butler, Tanner & Dennis

An exhibition of the work of Book Designer, David Pearson runs at Kemistry Gallery in Charlotte Rd, Shoreditch, until 28th June

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One Hundred Penguin Books

In Fleet St

May 13, 2014
by the gentle author

Walking between Spitalfields and the West End, Fleet St has emerged as a favourite route in recent years, because the detail of this magnificent thoroughfare never ceases to fascinate me with new interest – and so I spent a morning wandering there yesterday with my camera to record some of these sights for you.

Alsal Watches

Royal Courts of Justice by George Edward Street, opened 1882

This marker at the entrance to the City of London was unveiled in 1880 and is the work of Horace Jones, architect of Tower Bridge and Smithfield, Billingsgate and Leadenhall Markets

Hoare’s Bank from Hen & Chicken Court

Hoare’s Bank founded in 1672

Clifford’s Inn founded in 1344

Entrance to Middle Temple, 1684

St Dunstan-in-the-West

Angels at the entrance to St Dunstan-in-the-West

Statue of Queen Elizabeth I that once stood upon the west side of Ludgate, demolished in 1760

Sixteenth century statues of King Lud and his sons that originally stood upon the east side of Ludgate

Old King Lud

Removed in 1878, Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar now stands at the entrance to Paternoster Sq

Prince Henry’s Room over entrance to Inner Temple, 1610

St Brides by Christopher Wren, 1672, reflected in the Daily Express building by Ellis & Clarke, 1932

St Bartholomew House by Herbert Huntly-Gordon, 1900

Carving upon The George

Pulpit in St Clement Danes by Grinling Gibbons

Eagles in St Clement Danes

Statue of Dr Samuel Johnson

Looking east down Fleet St

Julie Begum On Brick Lane

May 12, 2014
by the gentle author

When Julie Begum came to the launch for Phil Maxwell’s BRICK LANE recently, she was astonished to open the book and confront this photograph of herself, taken twenty years ago, which she had never seen before. “It was strange to see myself,” she admitted to me, “I was pleased but also sad, because I’m not that person anymore.”

The picture appears as part of sequence taken by Phil during the Anti-Fascist protests of the eighties and nineties, and I was struck by the dramatic tension in the photograph between Julie’s relaxed, generous smile and the approaching figure of the mounted policeman coming up behind in riot gear.

I know Julie from her current work with the Boundary Estate Women’s Group at St Hilda’s Community Centre, so I paid her a visit recently at her home just off Brick Lane to learn more about the background to this curious picture.

“It was at the time when Derek Beackon of the British National Party was elected as councillor in Millwall by just eight votes in 1993. I was one of a number who formed ‘Women Unite Against Racism.’ We realised we needed to do something, so we staged a conference at Tower Hamlets College and more than one hundred women from different backgrounds came along and we decided upon a plan.

Our aim was to create a women’s presence in the male-dominated protest movement and we made sure there was no cult of the leader in our group, and that many different people spoke at our meetings. We went door to door and encourage women to vote, because we wanted to give support to women who were too frightened to go out and vote.

The photo was taken on the day of a protest again the BNP in Bethnal Green, the police were there in huge numbers. It was important to have a mix of people, men and women, and young and old – because police can behave very differently if it is just young men they are dealing with. There was a lot of solidarity and it was nice.

The police had dogs and officers on horseback, and I remember the police wanted to set the dogs on the young men.  So we women got in front to protect them and the police had to stop because we were women. I think it’s important not to give in to the sense of tension and excitement in these situations – we tried to keep everyone calm and peaceful.

It was a good time, even though we had sleepless nights. It was a year of madness but people came together from all walks of life and we felt we were part of the heritage of protest against fascism in the East End.”

