The Return of Parmiter’s School
Pupils of Parmiter’ School, which moved to Watford from Bethnal Green over thirty years ago, returned to the East End yesterday to honour Peter Renvoize, one of their benefactors who is buried in the churchyard of St Matthew’s. They were joined by members of the Old Parmiter’s Society of Bethnal Green for a service of rededication of the Renvoize family tomb which has recently been renovated. And I joined the excited throng as guest of Parmiter’s old boy Ron Pummell.
In his will of 1682, silk merchant Thomas Parmiter left two farms in Suffolk to supply income for “six almshouses in some convenient place upon the waste of Bethnal Green, and further, for the building there one free schoolhouse or room, wherein ten poor children of the hamlet of Bethnal Green may be taught to read, write…” Yet it was not until 1720 that his legacy had accrued sufficient funds, and the buildings in Grimsby St, off Brick Lane, were only completed in 1722.
In the nineteenth century, the school’s most generous benefactor was Peter Renvoize (1757-1842) who left £500 to Parmiter’s, plus £10 to the master and five shillings to each schoolboy, along with the wish that his family vault be kept “In good repair and condition.” By chance, Peter Renvoize’s tomb and that of his contemporary Joseph Merceron (1764–1839), were the only two graves out of eighty thousand buried here that survived the bombing of the church in 1940.
And thus you might think yesterday’s service of rededication of the tomb was a simple celebration of the enlightened altruism of the venerable Peter Renvoize, yet the truth is more equivocal. Peter Renvoize and his henchman Joseph Merceron were two of the most notorious characters in the history of Bethnal Green,whose activities included swindling the poor funds at St Matthew’s of £925 in 1819.
The ambivalence of the occasion did not go unacknowledged by Rev Kevin Scully, Vicar of St Matthew’s. In his welcoming address, he laid it out fair and square, outlining the notoriety of Joseph Merceron who was both church warden and owner of a number of disorderly pubs and brothels in Bethnal Green – before serving time in prison only to return to the role of church warden again.
“We’re quite famous for gangster funerals here,” admitted Rev Scully, referring to the Krays’ funerals that took place in his church and running his gaze provocatively along the rows of children,“we serve all members of the community and maybe some of you will be part of the criminal fraternity one day?” Then, lest he cast a shadow upon the day for the young ones, Rev Scully salvaged an uplifting moral from this dubious history, citing Peter Renvoize’s legacy to their school as a redeeming example of how “good comes out of bad.”
Once headmaster, Nick Daymond, had read from the book of Corinthians reminding us all that charity “Rejoiceth not in inquity, but rejoiceth in the truth,” and after we had all sung the school song we filed out into the church yard in the rain to peer at the tomb where Peter Renvoize lay buried beneath.
Afterwards, it was my pleasure to be introduced by Ron Pummell to some of his fellow members of Old Parmiter’s Society who had attended the school before it moved from Bethnal Green. Running through a distinguished list of former pupils, Ron mentioned Nick Leeson, the trader that bankrupted Barings Bank, who attended Parmiter’s after the school moved to Watford. “We always say, ”If he’d been a Bethnal Green boy, he would have got away with it,'” he joked.
Rev Gp Capt Donald Wallace rededicates the tomb of Peter Renvoize.
Ron Pummell, member of the Old Parmiter’s Society of Bethnal Green
The vault of Peter Renvoize
Peter Renvoize, school treasurer, who conspired to swindle £925 from the poor of Bethnal Green in 1819.
The tomb of the Merceron family – Joseph Merceron was church warden, magistrate and a notorious criminal of Bethnal Green.
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The Beating of the Bounds in the City of London
More Travellers’ Children in London Fields
As I await delivery of copies of Colin O’Brien’s Travellers Children in London Fields that I am publishing next week, I am looking back upon those pictures which did not find their way into the book. Rather than let these stray images from this extraordinary series be forgotten, I am publishing some here as a taster of what you can expect from the book.
Click to buy a signed copy of Colin O’Brien’s book for £10!
“I came across the travellers whilst I was photographing a deserted warehouse in London Fields. They had parked their caravans in and around Martello St near the railway arches by the station. This part of Hackney was very run down in the eighties. The streets were littered with rubbish and many of the decaying Victorian terraces were being demolished. The area was neglected and dangerous, with graffiti everywhere.
The travellers were Irish, mostly families with three or four children, living in modern caravans which looked extremely cramped but comfortable. On the first week, I started to take one or two Polaroid shots of the children which I gave to them to show their parents. Some of the parents then dressed the children up and sent them out for me to take more portraits.
