Mattie Faint, Clown & Giggle Doctor
With his sunny disposition and indefatigable good humour, Mattie Faint, the clown, maintains the resilient smile that is his customary expression, irrespective of any dark clouds that gather.
This picture was taken on the roof of Mattie’s house in Clerkenwell, the area of London associated with the most famous clown of all – a connection which Mattie cherishes. “Joseph Grimaldi always lived in Islington, he was the Clerkenwell clown and now I am the Clerkenwell clown – I tend his grave.” he admitted to me proudly. Mattie is the archivist of Clowns International, preserving the history of his chosen profession, and this afternoon he is hosting a festival honouring the celebrated performer at Joseph Grimaldi Park in Pentonville Rd.
Yet the life of a twenty-first century clown is very different from that of his predecessors. The Annual Grimaldi Service held each year in February once marked the gathering of clowns in London to seek employment before the Circuses set out on tour, but the decline of touring circuits meant clowns had to find alternative employment doing advertising, promotions and entertaining at corporate events. After the crash and recession, this work no longer exists but, with characteristic ingenuity, clowns have discovered a new arena for their singular talents as ‘giggle doctors.’
“I’ve been in Clerkenwell about thirty years, but I’m from Plymouth originally. I came up on a scholarship with the National Youth Theatre at seventeen. I worked with props and scenery and stage management, and did twenty shows in eight weeks and decided I didn’t want to go back to Plymouth. Instead I found a job as a junior electrician at the Saville Theatre and worked my way up to sound operator. I did Cameron Mackintosh’s first show and it only lasted two weeks. Then I worked on ‘Hair’ as sound operator for three and a half years, and became stage manager at twenty-one and, after the nine-hundredth-and-ninety-ninetieth performance, three-and-a-half tons of plaster fell from the ceiling into the auditorium and closed the show down. It happened at five thirty in the morning, but there had been a full house the night before and it could have been a national disaster killing two hundred people.
Then I took ‘Hair’ to Africa as company manager and we didn’t get an audience in Lesoto, but I was invited to stay on at the hotel as PR manager and clown.What I liked about being a clown was that I could have a second personality. It allows you to be naughty and do things that you wouldn’t do in normal life and get away with it. I had a double existence – whenever they wanted entertainment, I’d go to my office and change into a clown. People didn’t know if I was a PR officer dressed as a clown or whether I was a clown dressed as a PR officer. I remember a little boy said to his mother, ‘Who’s he?’ and she said, ‘That’s Mattie the clown dressed up as a man.’ And I thought I’d like to put that on my tombstone.
It’s one of the most difficult kinds of acting because you are working without a stage and surrounded by your audience. Quite often it can be hard from the security point of view. Teenagers and sometimes adults can ridicule you and try to destroy what you are. I’ve found myself in dangerous situations more than once where I’ve had to run. But forty-three years I’ve worked as a clown and it’s a great thing to be.
After Africa, I came back and did ‘Cinderella’ with Jim Davidson in Bristol, and I realised I didn’t want to do that any more. So, in 1980, I channelled all my energies into being a clown full-time and made a good living out of children’s parties and doing promotional work in shopping centres. But the world has changed because of the recession and the work dried up. I used to work alongside Santa at Canary Wharf for three weeks each year but now they just make do with Santa and a few elves.
Eighteen years ago, I started working an entertainer for the Theodore Children’s Trust, a charity that sends clowns into hospitals as ‘giggle doctors.’ At first, there were just two of us but now there are thirty-two working in twenty-one hospitals, all professionally trained entertainers who go into wards and visit children at their bedsides to bring laughter when they are suffering traumatic things. I’ve worked this week at Great Ormond St Hospital, visiting two to three hundred children and covering the entire hospital in two days.
So the business has changed a lot for clowns but I am lucky to work a couple of days each week as a giggle doctor, and I like the work because you really get a chance to make a difference. It’s so nice when people laugh. Laughter is a difficult thing for many people to find in their lives. As Chaplin said, ‘A day without laughter is a day wasted.'”
