More Blogs Spawned
One of the joys of teaching courses encouraging others to write blogs is that – without exception – the participants always come up with wonderful ideas and here are just a couple that have been spawned as a result. The next course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ will be held in Spitalfields on 11th & 12th October.
The view from the terrace of our house-to-be
A HOUSE IN THE ALGARVE
Leaving the East End of London and moving to Portugal
http://ahouseinthealgarve.com/
It can be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment a decision is made. The impulse is hardly felt, the impetus slowly grows, things start to be done. Small and large. Large is booking the flight to go to look at properties, then back at home instructing an agent to sell our flat. Small are the acts of tidying, sorting, organising, beginning to make it all possible.
Harder still is to explain why having loved London for thirty years, why having only months earlier completed the improvements to our flat that we had waited thirteen years to be able to afford to make, and having relished them for only weeks, we suddenly wanted out, both of us. Out of London, out of jobs (my husband’s – I’m a freelancer and I shall keep on doing mine).
This is the beginning, and while nothing irreversible has taken place in reality, something irreversible has taken place in our hearts. In a matter of months, all being well, we will have sold our flat and moved into a house in the eastern Algarve, in southern Portugal. My husband will have given up his stressful but quite well paid job in publishing, and will be baking bread. I will support us through my work as a freelance editor, which I hope will survive the translocation intact. As it is, I have worked with people for years in the same city whom I have not yet met, so can it make much difference if I’m further away?
This will be the story, week by week, of how it all happens.
3rd September, 2014
I’m typing this sitting on the floor of an empty flat. On Wednesday evening our solicitor phoned us to tell us contracts had been exchanged. Confirmation in writing came on Friday.
On Thursday, Husband made it with my help to his office where he delivered a leaving speech while leaning on crutches and with the additional support of a wall. He was very happy to be able to say his goodbyes. On Saturday he and I travelled by train to my mum’s house, a bungalow – what joy! – where he will convalesce, then I returned to London. I now had thirty-two hours before the packers arrived. I managed to work for twenty-four of these hours.
Last week on his way home, Husband had an accident on his moped, caused by a cyclist running a red light. Superficially it didn’t seem a bad accident. No harm done to the moped anyway. However, in attempting to avoid the collision with the cyclist and then self-correct, Husband shot out a foot, which met the tarmac, sending severe forces up to his knee and fracturing his tibial plateau.
He was taken by ambulance to University College London Hospital. Three days later – that is, last Friday afternoon – he had an operation to insert a metal plate to hold the knee together. At 5pm I phoned up. The woman who answered couldn’t help, but assured me that Ron, Husband’s nurse, would call me right back. By 6.30, no return call.
I’m not an especially panicky person, but I did think that Husband might be dead. They wouldn’t want to give you that information over the phone, would they? I decided to go in. I arrived at the ward and saw the empty space where Husband and his bed had been.
The first person I asked wanted to be helpful but didn’t know anything about Mr G. The second person couldn’t help either but told me to talk to ‘Ron.’ Ron was busy with a patient and so I waited, stricken. Finally, Ron had done all he had to do there and peeled away. I tried to intercept but a woman sitting by a man in the next bed got in first and called out to him, ‘We asked for tea half an hour ago.” Ron promised to see to this.
Oh God. Ron’s going to disappear to make tea. Oh God. I stepped in front of him and forced some words out of my constricted throat. “Excuse me, I’m looking for my husband, Mr G.”
“‘I can only bring up one patient at a time,” said Ron narkily. This told me that Husband is alive! He wouldn’t have said that if he was dead.
I returned to the ward and there was Husband, looking fine. A little spaced out, a little pale, but fine. In my handbag I had some slices of his latest home made bread, which had been in the freezer. He ate it like a hungry lion. All will be well. Just eight weeks of first-stage recovery to get through.
Lego octopus washed up on a beach in South Devon in the late nineties
LEGO LOST AT SEA
https://www.facebook.com/LegoLostAtSea
In 1997, nearly five million bits of Lego fell into the sea when a huge wave hit the container ship Tokio Express, washing sixty-two containers overboard. Beachcomber, Tracey Williams, first discovered pieces of sea-themed Lego on beaches around her family home in South Devon in the late nineties. She now lives in Cornwall, where the shipwrecked Lego still washes up daily.