I continued to take pictures over a period of three weeks and got to know some of the travellers well. They took me into their confidence and trusted me with their children.
When I returned to the site on the fourth week the families had gone. I was surprised, though I should not have been because this is what travellers do – they move on. I had no way of contacting them, yet I was left with this set of pictures, and it was only when I started to print the negatives that I realised what an amazing set of photographs they were.”
– Colin O’Brien
Hardback copies will be on sale at £10 from 3rd July at the Bishopsgate Institute, Brick Lane Bookshop, Broadway Bookshop, Labour & Wait, Leila’s Shop, Newham Bookshop, Pages of Hackney, Rough Trade and Townhouse, Fournier St. Faber Factory Plus part of Faber & Faber are distributing Travellers’ Children in London Fields nationwide, so if you are a retailer and would like to sell copies in your shop please contact bridgetlj@faber.co.uk who deals with trade orders.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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Alex Pink’s Fournier St, Then & Now
No street in the East End has seen a greater transformation than Fournier St, where once were shabby clothing factories, sweatshops and furriers, are now immaculately appointed mansions. In this final part of the collaboration with Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive, Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Alex Pink selected photographs from the collection and then took a stroll from Christ Church to Brick Lane to review the changes that conservation has brought.
19 Fournier St, 1975
19 Fournier St, 2013
20 Fournier St, 1975
20 Fournier St, 2013
21 Fournier St, 1975
21 Fournier St, 2013
27 Fournier St, 1975
27 Fournier St, 2013
29 Fournier St, 1975
29 Fournier St, 2013
33 Fournier St, 1975
33 Fournier St, 2013
37 Fournier St, 1975
37 Fournier St, 2013
39 Fournier St, 1975
39 Fournier St, 2013
Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
New photographs copyright © Alex Pink
Visit Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives for opening times, collections & events.
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Jonathan Miller in Fournier St
All Change at 15 & 17 Fournier St
A Tourist in Whitechapel
Now that the visitor season is upon us again, I discovered this comic pamphlet of 1859 in the Bishopsgate Institute which gives a fictional account of the experiences of a French tourist in Whitechapel yet permits us a rare glimpse of East End street life in that era too.
Monsieur Theophile Jean Baptiste Schmidt was a great observer of human nature. He was a great traveller too, for he had been across the Atlantic. But he had never been to London, so to London he determined to come.
When he arrived at London Bridge, to which he came in his Boulogne steamboat, he was met by his friend and countryman, Monsieur Hippolyte Lilly, who had resided some years in the city and knew all about its ways. Now Monsieur Lilly was a bit of a wag, so he determined to play Monsieur Schmidt a practical joke. Instead of taking his friend to the West End of London, when he landed, he led him to Whitechapel, and lodged him in a small public house called the Pig & Whistle.
“Baptiste, my friend,” said Hippolyte, “The English are a very strange people and you must not offend them – if they ask you for anything, you must give it at once.”
The Lost Child
No sooner therefore were the friends in Whitechapel, than they sallied out to see London. The stranger was very much astonished at the throng of people and vehicles, and they had not gone far before they saw a little crowd assembled on the pathway, so they at once stopped to see what was going on. Looking over the shoulders of a couple of young ladies they discovered a little child being questioned by a policeman.
“What is the matter?” asked Hippolyte. “Child lost,” replied the policeman. “Better give the man a shilling,” said Hippolyte to his friend. Baptiste therefore put his hand in his pocket and drew out a long silk purse, and taking from it a franc presented it to the policeman, who received it with a nod and a knowing wink.
The Benefits of a Long Purse
The action of the foreigner was not lost upon the crowd, and in a few minutes the friends found themselves surrounded by eager applicants. A little boy with a broom tumbled head over heels for their diversion, a Jew offered them a knife with twenty blades. an Indian begged them to buy a tract, a cabman wished to have the honour of drinking their healths, a boy offered them apples at three a penny, a woman with a child in her arms asked them to treat her to glass of gin, a man with a board requested them to fit themselves with a suit of clothes and a little girl wished to sell them a string of onions. To all of these people Monsieur Baptiste gave some piece of money, so that he was soon a very popular character. The policeman, however, cleared the way and they walked on.
The Conductors of the London Press
Presently they came to the outside of a newspaper dealers, where they saw a crowd of boys and men, laughing, talking, and playing. “These are the conductors of the London Press,” said Hippolyte.
The Disputed Fare
Soon afterwards they witnessed, and took part in, a dispute between a gentleman with a great moustache, a policeman, and a cab driver assisted by a variety of little boys. Baptiste soon settled the dispute by giving the cabman a shilling.