Mattie’s first day as a clown, June 1971
Mattie with Britain’s tallest man, Chris Greener
Mattie as the Kia-ora Kid.
Mattie as Leco, the refridgerator clown.
Mattie pays homage at the grave of Joseph Grimaldi
Mattie puts his feet up.
Mattie with his pal Ginger Nuts
Mattie as a Giggle Doctor
A record of Mattie’s distinctive make-up.
At the clowns’ convention.
Mattie
Matty Faint, Clown & Giggle Doctor
Joseph Grimaldi Park Community Festival runs from 2pm-5pm this afternoon at Joseph Grimaldi Park, Collier St, N1 9QZ, with clowns, cheerleaders, latin dancers, stalls, face-painting and more. Admission is free.
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Two Men From Ilfracombe
Two young men from Ilfracombe
A small cache of glass slides of a century ago arrived at the Bishopsgate Institute recently as a donation from Ilfracombe Museum, yet the fact that nothing is known of these two men from Ilfracombe featured in the photographs has not prevented speculation.
“Don’t we look like born Londoners, taking a stroll down the Victoria Embankment in our best suits on a Saturday morning? It makes the quay at Ilfracombe look pitiful I must say. We sought out the statue of old Raikes on his pedestal in the park and took a picture for Norah and her Sunday School nippers, like we promised. I never thought there were so many people in the world as we saw in Fleet St, it makes you wonder who cooks them all dinner? Everyone seems to know where they are going, so we did our best to blend in, keeping our noses directed towards St Paul’s up ahead in the fog. Himself tugged upon my cuff at every watering hole and it was all I could do to resist. Yet I still felt intoxicated by the train journey, changing at Exeter St David’s and whisking us at lightning speed to Paddington yesterday. We kept our wallets in our inside pockets, like you told us, and made sure that we did not both fall asleep at once, lest we should get robbed. Himself snored all the way up and missed the changing wonders of the landscape, of course. The sheets in the guesthouse were not of the cleanest but rather than raise a fuss I slept on top of the blanket. You do fear you might get lost in all the streets and never find your way out again. Magnificent vessels moored in the Pool and it reminded us of home to see the little tugs and pilot boats bobbing. It makes my head spin to see the big cargo ships lined up and think of the dark continents so far away. I swear I never walked so much as we did through the West End and back across the Park, and I felt we deserved a decent refreshment but the prices were iniquitous and I shall regret that cold roast beef sandwich as long as I live. Yet Himself was philosophical and asked what is existence without adventures like this? The boots are bearing up well, thankfully. At least, if we never go outside dear old Ilfracombe again, we can say that we have seen life now. Greetings to Ernie and Nan, and little Ralph and the twins.”
“Behold Sir Robert Raikes who founded the Sunday Schools movement”
“Best foot forward up Ludgate Hill”
“Outside St Paul’s”
“At the Pool of London”
“Passing ourselves off as Londoners”
“This is me and Albert”
Photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Fred Iles, Meter Fixer
Fred & Marie Iles with Smudge
Fred Iles was born half a mile from his allotment in Stepney and his wife Marie grew up in Garden St that once stood where the allotment is today. They were married in St Dunstan’s, just across the road, and today live fifty yards away in Rectory Sq. As for Smudge, she is a local too and gave birth to two litters in the allotment shed.
Fred grows potatoes, cabbages, strawberries, gooseberries, runner beans and nasturtiums to draw the bees in his allotment, which is a small enclosure at the heart of Stepney City Farm. Surrounded by on all sides by other plots, this is a secluded corner sheltered from the wind where Fred can pass his time gardening peacefully in the company of his cat.
As gardeners will know, the growing season has been very late this year, but Fred had a good crop of strawberries and, as he was telling me his story yesterday, while boney old Smudge patrolled the territory, Marie searched among the runner beans and discovered the first pickable specimens of the season.