Here’s a photo of some the different types of Lego that were in the containers that fell off the Tokio Express. If you find any, please let us know as I’ve been told that it all needs to be reported to the Receiver of Wreck and it’s probably easiest if I do monthly reports for them rather than everybody reporting each individual daisy (and there over 350,000 of those) individually.
Tiny treasures picked up during recent beach cleans in North Cornwall, including three pieces of Lego and a lobster trap tag from Maine, US
BEATA BISHOP – The Way I See It
http://beatabishop.wordpress.com
Waiting for the Thames
11th February, 2014
I’ve been living in West London near the Thames for many years. A comfortable trot takes me to the water’s edge in five minutes or so, and a walk along the towpath to commune with the waterfowl is a wonderful antidote to all the hours spent at the computer.
But now the Thames has burst its banks at Chertsey and Datchet, not all that far away, and the latest BBC news was mainly about waterlogged houses, sandbags and tired volunteers. Not a word about when, or whether, that unholy amount of water will roll down to these parts. So here I sit, wondering what to do.
When I first moved here, a message arrived from Hounslow Council. It instructed me, in the case of flooding, to go upstairs with radio and kettle and wait for instructions. A telephone number was also given, with “Monday to Friday, 9 to 5″ in bold print.“There will always be an England,” I thought. Flood, what flood? I hope not to find out now.
The Thames is tidal here, and continental visitors used to the unchanging flow of the Seine in Paris or the Rhine at Cologne get quite upset when they see the Thames turning in a few hours from a grown-up river to a muddy trickle. Ebb or flow, I know and love it so well, complete with gulls, Canada geese, moorhens, ducks, swans and cygnets. During a long illness many years ago, when I was practically housebound, this path was my only escape from a tiresome, demanding therapy – it saved my sanity with its perpetual motion and shimmering beauty. Ever since, a kind of love affair has been going on between the river and me.
Back to the flooding. The huge, elegant and murderously-expensive houses along the river protect their front gardens with tall walls – the flotsam and jetsam of a high tide reaches those walls with ease. I stop for a moment under one of the old weeping willows that leans towards the water. It is used to having its roots washed regularly, but will it survive a total immersion? Will we, living on this flood plain?
Shall I have to go upstairs with kettle, radio and my old wellies, waiting to be rescued no longer only between 9 and 5, Monday to Friday? Frankly, I am scared.
“”Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” and beyond, too. Please.
Converted Volkswagen Dormobile Camper used as an Ice Cream Bus
LIAM O’FARRELL – A personal celebration of ordinariness
As I am fortunate enough to live in Pilton where the Glastonbury Festival is held, and living here makes it easy for me to get out with my paints and do a spot of work in between bands, larger and hog roast. I felt that this year I would take it a bit easier and just do a few small postcards for a bit of festival fun. The festival occupies and few square miles, and fifty odd stages so there is a vast army of businesses on site to offer the best takeaways in all the world. With that in mind, I decided to paint a few of the many weird and wonderful food and refreshment vans that are plying their trade. The three vans were just randomly chosen, though each I felt had a particular charm which exemplifies the festival. I had to dodge the weather on occasion, though I got what I wanted in the end.
Converted Citroen H Van used as The Tea & Toast Van
Converted Volkswagen Dormobile Camper used as The Olive Van
FLY TIPPINGS – British for trash dumping, American for an absurd image
I think that it is fairly obvious at this point that I am not much of a writer. I tend to write short, choppy sentences and to be rather terse. But, I did go to this blogging course and I feel that I owe it to my fellow students to at least try. I also confess that I just wanted to meet the brilliant teacher of the course, I had no idea that I would actually have to write anything. And that it would be personal.
August 9th 2014
This is my dentist. I asked him if it was okay to write a blog post about him and he said “yes.” He has been my dentist for thirty years, we started going to him because his daughter worked with my husband. Over the years, I have gotten to know him, his pets, the wildlife around his house (he lives over across the valley on the side of the mountain) and his whole family.