The Great Market
“I will now take you to the Great Market,” said Hippolyte, leading him through the dense crowd assembled round the butchers’ shambles in Whitechapel.
Monsieur Baptiste wondered very much at all he saw, thought the flaming gaslight, streaming over the heads of the people, “a very fine sight,” allowed himself to be pushed and hustled to and fro in the throng with perfect good humour, and was not in the least offended when one stall keeper offered him five bundles of firewood for a penny, or when another recommended him to invest sixpence in the purchase of a dog collar, or when a third – stroking his upper lip – politely asked him whether she should show him the way to the half-penny shaving shop.
Nor did he doubt for a moment what his friend told him was true when he was informed that this was the principal market for the supply of London with fresh meat. At last however, he expressed a desire to get out of the hot, unwholesome throng of poor people, which became every moment more dense, more noisy, and more bewildering.
The English Aristocracy
“Let us have one little glass of wine,” said Hippolyte, and forthwith they found themselves in the centre of a throng in a low gin shop.
The space in front of the counter was crowded with people of the poorest sort – an Irish labourer, in a smock frock and trousers tied below the knee with a hay band, was treating a miserable-looking woman to a glass of gin – a poor, half-starved girl was trying to persuade her tipsy father to go home, while another child was staggering under the weight of a baby on one arm and a gin bottle under the other – a miserable hag of a woman was crying ballads in a cracked voice – while a dirty-faced man was selling shrimps and pickled eels from a basket on his arm – and a Whitechapel dandy was joking with the smart barmaid – whose master stood at the door of his private parlour and smoked his cigar with the air of a lord.
A very hot, disagreeable odour filled the place, so that Monsieur Baptiste was obliged he must go home to his hotel. But just before he reached the door of the gin shop, he turned to his friend and asked, “What sort of people are these?”
“These are the aristocracy of England,” said Hippolyte. “These?” exclaimed Baptiste, beginning to see his friend’s joke, “then take me to see the poor.”
How many other places the friends visited that evening, how many jokes Hippolyte played upon Baptiste, and how many other shillings the foreigner spent on his first day in London, I cannot tell you. But I know that he laughed a good deal at the idea of seeing the wrong end of London first.
“Nevertheless, ” Baptiste exclaimed the next morning, “London is a very fine, great, big wonderful city.”
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Kendrew’s Cries of London
The latest discovery at the Bishopsgate Institute in my ever-growing collection of The Cries of London is this set of woodcuts printed by J. Kendrew of Colliergate, York, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The popularity of the series was such that even publishers in York and Banbury produced their own versions of the Cries of London. Unusually, in an age when hawkers were often considered vagabonds, this chapbook for children illustrates the street sellers as paragons of virtue, as expressed by their industriousness. Yet, for me, the most exciting phrase in this volume is the text ‘from the life’ which allows the possibility that some of these evocative and characterful cuts may be portraits of individual traders from the streets of London two centuries ago.
Come buy my fine Writing Ink!
Green large Cucumbers twelve a penny!
Dainty Sweet Briar!
Mary, Mary, where are you now, Mary? Tiddy dol, tol drol, tiddy dol.
Rue, Sage and Mint, a farthing a bunch!
Diddle, diddle ,Dumplings, Oh!
Buy a fine Bread Basket or Work Basket!
Oars, Sir! Oars or Scullers, Madam, do you want a Boat?
Black your Shoes, your Honour?
Nice Yorkshire Muffins!
Buy a Broom! Buy a Birch Broom!
Come, but my little Jemmies, my little Tartars, but half-penny a piece!
Twelve pence a peck, Oysters!
My good soul, will you buy a Bowl?
Buy a young Chicken or Fowl!
Ripe Strawberries!
Rabbit! Rabbit!
One a penny, Two a penny, Hot Cross Buns!
Pretty Maid, Pretty Pins!
Maids, buy a Mop!
Old Chairs to mend, Old Chairs to Mend!
Buy my Flounders!
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London down through the ages
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
More John Player’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
On the Thames Sailing Barge ‘Repertor’
David Pollock, skipper of S B Repertor
“It’s all my wife’s fault,” admitted David Pollock of the Thames Sailing Barge Repertor with a grin of pure delight, when I asked how he came to be the owner of such a fine vessel. “She was an avid reader of the property pages and small ads, and one day she said, ‘There’s a Thames Barge for sale in The Times, let’s go and take a look.'” David continued, rolling his eyes, “I said, ‘You don’t know anything about Thames Barges,’ and she said, ‘I’ve been to a party on one!’ Well, one thing led to another and we bought it, and here we are twenty-seven years later.”