“We never had a garden of our own. My grandfather Edmund lived with us when I was a child, he had come up to London from Bristol originally with two children and he ended up with four sons and three daughters. He was a great pigeon fancier and our backyard was all pigeon lofts where he kept three hundred pigeons – that’s a lot of pigeons. He was very successful at it and when he was dying he called me into his bedroom and showed me his box of medals and asked me to take one. I picked the silver one because it had a picture of a pigeon on it. There were gold ones I could have picked but I was too young to understand. He told me that Iles is a French name and that my ancestor fought in Napoleon’s army and was brought over to Bristol as prisoner of war and then stayed.
I was born in 1926 just half a mile from here in Hartford St, in a little cobbled yard called Wades Place. My father William was a seaman in his younger days and he went all over the world. I don’t know how he learnt about classical music but he was very knowledgeable and he used to play the Gounod’s Faust and Viennese waltzes on his harmonica for me.
I was here for part of the Blitz. It started on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm. I was in the yard and I heard the roar of the aeroplanes. I was thirteen and I thought it was our planes coming back, but it wasn’t. My father took me inside and we sat under the stairs which we thought was the safest place. I couldn’t see anything but I could hear the sound of the anti-aircraft guns and the engines of the planes and, at my age, I found it very exciting.
By the time they came back to bomb the docks, we had an Anderson shelter in the garden and we sat there listening to the sound of bombs dropping. My father decided it was too much and sent me and my mother and my sister to his brother in Oxford. He worked in the Morris factory which, at that time, was building aeroplanes and he got me job at fifteen making cowling panels for the side engines of Hawker Hurricanes. It was exciting work but it was miserable waiting in the cold for the bus to go to work at seven in the morning.
I got called up to the army on D-Day, June 6th 1944 and I was eighteen years old on my birthday, 30th June. They summoned me for 20th July, the day they tried to assassinate Hitler, so I had three weeks freedom before they put me in the army. By the time I’d learnt to shoot a gun, for some unknown reason they put me in the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers. I was posted to the anti-aircraft guns around London and then they sent me to an experimental laboratory in Shoeburyness where they were working on radar. I found I had an easy time for three and a half years until I was discharged in 1947.
I went to the Labour Exchange and the man said, ‘There’s not much going but I like the look of you so why not come and work on this side of the counter? And when a good job comes in you can get it.’ I worked there for six months, and my father was unemployed and he came in and signed on the dole. After six months, the London Electricity Board came along and I worked there for twenty-six years, at first in the office and then as a meter fixer.
When I started here at the allotment, it was quite hard. It was still a bomb site and I had to clear the bomb damage before I could plant anything. There were just six of us pensioners then and I needed something to do in my spare time. They retired me at sixty in 1986, but I started my allotment here four years before that. Smudge turned up on the allotment one day, fifteen years ago. And I thought ‘poor old cat’ and decided to feed it, so she made the allotment her home and now I have to come and feed her every day.”
Fred aged five with his sister Phyllis and cousin Rosamund in 1931, taken by Griffiths in the Roman Rd
Fred in uniform at eighteen years old, 1944
Fred and his pal Gimlet in Shoeburyness
Fred stands at the base of the aerial in Shoeburyness.
Fred (left) enjoys a pint with Bernard & Jack at Shoeburyness in 1946
Fred (top left) with pals on the beach at Shoeburyness
Fred & Marie get married at St Dunstan’s Stepney, 1st August 1953
Fred & Marie on their wedding day.
Fred in the seventies.
Fred & Marie with their prizewinning dog Rufus, in July 1984 at Stepney City Farm – when Rufus won the dog with the waggliest tail and best mongrel.
Fred grew some magnificent hollyhocks on the allotment in the nineties
“Smudge turned up on the allotment fifteen years ago. And I thought ‘poor old cat’ and I decided to feed it, so she made the allotment her home and now I come every day to feed her.”
Fred and Smudge
Gooseberry time in Stepney
Fred & Marie Iles celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary on 1st August
Stepney City Farm runs a Farmers’ Market every Saturday from 10am – 3pm, selling food from local producers at affordable prices. If you would like to join their Urban Farmer scheme and learn about growing vegetables and caring for livestock contact karen@stepneycityfarm.org
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Bob Mazzer’s Street Photography
Axeman in Praed St
One day, on his way to work at “The Office” – the porn cinema in Paddington where he was a projectionist – Bob Mazzer met this mad axeman in the street who fortunately was more than happy to have his photo taken.