He’s a working-class guy from Pueblo, Colorado. His father was an Italian immigrant who came to Pueblo to work in the steel mill, back when there was a steel mill. His father was long gone, but his mother lived to be a hundred. My dentist is well past the age when most people retire (his son, the dentist, just retired), but he likes his work, and he is really, really good. When he hit retirement age, he got interested in forensic dentistry and learning about new things has kept him going. He often has stories about cases that he is working on for the Coroner. He has done dental identification of corpses, and bite mark analysis in criminal cases.
When I saw him last week I thought to ask him why he became a dentist. He was studying to be a doctor and working nights at a hospital while he went to school. He found it too difficult to deal with death, so he switched over to dentistry and, as I said, he is very good. The entire time he is working on you he is blathering and telling bad jokes, he must know thousands of them. Before you know it, he’s finished and everything in your mouth is working again.
HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ, 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields, 11th & 12th October
You may also want to take a look at my earlier selection
Hop Picking Portraits
Every September, at hop picking time, Tower Hamlets Community Housing stages a Hop Picking Festival down in Cable St, affording the hop pickers of yesteryear a chance to gather and share their tales of past adventures down in Kent, and this year Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I went along to join the party.
Connie Aedo – “I’m from Shovel Alley, Twine Court, at the Tower Bridge end of Cable St. I was very little when I first went hop picking. At weekends, when we worked half-days, my mum would let me go fishing. Even after I left school, I still went hop picking. Friends had cars and we drove down for the weekend, as you can see in the photo. Do you see the mirrors on the outside of the sheds? That’s because men can’t shave in the dark!”
Derek Protheroe, Terry Line, Charlie Protheroe, Connie Aedo and Terry Gardiner outside the huts at Jack Thompsett’s Farm, Fowle Hall, near Paddock Wood, 1967
Maggie Gardiner – “My mum took us all down to Kent for fruit picking and hop picking. Once, parachutes came down in the hop gardens and we didn’t know if they were ours or not, but they were Germans. So my mum told me and the others to go back to the hut and put the stew on. On the way back, a German aeroplane flew over and machine gunned us and we hid in a ditch until the man in the pub came to get us out. My mum used to say, ‘If you can fill an umbrella with hops, I’ll get you a bike,’ but I’m still waiting for it. We had some good times though and some laughs.”
Alifie Rains (centre) and Johnny Raines (right) from Parnham St, Limehouse, in the hop gardens at Jack Thompsett’s Farm, Fowle Hall, Kent
Vera Galley – “I was first taken hop picking as a baby. My mum, my nan and my brothers and sisters, we all went hop picking together. I never liked the smell of hops when I was working in the hop gardens because I had to put up with it, but now I love it because it brings back memories. ”
Mr & Mrs Gallagher with Kitty Adams and Jackie Gallgher froom Westport St, Stepney, in the hop gardens at Pembles Farm, Five Oak Green, Kent in 1950
Harry Mayhead – “I went hop picking when I was nine years old in 1935 and it was easy for kids. It was like going on holiday, getting a break from the city for a month. Where I lived in a block of flats and the only outlook was another block of flats, you never saw any green grass.”
Mr & Mrs Gallagher with their grandchildren at Pembles Farm, 1958
Lilian Penfold – ” I first went hop picking as a baby. I was born in August and by September I was down there in the hop garden. M daughter Julie, she was born in July and I took her down her down in September too. We were hopping until ten years ago when then brought in the machines and they didn’t need us any more. My aunt had grey hair but it turned green from the hops!”
The Liddiard family from Stepney in Kent, 1930
Dolly Frost – ” I was a babe in arms when they took me down to the hop gardens and I went picking for years and years until I was a teenager. I loved it while was I was growing up. My mother used to say, ‘Make sure you pick enough so you can have a coat and hat,’ and I got a red coat and matching red velour hat. As you can see, I like red.”
The Gallagher family from Stepney outside their huts at Pembles Farm, 1952
Charles Brownlow – “I started hop picking when I was seven. It was a working holiday to make some money. This was during the bombing, you woke up and the street had gone overnight, so to get to the country was an escape. You wouldn’t believe how many people crammed into those tiny huts. You took a jug of tea to work with you and at first it was hot but then it went cold but you carried on drinking it because you were hot. You could taste the hops in your sandwiches because it was all over your hands. There was a lot of camaraderie, people had nothing but it didn’t matter.”
