At The Ragged School Museum
The Ragged School Museum in Bow is a long tall building occupying the narrowest triangular site between the canal and the road, and it is as thin as a meagre slice of cake. In 1876, Dr Thomas Barnardo purchased these premises, originally constructed for warehouses, from a Scottish provisions company and opened a ragged school as one of forty establishments under his supervision in the East End. Within a couple of years, there were three hundred and seventy pupils daily and two thousand five hundred for Sunday school each week.
As well as providing education, children were given food and offered care and support to ameliorate the deprivation they suffered. Reverting to light industrial use after the death of Dr Barnardo at the beginning of the last century, the complex was blighted by a demolition order until the formation of the Ragged School Trust who purchased the building in 1986. An atmospheric structure where the melancholy presence of history still lingers, it is now a museum where school children come to experience Victorian education and learn of the realities of life for the poor in nineteenth century London.
Dr Barnardo’s Ragged School, 1879
Copperfield Rd today
“a long building occupying the narrowest triangular site between the canal and the road, and it is as thin as a meagre slice of cake”
Stairs up to the classrooms
The Boys’ staircase
Behind these screens was the Headmaster’s Office
Bridge over Regent’s Canal
Stairs down to the Regent’s Canal towpath
Cyril Mann, Artist
Tubby Isaac’s Jellied Eel Stall, Petticoat Lane, c. 1950
After serving as a Gunner in the Royal Artillery in World War II, Cyril Mann returned to live in a tiny flat in Paul St with his wife Mary and small daughter Sylvia in 1946. Close to where the Barbican stands today, this area at the boundary of the City of London had suffered drastic bomb damage and much of it remained a wasteland for decades. Roving around these desolate streets as far east as Spitalfields, Cyril Mann discovered the subject matter for a body of works which became the focus of a major exhibition at the Wildenstein Gallery in 1948.
Losing his hair in his thirties, Cyril Mann had the look of a man older than his years. Through the Depression he had been unemployed and close to starvation, yet thanks to a trust fund set up by Erica Marx he entered the Royal Academy Schools at twenty years old in 1931. For one so young, he had already seen a great deal of life. At twelve, he had been the youngest boy ever to win a scholarship to Nottingham College of Art, before leaving at fifteen to be a missionary in Canada. Quickly abandoning this ambition, he became a logger, a miner and a printer, until returning to London to renew his pursuit of a career as an artist. Ever restless, he moved to Paris after three years at the Royal Academy and there he met his first wife Mary Jervis Read.
Forced to leave his wife and baby when he was called up in 194o, Cyril Mann did not paint at all for the duration of the war. Back in London and battling ill-health, he set out to make up for lost time. The fragmented urban landscape of bombsites that was familiar to Londoners was new to him and, turning his gaze directly into the sun, he sought to paint it transfigured by light. Channelling his turbulent emotion into these works, Cyril Mann strove to discover an equilibrium in the disparate broken elements he saw before him, and many of these paintings are almost monochromatic, as if the light is dissolving the forms into a mirage.
During these years, Cyril Mann’s life underwent dramatic change. He obtained a teaching job at the Central School of Art in 1947 and exhibited at the prestigious Wildenstein Galery, showing his new works in 1948. Yet at the same time, his marriage broke down and he found himself alone, painting in the tiny flat in Paul St. Whilst critically acclaimed, his exhibition was a commercial failure because, in post-war London, nobody wanted to see images of bombsites and consequently these important works became forgotten.
Yet, through his struggle, Cyril Mann’s work as an artist had acquired a new momentum and, after 1950, a bold use of colour returned to his painting. In 1956, he was offered a flat in the newly-built modernist Bevin Court built by Tecton in Islington, where today a plaque commemorates him. In 1964, he moved east to Leyton and then Walthamstow,where he died in 1980.
At a time when all other artists turned away from painting the London streets, Cyril Mann made it his subject. While these pictures may not have suited the taste of the post-war capital, they comprise a unique body of work that witnesses the spirit and topography of these threadbare years. As his second wife, Renske who met Cyril Mann in 1959, assured me, “I believe he is the most significant London painter of the nineteen-forties, post-war.”