Our conversation took place in the engine room of Repertor, currently moored in St Katharine Docks for a few days in the midst of a busy summer of charter trips and races. Looking trim with its green, yellow and red paintwork, ropes coiled and russet sail neatly furled – the barge welcomes you with an appealing mixed aroma of engine oil and yacht varnish, as you step below deck. In the hold, where once the cargo was stored, there is now a large panelled galley with small cabins leading off a narrow passage. In its working days, Repertor was manned by a skipper and mate, with the skipper sleeping in the stern and the mate in the foc’sle next to the engine room.
“My twin brothers, Ben and Leo, and me, we’d shimmy up the rigging to the crosstrees to show off,” admitted Amy, David’s daughter, fondly recalling childhood summers on the barge, “People were horrified, but nothing terrible ever happened to us.” As a child, Amy spent every weekend and holiday on the boat, at first on the Isle of Dogs where it was repaired and then on extended coastal cruises. “My parents had three children in a tiny two bedroom flat in North London yet when they got a little money, rather than investing in it bricks and mortar, they invested it in steel and sail – and it was well worthwhile,” Amy confirmed to me, as she sat cradling her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter Rosa, who is herself now being introduced to the ways of maritime life.
The Repertor was one of the last Thames Sailing Barges, built in 1924 by the famous barge-masters Horlocks, based in Mistley on the River Stour in Essex. Such barges were the workhorses of coastal transport, making deliveries up and down the Thames and along the East Coast, their flat hulls enabling them to navigate the shallow creeks where larger vessels could not go.
“I’ve always sailed and my father was in the navy, he was a keen sailor,” David confided, revealing that he was not quite the dilettante he had first implied, “We did most of the work repairing the barge ourselves.” These days, David enters many of the nine barge races that happen at locations around the Thames estuary each summer from the River Medway at Chatham in May until the River Colne at Brightlingsea in September, and he has a reputation for winning a significant number, as the lines of trophies in the galley testify.
“It’s a way to refine the rigging as well as a test of skill – traditionally, barges had to race to get the ports to be the the first to get work delivering cargo, so it was a commercial imperative,” David explained, “The matches were begun in 1863 by Henry Dodds, a barge owner from Hackney who became known as The Golden Dustman by making a fortune transporting rubbish from London to Kent, where it was used in manufacture of bricks that were transported back again.”
Readers will be interested to learn that David Pollock has invited me to join his crew for one of these matches next month. Involving as many as twenty-five traditional sailing barges over a day-long course, they can be dramatic races and it will be my pleasure to report to you from the deck of the S B Repertor, which has won the annually-awarded title of ‘Champion Barge’ five times.
Amy Pollock
Repertor moored in St Katharine Docks
Amy brings her baby daughter on board.
Amy Pollock and her daughter Rosa
Click here if you would like to take a trip on Thames Sailing Barge ‘Repertor’
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More East End Pubs, Then & Now
I am spending the whole weekend in the pub – publishing this second instalment of the collaboration with Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive in which Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Alex Pink selected photographs of public houses from the collection, and then set out with his camera to pay them a visit and see what he discovered.
The Vine Tavern, Whitechapel 1903
The Vine Tavern, Whitechapel 2013
The White Hart, Whitechapel 1960
The White Hart, Whitechapel 2013
The Dover Castle, Shadwell 1992
The Dover Castle, Shadwell 2013
The Londoner, Limehouse 1974
The Londoner, Limehouse 2013
The Kings Arms, Cable St 1994
The Kings Arms, Cable St 2013
The Grapes, Limehouse 1975
The Grapes, Limehouse 2013
Duke of Norfolk, Globe Rd 1985
Duke of Norfolk, Globe Rd 2013
The Artichoke, Whitechapel 1990
The Artichoke, Whitechapel 2013
The Old Blue Anchor, Whitechapel 1973
The Old Blue Anchor, Whitechapel 2013
Bromley Arms, Bow 1981
Bromley Arms, Bow 2013
The Morgan Arms, Bow 1961
The Morgan Arms, Bow 2013
The Dickens Inn, St Katharine Docks, 1975
The Dickens Inn, St Katharine Docks 2013
The Alma, Spitalfields 1989
The Alma, Spitalfields 2013
Prospect of Whitby, Wapping nineteen-eighties
Prospect of Whitby, Wapping 2013
The Black Horse,Leman St nineteen-eighties
The Black Horse, Leman St 2013
The Dean Swift, nineteen-eighties
The Dean Swift, 2013
Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
New photographs copyright © Alex Pink
Visit Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives for opening times, collections & events.
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