Mr & Mrs Gallagher from Stepney at Pembles Farm
Margie Locke – “I’m eighty-eight and I went hop picking and fruit picking from the age of four months, and I only packed up last year because the farm I where went hop picking has been sold for development and they are building houses on it.”
At Highwood’s Farm, Collier St, Kent
Michael Tyrell – “I was first taken hop picking in the sixties when I was five months old, and I carried on until 1981 when hops was replaced by rapeseed which was subsidised by the European Community. In the past, one family was put in a single hut, eleven feet by eleven feet, but we had three joined together – with a bedroom, a kitchen with a cooker run off a calor gas bottle and even a television run off a car battery. There was still no running water and we had to use oil lamps. My family went to Thompsett’s Farm about three miles from Paddock Wood from the First World War onwards. I have a place there now, about a mile from where my grandad went hop picking. The huts are still there and we scattered my uncle’s ashes there.”
Annie & Bill Thomas near Cranbrook, Kent
Lilian Peat (also known as ‘Splinter’) – “My mum and dad and seven brothers and three sisters, we all went hop picking from Bethnal Green every year. I loved it, it was freedom and fresh air but we had to work. My mum used to get the tail end of the bine and, if we didn’t pick enough, she whipped us with it. My brothers used to go rabbiting with ferrets. The ferrets stayed in the hut with us and they stank. And every day we had rabbit stew, and I’ve never been able to eat rabbit since. We were high as kites all the time because the hop is related to the cannabis plant, that’s why we remember the happy times.”
John Doree, Alice Thomas, Celia Doree and Mavis Doree, near Cranbrook, Kent
Mary Flanagan – “I’m the hop queen. I twine the bines. I first went hop picking in 1940. My dad sent us down to Plog’s Hall Farm on the Isle of Grain. We went in April or May and my mum did the twining. Then we did fruit picking, then hop picking, then the cherries and bramleys until October. We had a Mission Hall down there, run by Miss Whitby, a church lady who showed us films of Jesus projected onto a sheet but, if the planes flew overhead, we ran back to our mothers. We used to hide from the school inspector, who caught us eventually and put us in Capel School when I was eight or ten – that’s why I’m such a dunce!”
Annie & Bill Thomas with Roy & Alf Baker, near Cranbrook, Kent
Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Archive photographs courtesy of Tower Hamlets Community Housing
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Seventeenth Century Finds From Shoreditch
Moneyboxes, a jug and a candleholder from Holywell
The name of Holywell Lane is the only clue today of the former existence of Holywell Priory that stood between Shoreditch High St and Curtain Rd from the eleventh century until it was seized by the crown in 1539. Thomas Manners, a favourite of Henry VIII, acquired the lion’s share of the site and he created a rambling mansion for himself by combining the surviving medieval buildings and converting them to his own use for aristocratic banquets and lavish entertainment. And nearby, grand houses for wealthy merchants were constructed facing onto Shoreditch High St.
The recent construction of the new East London Line across this site afforded the opportunity to excavate and I paid a visit to the Museum of London Archaeological Archive in Hoxton recently to take a look at some of the artefacts they discovered. Ceramic Specialist, Jacqui Pearce, laid them out on a table for me and we passed a pleasant morning as she took me through, explaining the origin and purpose of each item.
The curious onion-shaped Tudor moneyboxes caught my eye first. Manufactured on the Surrey Hampshire border in whiteware and glazed in an attractive mustard hue, these were turned on a wheel and pin-pricked to let the air escaped as they dried. Then the coin slot was cut with a knife and they were dipped into glaze before firing. Jacqui explained that these moneyboxes were sometimes used in theatres to collect coins as the audience entered and then stored in a box until they were full, in a room that became known as the Box Office. Similar moneyboxes were found at the Rose Theatre site and these discovered in Shoreditch may be connected to the Theatre or the Curtain Theatre nearby. Jacqui pointed out to me the fingerprints of the maker, still visible, and chips around the slot where someone tried to get their money out with a knife centuries ago.