Julie Begum at home

Julie Begum cooking with members of  St Hilda’s women’s group

Julie Begum in her kitchen

Julie Begum (top right) with members of her women’s group at Geffrye Museum

Brick Lane photo copyright © Phil Maxwell

Recent photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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The East London Group & Photography

May 11, 2014
by David Buckman

Following the opening of the major retrospective at the Nunnery in Bow last week, David Buckman – whose book From Bow to Biennale recovered the lost history of The East London Group – considers the use of photography by members of the Group.

Pavilion in Grove Hall Park, Bow, by Harold Steggles

Working photograph by Harold Steggles

Brymay Wharf by Walter Steggles

Working photograph by Walter Steggles

I am often asked about the role of photography in the work of the East London Group, particularly in the paintings of Elwin Hawthorne and Harold and Walter Steggles.  They were core members of the band of working class men and women that John Cooper taught at evening classes in Bow in the twenties and thirties who came together to form the Group.

Walter Steggles assured me that sketching was “better than a camera.  I only did one picture from a photograph and that was dead” and his sister Muriel – who late in life drove him around looking for subjects – insisted that when her brother asked her to stop the car to sketch a cloud formation, he was “better than a camera.”

Nevertheless, Walter and Harold Steggles were both keen photographers, taking it up shortly before their joint show at Lefevre Gallery in 1938.  In the thirties, they also took up motoring – as their family photographs confirm – and they travelled around Britain and to the south of France on painting trips with Harold behind the wheel.

When the house where Walter lived was cleared, ten different cameras were found. According to Alan Waltham, who married Walter’s niece Janeta, there were two or three Praktica cameras, a couple by Kodak and Olympus, and several others.

“Most, if not all, were 35mm, but at some point Wally must have owned cameras that took 120-format film, judging some of the contact prints we have,” Alan explained to me.  “Most of the early pictures are in black and white but he switched to colour film early on after the war. We found endless copies of potential landscapes that he must have photographed in later life but, sadly, many of the early photos have little or no annotation.”

The role of photography in picture-making is clearly evident in the work of Elwin Hawthorne, the artist who – along with Walter Steggles – achieved star status when they had paintings in the British Pavilion at the 1936 Venice Biennale.  Elwin’s son said, having studied a number of squared-up photographs he holds, “my father did use photography as an aid to his work quite regularly….  My mother had disposed of my father’s camera before I developed an interest in photography at the age of thirteen.  It was more than an amateur box camera – I remember it had a Dallmeyer lens, but it was not really a high-quality professional camera.”

The absence of people is a common feature of Hawthorne’s paintings, sometimes infused with melancholic even surreal qualities.  Elwin junior feels that his father “might have gone out early in the morning, when conditions were misty, as a way of removing fine detail from the scenes he photographed, though I cannot confirm this.” Lilian, Hawthorne’s widow, who also showed with the Cooper group as Lilian Leahy, told me that Elwin “always carried a camera.  Once he almost left it behind in a restaurant at Rottingdean, until I reminded him.”

Walter Sickert lectured Cooper’s Bow students, where Hawthorne heard him speak, and the squaring-up of drawings for transfer to canvas was a common practice, one that Hawthorne would have been accustomed to while working as studio assistant to Sickert from 1928-31.  Sickert studied for a time at the Slade School of Fine Art, notable for its tradition of fine draughtsmanship, which John Cooper also attended – taught by that master-draughtsman Henry Tonks – and he believed that drawing was the basis of every picture, urging students to carry a notebook wherever they went.

However, from around 1923, according to Sickert’s biographer Robert Emmons, the ageing artist gradually abandoned drawing and “came to rely more and more for his data on old prints and photographs.” Sickert acquired a huge collection of illustrations, some of which formed the basis of his English Echoes exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1931.  The twenty-two exhibits dismayed some of his admirers, familiar with his earlier, more conventionally conceived works.  In a letter to The Times in 1929, in justification of his new practice, Sickert pointed out that Canaletto had based his work on tracings made with the camera lucida, Turner’s studio had been “crammed with negatives,” Millet had used photographs and Degas had taken them. While writing that photographs should be used with caution, he also noted that they could serve as valuable documents of record. Emmons comments “Sickert knew well enough what he wanted and was not likely to be squeamish as to how he got it.”