Cyril Mann preparing for his exhibition at Wildenstein Gallery in 1948
St Paul’s from Moor Lane, 1948
Cyril in his crowded flat in Paul St, c. 1950
Christ Church Spitalfields seen across bombsites from Scrutton St
Christ Church Spitalfields seen over bombsites from Redchurch St
Bomb site in Paul St with cat, c. 1950
Christ Church Spitalfields seen from Shoreditch
Bomb sites around Paul St, c. 1950
Christ Church Spitalfields from Worship St, c. 1948
Streetscape with red pillar box
East End shop
Trolley bus in Finsbury Sq, c. 1949
Finsbury Sq, c. 1949
Finsbury Sq, c. 1949
Red lamp post, Old St
Bombsite at Old St
Cock & Magpie, Wilson St, Shoreditch
St Michael, Shoreditch, c. 1948
St Michael and St Leonard’s Shoreditch from Leonard St, c. 1950
Angel Islington from City Rd, 1950
St James Church, Pentonville Rd, Islington, 1950
Cyril Mann (1911-1980)
Images copyright © Estate of Cyril Mann
Paintings by Cyril Mann can be seen at Piano Nobile Gallery
Robert Wells, The Boy On The Bicycle
Rob Wells cycles down Brick Lane in 1984
Rob Wells cycles down Brick Lane in 2014
When Robert Wells – or Rob as he is widely known – moved with his family at nine years old from Tomlinson Close at the north end of Brick Lane to Nathaniel Close at the south end of the Lane, he was always cycling back and forth from his new house in Spitalfields on his BMX to visit his old friends in Bethnal Green. One day unawares, Rob cycled into the frame, as Phil Maxwell pressed the button and the shutter fell while Rob crossed the junction of Brick Lane and Princelet St – recording the moment for ever. Yet Rob did not know he had been photographed and Phil soon forgot the picture among the thousands he took of Brick Lane at that time.
Thirty years later, Rob got a call from a friend to say that he was pictured on the cover of Phil Maxwell’s book Brick Lane. “It was just a wow, I was happy!” Rob admitted to me, recalling his surprise when he first saw the photograph recently, “At first, I didn’t believe it – but when I looked at the picture, I began to remember the clothes I was wearing.”
I met Rob when he introduced himself to me.“I’m the boy on the bicycle!” he said proudly. It was an astonishing encounter because at once I recognised Rob from his picture and I saw that he still possessed the same brightness of spirit today which Phil captured in the photograph thirty years ago. Realising this was an opportunity too good to miss, I asked Rob if he would be willing to collaborate with Phil Maxwell to reshoot the photograph and that is what we did at ten o’clock on Saturday morning.
Brick Lane is a one way street and Saturday is the quietest morning, so I watched out for cars while Rob cycled up and down a couple of times, passing Phil standing on the corner of Princelet St. Thus we accomplished our task and you can compare the changes wrought by thirty years in the pair of photographs above. Once the business of the day was concluded, we sought refreshment and Rob revealed more of the background to the picture to us.
“I wish I still had that bike. All my friends had bikes and we were always exchanging parts, so if someone got new wheels then someone else got the hand-me-downs. You’d go round to a friend’s house and they’d have all these spare parts lying around in the garden, and they were like little mechanics. My bike was a mish-mash of bits and pieces, it was probably a hand-me-down from my brother or friends. I used to go everywhere on it. I didn’t tell my mum, but I cycled all the way to King’s Cross to look at trains. Society has changed, children can’t do that anymore.
One day, I went home to go to the toilet and left my bike outside. My mum said it was dinner time and I forgot about it, but half an hour later it was gone. Someone had nicked it – this must have been shortly after the picture was taken.
When I was six or seven there was quite a bit of racial tension here. At the Bethnal Green end of Brick Lane, white kids were in the majority and they picked on the Asian kids but, when I moved to the other end, I got picked on by Asian kids – so I experienced both sides of the situation. In those days, if there was any piece of green, you played football on it and I ended up playing for the BYF – Bengali Youth Football. They said, ‘You can’t play for us, you’re white,’ but I said, ‘I want to play football, does it matter whether I come from Bangladesh or not?’ And that’s what I did.
My mum had three kids with my dad – who was a champion boxer in Bethnal Green – but she left him because he knocked us about. One day he kidnapped us after school, and the police had to come and take us back. For a while, he worked in the amusement arcade next to McDonald’s in Bethnal Green and I used to visit him there. A lot of people I knew in my crowd when I was young got involved in hard drugs and ended up in prison or on the streets, but I turned out all right. I’m a self-employed builder and I only work when I please. I am my own boss and I have two daughters, Eliza and Darcy.