A red clay pitcher made in London of utlitarian design captured my imagination as an object that would have once been familiar to all, as a water or ale jug. Jacqui explained to me that jugs and mugs often have burn marks where they have placed in the fire to warm the ale. This specimen had a splash of glaze on the front just so that any drips from the spout would run off, while the absorbent quality of the clay permitted the jug to stand in water and keep the contents cool in summer. The Holywell Priory would have had elaborate gardens and Jacqui has seen similar examples with a watering can rose upon the front of the jug and others with perforations in the base to deliver a fine spray for delicate plants.
A sixteenth century porringer, with a small handle to grip it comfortably in your hand while eating soup or stew or porridge, was an object that evoked an entire way of life to me, an existence punctuated with innumerable weary fireside suppers after the day’s work. Similarly an imported Bellarmine bottle used to decant wine from the cask and a pair of black-glazed clay mugs – made in Essex and each with a surprisingly fine lip – recalled the life of taverns. These were the common wares that would have been used in the inns that lined Bishopsgate and Shoreditch High St in Shakespeare’s day.
It was a poignant experience to spend a couple of hours in the company of these modest, fragile items which spoke of an earlier existence when everything was handmade. Objects that were used daily half a millennium ago in a location that is shortly to be threatened with violent transformation by the imposition of vast high-rise towers. And as I walked back from Hoxton to Spitalfields through Shoreditch, I could barely reconcile the enormity of difference between these two worlds in my mind – the one long-gone and the other lowering like a dark cloud upon the cusp of the future. The disquieting irony is that the excavations required to build this monolithic future will reveal more of our long-forgotten past, before obliterating it for ever.
Money box
An imported Bellarmine wine bottle from Frechen in the Rhineland and two tavern mugs made in Harlow, Essex
A sixteenth century pitcher made in London
Sixteenth century earthenware plate with dramatic slip decoration of the era when Londoners were moving from wooden bowls to ceramic dishes for eating
Seventeenth century porringer with an attractive speckled glaze
These are the centres of large tin-glazed serving plates, known as chargers
Two fragments of delft tile made in London, possibly in Aldgate
A witch bottle with the pins that were inside it from Holywell
Medieval lead token showing an ape looking at a mirror
Late Neolithic or early Bronze Age flint tool found at Holywell
Photographs copyright © MOLA
‘Tracks Through Time, Archaeology and History from the London Overground East London Line’ is available from Museum of London Shop
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The Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club Final Reunion Dinner
When I attended the 86th Anniversary Dinner of the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club in 2010 as guest of Ron Goldstein, I promised to return each year until the last. The numbers of those who were members from the nineteen-thirties were diminishing and, somehow, I foolishly imagined that eventually I should be there eating dinner with the remaining members fitting round one table.
Yet, possessing greater insight than I, the reunion committee took the executive decision to make the 90th Anniversary Dinner this year the final one, and thus Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney & I discovered ourselves amidst the excited throng at the Imperial Hotel, Russell Sq, on Monday night.
“It takes me back to when I was twelve, and the first night I met Maxie in the blackout in 1939 in Hare St, that you know as Cheshire St, on my way to join the Club” Manny Silverman ex-chief of Moss Bros and Norman Hartnell Couture reminded me, referring to Maxie Lea, the irrepressible Club Secretary who has been organising these dinners each year for the last sixty years. “It’s end of an era for everyone who went through the Club’s doors, but we are resigning because time is catching up with us and there have been no new members since 1989,” Manny confessed, raising his eyebrows for dramatic emphasis.
At the next table sat Dennis Frank, the oldest surviving Club Manager at a sprightly ninety-seven years old, with his junior, Alf Mendoza at a mere ninety-five. “I’m going to catch up with him eventually,” Alf assured me with a significant grin.
“We’ve had this same menu for the past ten years,” Maxie informed me proudly, as the waiters began serving Chicken Chasseur with carrots and broccoli again, “it means we don’t offend anybody.”
Monty Meth tapped my wrist in a kindly way. “No-one comes for the dinner,” he whispered diplomatically, winning my envy as he tucked in to a specially-made omelette. “There isn’t a month goes by that I don’t remember the Club,” he continued, speaking fondly, “Without it, I would have gone off the rails, but it kindled my interest in photography and writing that led to my career in Fleet St.”
Once the Chicken Chasseur was cleared away and the familiar Black Forest Gateau had been consumed, it was time for Monty’s speech as the climax of the evening and here I publish a few highlights.