This picture may come as a surprise to those who only know the tube photography for which Bob has become celebrated, yet his distinctive vision of existence is equally evident in these compelling images of London street life. “I’ve never not done photography above ground,” Bob confessed to me,“If you are a photographer, then you can’t walk down the street without a camera … and the tube is an extension of the street.”
These pictures published here for the first time are from the years when Bob worked in two porn cinemas, at Paddington and latterly at King’s Cross, offering him ample opportunity to wander with his Leica M4, photographing on the streets by day and on the tube going home at night.
“I was obviously out and about a lot in the eighties,” he declared in delighted surprise, contemplating this diverse collection of images.
“I came round the corner into Cambridge Circus and this was happening – these men had climbed out of the coach and were moving the car out of the way – but I couldn’t hit the shutter before these people walked in the way and at first I was pissed off, but later I realised they make the photograph – they stand in for you, the viewer. Meanwhile, the man on the bench slept through it. The whole thing was bonkers really.”
“This was at the Notting Hill Carnival. In a quiet moment, here was this cameo of a little therapy session on the pavement edge.”
“I was waiting for a bus. Sometimes you have to pretend you are waiting for a bus to get the shot.”
“It all seems to be about eyes, people looking in different directions.”
“I was at the bus stop and she was standing on the other side of the concrete post, so I angled my camera at waist level and ‘guestimated’ the shot. I love the colour range and her outfit – it was so ‘Hey everybody look at these.'”
“At St Martin in the Fields, a destitute bloke with nowhere to go and I felt for him.”
“I was walking down Oxford St and the bus passed by. It was a split second and I didn’t have time to think about it.”
“I was on my way to work at the porn cinema in King’s Cross and I saw this artificial leg sticking out and I was preparing to photograph it when this scuffle suddenly happened.”
“This is outside Regent’s Park tube. Sid Vicious had only just died.”
“This was in Soho Sq. They look like they could be conjoined. I always think this is one of the strangest pictures I’ve ever taken. I crouched down and said, ‘I love how you look, please let me take your picture,’ and it was all over in a second.”
“In Soho Sq again. I thought it was a mad thing to do, to stand with a dog in a bag.”
“I used to go to Regent’s Park a lot.”
This was outside Wyndhams Theatre in Charing Cross Rd when ‘Once a Catholic’ was playing. It was shot from the hip, I wasn’t looking through the viewfinder. You have to be not there or they’d say, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m probably standing at right angles.”
“I’m speechless when I look at this. You couldn’t want to live there, but my dad did for a while in a block of flats very near.”
“I love black kids, and I love the way the hands and eyes are so friendly in this picture. If you’ve got the right vibe, I find people tend to be friendly.”
Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer
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Cruikshank’s London Almanack, 1837
This set of engravings is the third in a series of calendars illustrating the seasons and festivals of the London year, drawn annually by George Cruikshank for The Comic Almanack published by Henry Tilt of Fleet St. With each series, Cruikshank was required to avoid repeating himself and thus he became more ingenious as the years went by. (Click on any of these images to enlarge)
JANUARY – Last Year’s Bills
FEBRUARY – Valentine’s Day
MARCH – Tossing the Pancake
APRIL – Return from the Races
MAY – Beating the Bounds
JUNE – Haymaking
JULY – Fancy Fair
AUGUST – Regatta
SEPTEMBER – Cockney Sportsmen
OCTOBER – Brewing
NOVEMBER – St Cecilia’s Day (the patron saint of music)
DECEMBER – Christmas Eve Ball
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Cruikshank’s London Almanack, 1835
Cruikshank’s London Almanack, 1836
Professor Dick Hobbs, Criminologist
Professor Dick Hobbs on Blossom St where he once dealt in sanitary ware
Niclar House, the labyrinthine warehouse complex occupying the block between Norton Folgate and Blossom St, is boarded up and awaiting an uncertain future of corporate redevelopment. Yet until recently this space was occupied by Nichols & Clarke, an empire of ironmongery and sanitaryware that contained a hidden warren of semi-criminal subcultures. Dick Hobbs came here as a young man employed to lift toilets, yet he became so fascinated by the creative intricacy of the illicit activities which he encountered that it inspired him to become an ethnographer and criminologist.