We moved to Stepney when I was thirteen and I live in Epping now, but my family have been around this area a long time. I was born in the Royal London Hospital in 1975 and Brick Lane was my home. I used to go down to the market when I was five. I went to St Matthias School in Bacon St and walked there every day down Brick Lane, and ran to get home by three o’clock to watch Thomas the Tank Engine. I do miss that Brick Lane, but you’ll never get it back. I had a happy childhood there. I love this area and it’ll always be in my heart.”
Rob may not live on Brick Lane any more but, thanks to Phil Maxwell, he will always be there as the boy on the bicycle because, on that day he cycled unwittingly into the photograph thirty years ago, he cycled into eternity.
“I wish I still had that bike”
“I love this area and it’ll always be in my heart”
CLICK HERE TO BUY A COPY OF PHIL MAXWELL’S BRICK LANE FOR £10
Rachael South, Chair Caner & Upholsterer
Rachael South at her workshop in Dalston
It never fails to inspire me when I meet someone who finds joy in the work they do – and Rachael South, third-generation chair caner, is a prime example. The chain of events that led to making contact with Rachael was extraordinary and the resultant visit to her workshop proved a rewarding outcome.
A couple of weeks ago, I published a picture of an unknown man in a suit sitting on the kerb mending a cane chair, which came from David Sweetland’s A London Inheritance, where he writes a weekly commentary upon his father’s photographs of London in the fifties and sixties. The picture fascinated me because of its similarity to the age-old images of chair menders to be found in the Cries of London series of prints published in these pages. Imagine my surprise when his granddaughter, Rachael, got in touch, naming him as Michael South and explaining that she carries on the trade to this day which was taught to her by her father, who had in turn been taught by her grandfather.
My quest led me to an old workshop in Shacklewell Lane where Rachael spends her days caning and upholstering chairs by the light of a large window. “The family lived in Ladbroke Grove but was Irish in origin, I believe there were a lot of Irish immigrants there at one time,” she revealed to me, talking as she worked at her caning, “Michael, my grandfather, was a prizefighter and bare-knuckle boxer, but over time the chair caning took over as his boxing career waned. He had a pedlar’s licence and walked up the hill from Ladbroke Grove to work around Kensington and Knightsbridge. They may have been travelling people once, because I was told it was called ‘Gypsy Caning.’ You can do it in the street because you don’t need any tools, just a knife and a block of wood or hammer to knock out the pegs.”
Certainly, chair caning has been carried out upon the streets of London for centuries and Rachael delights in the notion of being the inheritor of this artisan tradition, which suits her independent nature very well and guarantees a constant income as long as she chooses to do it.
“Terry, my dad, wanted to stay on at school and train as a draughtsman but at fourteen my granddad said, ‘You’ve got to get a job,'” Rachael admitted to me. “He had been brought up doing chair caning and he managed to get an apprenticeship with Mrs Shield, who was a celebrity decorator of the time – before setting up his own upholstery workshop in Harrow where he trained six apprentices”
My dad taught me caning when I was fourteen. I used to go along to his workshop and I liked it, because I’m quite a patient person and the upholsterers were a good laugh,” Rachael recalled fondly, “and when I went to Art College, it was what I did to make money – I lived in Hammersmith and went round all the antiques dealers and they supplied me with enough caning to see me through.”
Employed as a textile designer, Rachael soon felt the need for freedom and set up her own workshop as upholsterer and chair caner. “I’ve never been without work and I have three people working with me. I’m forty-four now and I’ve been caning chairs for thirty years,” she confided to me proudly, “I can’t turn work away because I know I can do it and people are always so delighted when I give it back to them. I say, ‘That’s it done for another generation.'”
Rachael’s grandfather Michael South (1905-1964) at work in Kensington, sitting on his tool box
Michael worked with a pedlar’s licence in West London –“He had many brothers and sisters. One called Samson used to ride a motorbike on the wall of death and another called Danny had only one ear.”
Rachael’s father Terry South at work in his workshop in Harrow in the seventies
Rachael South at work today in Dalston
Terry South and Rachael at his workshop in 1978
Rachael sets to work with cane soaked in water for flexibility
Michael always went to work dressed in a suit and leather shoes
Rachael with a bundle of reeds
“Israel Potter, one of the oldest menders of chairs still living” – as portrayed by John Thomas Smith in Vagabondiana, 1819
Photo by John Thomson from Street Life in London, 1876: Caney the Clown – ”thousands remember how he delighted them with his string of sausages at the yearly pantomime, but Caney has cut his last caper since his exertions to please at Stepney Fair caused the bursting of a varicose vein in his leg and, although his careworn face fails to reflect his natural joviality, the mending of chairs brings him constant employment.”