“When I ask you later to be upstanding to drink that last toast, I would like us all to recall those few men of vision – who, on June 15th 1924, opened the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Jewish Boys’ Club. They were in the main graduates of Cambridge University who gave us what spare time and cash they had to buy numbers 3 & 4 Chance St, once the Blue Anchor pub, that had been converted into a cabinet-making workshop of the type so prevalent in Bethnal Green at the time.
Boys were admitted to the Club at the age of thirteen. Fifty-four boys were originally chosen by headmasters of local schools to join the Club and, by October 1925, one hundred and twenty had joined.
Twelve years later, the big decision was taken to open the doors to anyone irrespective of their religion – a decision which became known as the ‘Cambridge & Bethnal Green Experiment.’ It was regarded as “an alarming suggestion” by some people but I was interested to see that the parents of all the club members were consulted and not a single objection was received. By December 1938, the Jewish Chronicle admitted the “experiment was working very well.” Membership was then three hundred and twenty Jewish boys and eighty of other religions.
In a financial appeal launched at the time, the Club announced it was open to everyone irrespective of religion or denomination, no one was turned away. Segregation had ended. We didn’t appreciate it at the time, but the Club gave us the opportunity to emerge as individuals.
I retain to this day vivid pictures in my mind’s eye of George, Rowland, Derek Merton, and others , marching off from the Bishopstone Camp in 1939 to join the the King’s Royal and Tower Hamlets Rifles along with Club seniors. Some twenty young Club members never returned. I remember Ruby Ginsberg and Henry Landau. Others here tonght will recall Harry Freshwater. My own tent captain Donny Carlton was one of those who left the Bishopstone Camp but came home having won the Military Medal for gallantry.
So I’m now going to ask you to stand for a minute or so while we raise our glasses and recall the men who founded and led the Club for sixty-five years from 1924 until 1989. Let us remember too the boys we met, the friendships we made, and let us pledge to retain those Cambridge principles of fellowship, irrespective of race or creed, of tolerance and community cohesion, for as long as we live.”
Monty’s speech had attracted good-natured heckling by those who still did not want the Club to end, but after a last spirited performance of the Club song, the old boys dispersed into the night and an era in the East End that began with the opening of the Club in 1924 passed away. “Tonight is the end of my youth,” was Manny’s elegaic summation of the event, before he had another thought and announced, “now I can begin my second childhood.”
Ron Goldstein
Alf Mendoza
Monty Meth
Maxie Lea
Photographs copyright © Simon Mooney
Follow Ron Goldstein’s blog for future reports on the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club
You may also like to read these reports of previous dinners
At the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boy’s Club 86th Renuion Dinner
At the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club 89th Annual Dinner
and my interviews with members of the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club
and watch
Colin O’Brien’s Playground Portraits
In the midst of spending last week preparing the book of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers for publication in the autumn, I asked Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien if he would like to visit Weavers’ Adventure Playground with me before before summer’s end and create a series of portraits of ‘Bethnal Green Nippers’ in collaboration with the children. We were delighted to discover that our project coincided with the playground’s fortieth anniversary celebrations and join Sunday’s exuberant birthday party for this beloved institution which has brought joy to generations in this corner of the East End.
Alfie Davis
Brogan Ferron
Leo Hassan
Mason Pearce
Mickel Warner Mahood
Mya Warner Mahood
Arthur Ferron
Ishaac Bendjenahl
Michael Brown
Tilly Latham
Adam Warner Mahood
Lottie Ferron
Aaron McPherson
Mikki Gilbert
Patrick Doherty
Brogan Ferron
Mya Warner Mahood
Mason Pearce
Mikki Gilbert
Mason Pearce
Arthur Ferron
Paige Housham
Aaron McPherson
Arthur & Lottie Ferron
Brogan Ferron
Victor William, Playleader in charge at Weavers’ Adventure Playground
Victor and pals
Playleaders experience the ice bucket challenge at the adventure playground’s fortieth birthday party
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Weavers’ Adventure Playground, Viaduct St, Bethnal Green, E2 0BH
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Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers
Colin O’Brien’s Travellers ‘Children in London Fields
So Long, George Cossington the Steeplejack
George Cossington died last week at the age of eighty-one and and today I publish my interview with him, as a tribute to one of the last of London’s heroic steeplejacks to work without a safety harness.