“My concern is primarily with deviance as an everyday feature of life, an activity that is integral to urban existence, and which I believe justifies academic attention in its own right, without being hampered by any conceits regarding helping the police with their enquiries,” he writes – with appealing irony – in the introduction to his latest work Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK.
Making a sentimental pilgrimage to Spitalfields last week on his way to an important meeting in Whitehall, Professor Hobbs took me on a stroll over to Blossom St in search of a lost world and we were lucky enough to step inside the empty building. The cavernous basements of Nicholls & Clarke that fan out beneath Spitalfields, in which the workers once hunted rats at two shillings a tail, offered a natural metaphor for the nefarious culture that is the Professor’s special field of expertise and interest. “All ethnographers should bring their biographies to the research table,” he told me.
“It all started at Nicholls & Clarke in Blossom St. My dad got a job here at fourteen years old and worked for forty-seven years as a clerk and warehouseman. He went away for five years to the war, but he wanted to go back afterwards and stayed until he was sixty-three.
When I belatedly became an academic, I based much of the data for my PhD on life and larceny at Nicholls & Clarke. I worked in the warehouse as a young man in the seventies, I’d be doing all sorts of things, carrying toilets, sinks and cast iron baths around. At the time I worked there, the place was full of war heroes from El Alamein, Arnheim and the Atlantic Crossings. Some of these men were quite damaged but they were the enterprise of the firm until the eighties. They were sophisticated and dynamic in the way they did business. It was a wonderful place where I learnt about ducking and diving, and life in general, from a workforce consisting of rough sleepers, bankrupt furriers, degenerate gamblers, fighters, ex-war heroes, and a few ordinary people.
After I left school, I worked as an office boy in Great Eastern St. That was awful, I couldn’t stand office work, so I worked as a dustman and street sweeper. I did all sorts of things, but whenever I needed work I could always ask my father to call up one of the Directors at Nicholls & Clarke, Cyril Wakeman – father of Rick Wakeman – and get me work at twenty pounds a week, cash in hand, to pick up toilets. Cyril liked to talk about Rick’s success, his latest hit and how much the latest tour in America made and which page three girl he was dating. And at the end, he’d always ask how I was doing but I wasn’t dating page three girls, I was lifting toilets.
Working there, it had the biggest influence upon me. I was fascinated by how these ordinary people found a little niche for themselves. They were paid almost nothing but they found a way to make it work for their benefit and win a little self-esteem. They had customers. Plumbers would come round and they would go off into corners doing deals on damaged or old stock.
As a kid, I really enjoyed myself and I loved it there – the characters were amazing. There was Bob a gambler who worked in Blossom St but used to slip out through the shop in Norton Folgate to place bets. Everyone else wore dirty overalls, but he wore a pristine white coat and he looked like a dentist. He put his head down and walked purposefully out through the shop. Once a posh woman who wanted to buy some paint asked, ‘Do you work here?’ and without missing a step he said, ‘Not if I can help it.’ It was a magic moment.
There were elderly Jewish men who had been left behind when everyone else moved out to Forest Hill or wherever. One was Yossul, a furrier who had fallen upon hard times and whenever a manager came along he’d slip into a dark corner, whispering, ‘The Cossacks are coming!’ There was a young man in the office who was unusually ugly and acquired the nickname ‘The young Burt Lancaster,’ which became shortened to ‘Burt Lancaster’ that became shortened to ‘Burt’ and eventually he answered to it. Then there was Charlie Nails who spent all his days in the nail room. Nails were bought by weight and there was always spillage so the firm sent round a scrap metal dealer to collect it once a month. But Charlie sold the boxes of nails direct to the scrap metal dealer who resold them back through the front of the building again. It was sharp. A guy who had nothing found a way to make a life for himself.