The invention of Photography in the nineteenth century posed a problem for some artists and their patrons. If the artist’s role had been to depict reality, how could this be better accomplished with pencil, pen or brush than with the camera?  Yet this concern ignored such the possibility of individual inspiration and interpretation, and subsequent numerous art movements, such as Cubism, Pointillism and Surrealism, bear witness to this.

John Cooper and his students might appear to have been unaffected by continental developments in their own pictures, yet they were aware of them. This is evident from the Cubist-influenced mosaic that he and students completed at the Wharrie Cabmen’s Shelter, on Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead, in April 1935, where you can still admire it today while you drink your tea.

The accompanying pairs of photographs and pictures indicate how East London Group members employed the camera, astutely reorganising and simplifying untidy photographic reality into unforgettable images that become theirs and theirs alone.

The Mitford Castle, 1931 by Elwin Hawthorne

Working photograph by Elwin Hawthorne

Black & white photograph of a colour painting of The Bridge House, Tredegar Rd by Harold Steggles

Working photograph by Harold Steggles

Bow Backwater by Walter Steggles

Working photography by Walter Steggles

Black and white photograph of a coloured painting of ‘Bridge in Bow’ by Harold Steggles

Working photograph by Harold Steggles

Canonbury Grove by Elwin Hawthorne

Working photograph by Elwin Hawthorne

FROM BOW TO BIENNALE – The East London Group of Artists c. 1928-1936 – runs at the Nunnery, 181 Bow Rd, E3 2SJ until 13th July

You can read more about the East London Group

From Bow To Biennale

Elwin Hawthorne, Artist

Albert Turpin, Artist & Mayor of Bethnal Green

Phyllis Bray, Artist

Henry Silk, Artist & Basketmaker

From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group by David Buckman can be ordered direct from the publisher Francis Boutle and copies are on sale in bookshops including Brick Lane Bookshop, Broadway Books, Newham Bookshop, Stoke Newington Bookshop, London Review Bookshop, Town House, Daunt Books, Foyles, Hatchards and Tate Bookshop.

Adverts From The Stepney Borough Guide

May 10, 2014
by the gentle author

From 1900 until 1965, Spitalfields was in the London of Borough of Stepney. Although Stepney has ceased to exist as a political entity long ago, the official guides are still preserved in the Bishopsgate Institute, serving as a reminder of this lost kingdom where – in the thirties – fluffy picture frocks, crude drugs and skulgarde helmets might easily be obtained.

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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Phil Maxwell’s East End Cyclists

May 9, 2014
by the gentle author

After Rob Wells – the boy on the bicycle pictured on the cover of BRICK LANE – turned up, I realised that bikes were a recurrent theme in Phil Maxwell‘s photography and so I asked him to make this gallery of East End cyclists over the past thirty years.

Phil Maxwell will be giving a lecture showing his photographs from BRICK LANE at Waterstones Piccadilly next Wednesday 14th May at 7pm.

We shall be giving away signed and numbered prints by Phil to all at this event. Tickets are free but must be reserved by email events.piccadilly@waterstones.com

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Kitty Jennings, Dressmaker

May 8, 2014
by the gentle author

Kitty, Amelia (Doll Doll), Jimmy, Gracie & Patricia Jennings, Gifford St, Hoxton c.1930

On Sunday afternoon, I walked over to Columbia Rd Market to get a bunch of flowers for Kathleen – widely known as Kitty – Jennings, who has lived in Hoxton since 1924. I found her in a neat block of private flats near the canal where for many years she lived with her beloved sister Doll Doll, whose ashes now occupy pride of place in a corner of the sitting room.