This is George Cossington in the top left of this picture, photographed in the pursuit of his trade as a steeplejack & steel erector, perched at the very top of a one hundred and fifty foot jib during the construction of Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s Cathedral in 1958.
Seeing this vertiginous image, you will no doubt be relieved to know that George survived to tell the tales of his daring aerial adventures, still fit and full of swagger at eighty-one. ” In my day, you weren’t called a steel erector, you were called a spider man. I used to run up a sixty rung ladder in less than a minute and come down in less than twenty seconds – you just put your hands and feet on the sides and slid down! ” he bragged, with a modest smile that confirmed it was the truth.
George’s father was a steeplejack who once climbed Big Ben to fix the hands on the clock face and worked as chargehand on the construction on the Bank of England. So in 1947, when George left school at fourteen, there was no question about his future career, “All my friends were going into the Merchant Navy but when I came home with the form, my dad said, ‘No. You’re going into my trade so you get a pension.'” In fact, three out of the five boys in George’s family became steeplejacks, a significant measure of George’s father’s confidence in his own profession.
“My father, uncle and my brothers, we all loved it! There was none of this Health & Safety shit then, you learnt to be careful. What started coming in was the safety harness, a big belt with a hook on it attached to a rope – we hardly used them. There was no such thing as a crash helmet. Me and my brothers, we used to watch each other to check we put the bolts in correctly. It was all done properly, even without today’s safeguards.
I was apprenticed to Freddie Waite of Stratford. I started off as a tea boy. You learn as the months by, and then someone else becomes the tea boy and you learn how to adjust swivel bolts, rigging up steel beams, and how to sling a beam for the crane to lift. It takes well over a year before you start going off the ground. You had to learn rigging, slinging, welding, acetylene burning, and rope splicing. It takes five years to become a steeplejack. We used to walk the purlins that were four inches wide, you can’t do that today. Before scaffolding, we used wooden poles held together with wire bands, like they still do in the Far East. You had to know how to tie the wire bands securely, because it wasn’t an easy job going up to forty feet.
I enjoyed it, but I didn’t enjoy it when it was wet or cold. The crane used to take us in a bucket and put us on top of the steel work. In the Winter you could freeze. If it was a frosty night, we had a big fire in an oil drum and wrapped the chain around the fire to get the frost out of it, because if you didn’t it could snap like a carrot – a fifteen ton chain.
The day I fell, I was cutting some steelwork at Beckton Gas Works and it pissed down with rain, so they called us down. When I went back up again later, I cut one end of a beam without realising I had already cut the other end. I was seventeen years old. I was very lucky – my dad couldn’t believe it – a corrugated iron roof broke my fall. I had a few bruises, and a scar to this day. They called an ambulance but I was standing up by the time it came. I think I was only off work for a week, but I knew a couple of fellows that fell to their deaths.
My dad was still working up high until he was sixty-six. When he was the family foreman, he looked the business in a bowler hat. He taught me splicing and slinging, and he knew every sort of knot there was. He wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t do. He could throw a three-quarter inch bolt forty feet up for me to catch from a beam. Our last job together was on John Lewis in Oxford St. We were a hundred feet up in the air and he walked along beams as if they were on the ground.
I’ve never had a problem with heights. I’ve stood on the spider plate at the very top of a crane, three hundred and fifty feet up without a rope. I did it just for a laugh, but if my dad had seen me he’d have shot me…”
George retired at forty-five when he was required to wear a helmet on site, because he belonged to an earlier world that put more trust in human skill than safety procedures. When he spoke of pegging his own ladder to scale a factory chimney, I recognised a continuum with those that once climbed the spires of cathedrals, trusting their lives in the application of a skill which now exists only in the strictly controlled conditions of sport. Thankfully, with the advent of modern cranes and cherry pickers, men are no longer required to risk their lives in this way, but it only serves to increase my respect for the unacknowledged heroism of George Cossington, his brothers, his father, uncle and all of those in this city who fearlessly undertook these death-defying challenges as part of their daily routine. When you meet a steeplejack at the fine age of eighty-one, his very existence confirms his skill and proficiency in his former profession.