“Old Chairs to mend!” by Thomas Wheatley, seventeen-nineties
“Any Old Chairs To Mend! & Green and Young Hastings!” by Sam Syntax
“Old Chairs to mend, Old Chairs to Mend!” by J. Kendrew
“Chairs to Mend!” from The New Cries Of London, 1803
“The kerbside mender of chairs, who ‘if he had more money to spend would not be crying – “Chairs to mend!’ is one of the neatest-fingered of street traders. Watch how deftly he weaves his strips of cane in and out – how neatly he finishes off each chair, returning it to the owner, ‘good as new.'” from London Characters, 1934
William Marshall Craig’s Itinerant Traders in their Ordinary Costune, 1804 : “Chairs to mend. The business of mending chairs is generally conducted by a family or a partnership. One carries the bundle of rush and collects old chairs, while the workman seating himself in some convenient corner on the pavement, exercises his trade. For small repairs they charge from fourpence to one shilling, and for newly covering a chair from eighteen pence to half a crown, according to the fineness of the rush required and the neatness of the workmanship. It is necessary to bargain for price prior to the delivery of the chairs, or the chair mender will not fail to demand an exorbitant compensation for his time and labour.”
Chairmender at corner of Prince Orange Lane, Greenwich from Charles Spurgeon’s Londoners
From Julius Mendes Price’s London Types, 1919
From The Cries of London, early nineteenth century
Archive photos of Michael South © A London Inheritance
Cries of London courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Contact Rachael South for chair caning and upholstery
Whitechapel Lads
Seen for the first time in over a century, these are a series of portraits taken around 1900 at the Working Lads Institute, known today as the Whitechapel Mission. After my first visit with Colin O’Brien to take portraits at the Mission on Easter Tuesday, I returned this week to select these glass plates from the archive.
Founded in 1876, the Institute offered a home to young men who had been involved in petty criminal activity, rehabilitating them through working at the Mission which tended to the poor and needy in Whitechapel. Once a lad had proved himself, he was able to seek independent employment with the support and recommendation of the Institute.
The Working Lads Institute was the first of its kind in London to admit black people and Rev Thomas Jackson, the founder, is pictured here with five soldiers at the time of World War I
Stained glass window with a figure embodying ‘Industry’ as an inspiration to the lads
In the dormitory
Rev Thomas Jackson & the lads collect for the Red Cross outside the Mission
Click here to learn more about The Whitechapel Mission
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Andrew Tuer’s Old London Cries
Andrew White Tuer (1838–1900) was a bookseller, writer and publisher who set up the Leadenhall Press in the City of London, and had a passion for the centuries-old culture of chapbooks and pamphlets that preceded him.
In 1885, within ten year of John Thomson publishing Street Life in London, the first photographic survey of street traders in 1876, Tuer published Old London Cries – a self-consciously arcane production in the form of a chapbook from an earlier age.
It was an affectionate anecdotal history of the popular print tradition of the Cries of London, put together just as it was coming to an end, and I am proud to have acquired a first edition this week for a mere pittance, as the latest in my ever-growing collection that I have been amassing in recent years.
“Three rows a penny, pins!”
“Buy a fine singing bird!”
“Fine writing ink!”
“Buy a fork or fire shovel!”
“Troope every one!”
“Hot spice gingerbread!”
“Knives to grind!”
“Cabbages O! Turnips!”
“Cherries O! Ripe cherries O!”
“All a blowin’ !”
“Fresh oysters! Penny a lot!”
“Sand O!”
“Fine large cucumbers!”
“Large silver eels!”
“Buy my fine myrtles and roses!”
“Tiddy diddy doll!”
“Young lambs to sell!”
“Chairs to mend!”
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
More East End Soldiers Of World War I
Approaching the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, we remember some of those from the East End who served in the conflict. These photographs are a second selection from those already collected by Tower Hamlets Community Homes for an exhibition and booklet to come in August. Readers are invited to contribute their family pictures and stories by emailing andy.coleborn@thch.org.uk
George Joseph Dubock was descended from a Huguenot family that arrived in the East End in 1706. He was born on 5th December 1878 in 109 Eastfield St, Limehouse, and his family moved shortly after to Mile End Old Town. George worked as a Dock Labourer and a Road Sweeper/Scavenger for the Council. Serving as Private #14373 in the Sixth Dorset Regiment, George was a victim of a gas attack and suffered post-traumatic stress after the War. Later, George became a Master Cabinet Maker and ended his days working in Newbury, restoring old furniture until he died in 1951.