While at Nicholls & Clarke, I started to go to night school and I picked up two O levels and an A level. Then I went to teacher training college and qualified as a teacher and worked in Newham for three to four years, before I got a place at the London School of Economics to study Sociology where I was taught by David Downs who had written about East End kids and that’s where I came across the work of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew writing about nineteenth century London and Raphael Samuel’s ‘East End Underworld, the life of Arthur Harding,’ which outlined the world of East End criminality that was familiar to my dad. I showed it to him and he was able to correct some of it, such was his level of scholarship. I could talk to him about a scholarly work.
What was once labelled as delinquency is now seen as making a good deal. The world has caught up with the East End and we are all Arthur Daleys now. The East End was always based upon entrepreneurship albeit within a framework of trading connections and communality, but now we’re all traders and encouraged to be entrepreneurs, except there’s little to temper the competitive edge.”
Lucinda Rogers‘ drawing of the Nicholls & Clarke warehouse in Blossom St.
Niclar House, the frontage of Nicholls & Clarke in Norton Folgate.
Professor Dick Hobbs in the former sanitary department of Nicholls & Clarke
Click to buy a copy of Lush Life, Constructing Organised Crime in the UK by Dick Hobbs
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At The Caslon Letter Foundry
While researching the work of William Caslon, the first British type founder, whose Doric & Brunel typefaces, newly digitised by Paul Barnes, are being used by David Pearson in The Gentle Author’s London Album, I came upon this wonderful collection of photographs of the Caslon Letter Foundry in the St Bride Printing Library.
22/23 Chiswell St with Caslon’s delivery van outside the foundry
William Caslon set up his type foundry in Chiswell St in 1737, where it operated without any significant change in the methods of production until 1937. These historic photographs taken in 1902, upon the occasion of the opening of the new Caslon factory in Hackney Wick, record both the final decades of the unchanged work of traditional type-founding, as well as the mechanisation of the process that would eventually lead to the industry being swept away by the end of the century.
The Directors’ Room with portraits of William Caslon and Elizabeth Caslon.
Sydney Caslon Smith in his office
Clerks’ office, 15th November 1902. A woman sits at her typewriter in the centre of the office.
Type store with fonts being made up in packets by women and boys working by candlelight.
Another view of the type store with women making up packets of fonts.
Another view of the type store.
Another part of the type store.
In the type store.
A boy makes up a packet of fonts in the type store.
Room of printers’ supplies including type cases, forme trolleys and electro cabinets.
Another view of the printers’ supplies store.
Printing office on an upper floor with pages of type specimens being set and printed on Albion and Imperial handpresses.
Packing department with crates labelled GER, GWR, LNWR, CALCUTTA, BOMBAY, and SYDNEY.
New Caslon Letter Foundry at Rothbury Rd, Hackney Wick, 1902.
Harold Arthur Caslon Smith at his rolltop desk in Hackney Wick with type specimens from 1780 on the wall, Friday 7th November, 1902.
Machine shop with plane, lathes and overhead belting.
Gas engines and man with oil can.
Lathes in the Machine Shop.
Hand forging in the Machine Shop.
Another view of lathes in the Machine Shop.
Type store with fonts being made up into packets.
Type matrix and mould store.
Metal store with boy hauling pigs upon a trolley.
Casting Shop, with women breaking off excess metal and rubbing the type at the window.
Another view of the Casting Shop.
Another view of the Casting Shop.
Founting Shop, with women breaking up the type and a man dressing the type.
Casting metal furniture.
Boys at work in the Brass Rule Shop.
Boys making packets of fonts in the Despatch Shop, with delivery van waiting outside the door.
Machine shop on the top floor with a fly-press in the bottom left.
Woodwork Shop.
Brass Rule Shop, hand-planing the rules.
Caretaker’s cottage with caretaker’s wife and the factory cat.
Photographs courtesy St Bride Printing Library
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