Because Freddie Waite bought a camera in 1958 to record the construction of Paternoster House, we have the privilege to see these rare images today, photographed by those working on the site. And while Paternoster House may already be history – demolished for a subsequent development – in the meantime there are enough monumental structures still standing that George worked on, like Shell House, the Chiswick Flyover, the Edmonton Incinerator towers and the chimney at the Bryant & May Factory, to remind us of his heroic thirty year career as a steeplejack & steel erector.
George (on the left) with the team, Kenny the master electrician, Ron the crane driver, then two slewmen and the foreman standing at the end, with Freddie (the master steeplejack that George was apprenticed to) standing at the back.
George is to be seen at top of the lower jib in the centre of the picture, between the steel structure and St Paul’s
George & Freddie at the end of the jib, as viewed from the boom.
George Cossington
The Cossington boys, George (back left) pictured with his brothers Brian, Sid and Bob (front row, left to right) and Joey (back right) outside the family home in Rochester Avenue, Upton Park, E13. George, Brian and Joey all became steeplejacks like their father, while Sid and Bob became master bricklayers.
Portrait copyright © Jeremy Freedman
At The Whitechapel Mission
At dawn on Easter Tuesday, while most of the world was still sleeping, Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I paid a visit to the Whitechapel Mission which has been caring for the homeless and needy since 1876. The original building, constructed as the “Working Lads Institute” in 1885, still stands next to Whitechapel Underground Station, but these days the Mission operates from a seventies brick and concrete edifice east of the Royal London Hospital.
Whitechapel Rd was desolate at that hour but inside the Mission we encountered a warm community and were touched by the generous welcome we received there. Many of these people had been out on the street all night, yet they immediately included us within the particular camaraderie which exists among those who share comparable experiences of life and attend the day centre here regularly. Between six and eleven each morning, the door is open. Breakfast is served, showers are available, clothes are distributed, there is the opportunity to make phone calls and collect mail, and to seek the necessary advice which could lead to life off the street.
Our guide was Tony Miller, Director of the Mission, who has lived, worked and brought up his family in this building for the last thirty-five years. Charismatic and remarkably fresh-faced for one who opens up his door to the capital’s homeless every day of the year, he explained that if the temperature drops below freezing they offer a refuge for those sleeping rough. In the winter before last, Tony had around one hundred and fifty people sleeping upon every available inch of floor space and, while the other staff were off-duty, he sat watch through the long hours of the night. As a consequence, he contracted a rare and virulent strain of Tuberculosis from which he has only just recovered.
Yet Tony’s passion for the Whitechapel Mission remains undimmed by this grim interlude. “I lost five stone and I still want to make a difference! They started this Mission in 1876 because they were angry that, in their day, there were people without homes and here we are today in 2014 and the problem is still with us,” he declared, filling with emotion, before distinguishing for me some of the strains of humanity who stream through his door daily. There are those who were once living in care – many have mental health problems and around a third grew up in orphanages. There are those who are have no skills and cannot support themselves. There are the angry ones who feel let down and maybe lost their homes – these, Tony says, are the easiest to help. Around a sixth are ex-servicemen without education or skills, and around a third are mentally ill. “The ones that get me the most are those young people who leave the care system without education or prospects and end up on the street within twelve months,” he confided. Last year, the Mission supported one hundred and thirty-four people off the street and into flats, and two hundred people into hostel accommodation.
“Most people want reconnection, but they can live on the streets for twenty years after a row,” Tony assured me, “So, if we can ring up mum and they can say ‘sorry,’ then we’ll happily sub them for a bus ticket home if it means one less person on the street.” As we walked through the cafeteria, diners came up to welcome and engage us in multiple extended conversations, telling their stories and trusting Colin O’Brien to take their pictures.
“These people have validated my life – giving me a purpose and a job, and that makes me guilty because, from other people’s suffering, I live,“ Tony revealed in regret, “It’s a disgrace that this place is still here and it’s still needed, it should have been closed down years ago.”
Tony Miller, resident Director of the Whitechapel Mission for the past thirty-five years
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Click here to learn more about The Whitechapel Mission
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