Cards sent home from the Front by George Joseph Dubock
Alfred William Blanford was born in Poplar in 1894 and lived in Whitethorn St, Bow. At eighteen, in April 1912, he married Florence Jenkins and, in the December of the same year, they had their first child – also called Alfred. In February 2014, Alfred & Florence’s second son, Fredrick, was born and their third child, Edith, in December 1916.
Alfred joined the Army before his twentieth birthday and, in December 1914, by the time of Fredrick’s birth, he was in training in Aldershot. He served as a Driver in the Royal Field Artillery and was killed in action in May 1916, before the birth of his daughter Edith.
Henry George Crooney, also known as Harry, was born in Poplar in 1897 and served in the Royal Artillery from 1914-1918. Lying about his age, Henry enlisted in the Army before he was legally eligible. He joined the Royal Artillery because of his experience with horses, having worked since a child with his father who ran horses and carts from the docks.
Henry’s grand-daughter, Cheryl Loughnane, recalls the wartime stories Henry would tell – including his hatred of bully beef and of the time he stole a pig from French farm.
After the war, Henry married Annie and worked as a haulier. When he retired, he could not stop driving around the East End and became a volunteer for ‘Meals on Wheels,’ delivering dinners to pensioners.
Alfred James Barwell was a Private in the Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment). He lived with his parents, Alfred & Alice Barwell, at 27 Museum Buildings, Chester St, Bethnal Green. Aged just nineteen, Alfred was killed in action on 21st March 1918. His is listed on the Pozieres Memorial (Panel Ref 58 and 59) in the Somme.
James Polston, Rifleman 5059 in the Eighteenth Battallion London Regiment – London Irish Rifles. James was born on 20th September 1884, the eldest son of James & Elizabeth Polston who lived at Warner Place, Bethnal Green, and Lauriston Rd in Bow. He was killed in action on 8th December 1916 and is commemorated at the Railway Dugouts Burial Ground in Flanders.
(Photo of Water Tull courtesy of Doug Banks)
Second Lieutenant Walter Tull was the first black British Army Infantry Officer. The son of a joiner, Walter was born in Folkestone on 28th April 1888. His father, the son of a slave, had arrived from Barbados in 1876. In 1895, when Walter was seven, his mother died and his father remarried only to die two years later. The stepmother was unable to cope with all six children and so Walter and his brother Edward were sent to a Methodist -run orphanage in Bethnal Green.
Walter was a keen footballer and played for a team in Clapton. In 1908, his talents were discovered by a scout from Tottenham Hotspur and the club decided to sign the promising young footballer. He played for Tottenham until 1910, when he was transferred for a large fee to Northampton Town. Walter became the first black outfield player to play professional football in Britain.
When World War I broke out, Walter abandoned his football career to join the Seventeenth (First Football) Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment and, during his military training, he was promoted three times. In November 1914, as Lance Sergeant, he was sent to Les Ciseaux but, in May 1915, he was sent home with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Returning to France in September 1916, Walter fought in the Battle of the Somme between October and November. His courage and abilities encouraged his superior officers to recommend him as an Officer and, on 26th December, 1916, Walter went back to England to train as an Officer.
There were military laws forbidding ‘any negro or person of colour’ being commissioned as an Officer. Despite this, Walter was promoted to Lieutenant in 1917 and became the first ever black Officer in the British Army, and the first black Officer to lead white men into battle.
Walter was sent to the Italian Front where he twice led his Company across the River Piave on a raid and both times brought all of his troops back safely. He was mentioned in Despatches for his ‘gallantry and coolness’ under fire by his commanding officer and he was recommended for the Military Cross, but never received it.
After their time in Italy, Walter’s Battalion was transferred to the Somme and, on 25th March 1918, he was killed by machine gun fire while trying to help his men withdraw.
Walter was such a popular man that several of his men risked their own lives in an attempt to retrieve his body under heavy fire, but they were unsuccessful due to the enemy soldiers’ advance. His body was never found and he is one of the many thousands from World War I who has no known grave.
(Story & photo of John Arthur Tribe courtesy of East London Advertiser)
John Arthur Tribe was part of a large, close-knit family from Kirby St, Poplar. John lied about his age and joined the Army in 1911, serving in the Fourth Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, at first in India and then at the Battle of Loos in 1915, where he was killed in action. John is commemorated at the Loos Memorial but has no known grave.
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