Once Barbara Jezewska, who grew up in Spitalfields and was Kitty’s neighbour in this building for seventeen years, had made the introductions, we settled down in the afternoon sun to enjoy beigels with salmon and cream cheese while Kitty regaled us with her memories of old Hoxton.

“Thank God we were lucky, we had a father who had a good job, so we always had a good table. There was not a lot of work when I was a kid, but we always got by. We were lucky that we always had good clothes and never got knocked about.

My father, Jim, he was a Fish Porter at Billingsgate Market and he had to work seven days. He was born in the Vinegar Grounds in Hoxton, where they only had one shared tap in the garden for all the cottages, and he was a friendly man who would help anyone. He left for work at four in the morning each day and came back in the early afternoon. We lived on fish. I’m a fish-mullah, I like plaice, jellied eels, Dover sole and middle skate. My poor old mum used to fry fish night and day, she was always at the gas stove.

I was born in Gifford St, Hoxton. There were five of us, four girls and one boy, and we lived in a little three bedroom house. My mother Grace, her life was cooking, washing and housework. She didn’t know anything else.

When my sister Amelia was born, she was so small they laid her in a drawer and we called her ‘Doll Doll.’ They put her in the Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital when she had rheumatic fever and she didn’t go to school because of that. She was happy-go-lucky, she was my Doll Doll.

One day, when she was at school, there was an air raid and all the children hid under the tables. They saw a man’s legs walk in and Doll Doll cried out, ‘That’s my dad!’ and her friend asked, ‘How do you recognise him?’ and Doll Doll said, ‘Because he has such shiny shoes.’ He took Doll Doll and said to the teacher, ‘My daughter’s not coming to school any more.’

I was dressmaking from when I left school at fourteen. My first job was at C&A in Shepherdess Walk but I didn’t like it, so I told my mum and left. I left school at Easter and the war came in August. After that, I didn’t go to work at all for five years. Then I went to work in Bishopsgate sewing soldiers’ trousers, I didn’t like that much either so I stayed at home.

Doll Doll and I, we used to love going to Hoxton Hall for concerts every Saturday. It cost threepence a ticket and there was a man called Harry Walker who’d sling you out if you didn’t behave. Afterwards, we’d go to a stall outside run by my uncle and he’d give us sixpence, and we’d go and buy pie and mash and go home afterwards – and that was our Saturday night. We used to go there in the week too and do gym and see plays.

On Friday nights, we’d go to the mission at Coster’s Hall and they’d give you a jug of cocoa and a biscuit, and the next week you’d get a jug of soup. It didn’t cost anything. We used to go there when we were hungry. In the school holidays, we went down to Tower Hill Beach and we’d cut through the market and see my dad, and he’d give us a few bob to buy ice cream.

Me and Doll Doll, we stayed at home with my mum and dad. The other three got married but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t find anybody that I liked, so I stayed at home with mummy and daddy, and I was quite happy with them. When they got old we cared for them at home, without any extra help, until they died. We had understanding guvnors and, Doll Doll and I took alternate weeks off work to care for them.

Doll Doll and I moved into these private flats more than thirty years ago. In those days, it was only women and once, when my neighbour thought her boiler was going to explode, we called the fire brigade. Doll Doll leaned over the balcony and called, ‘Coo-ee, young man! Up here!’

We never went outside Hoxton much when we were young, but – when we grew up – Doll Doll and I went to Florida and Las Vegas. I finally settled down and I didn’t wander no more. I worked as a dressmaker at Blaines in Petticoat Lane for thirty-five years, until it closed forty years ago and I was made redundant.”

Doll Doll, Kitty and their mother Grace

Kitty in her flat in Hoxton

Doll Doll

Kitty places fresh flowers next to Doll Doll’s ashes each week

Kitty at a holiday chalet in Guernsey, 1960

Kitty Jennings with her friend and neighbour of sixteen years, Barbara Jezewska

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