At Bancroft Rd Jewish Cemetery
Neglected for over a century now, this was the cemetery for the congregation of Maiden Lane Synagogue in Covent Garden from 1811, where more than five hundred souls rest peacefully. Surrounded these days by housing and enclosed by tall iron railings, it as an enigma to many in Mile End who have known it their whole lives. Lacking any sign to specify the nature of the place, only by peering through the railings and recognising the Hebrew upon the broken stones might the curious passerby discover it was a Jewish cemetery.
In 2008, architect Susie Clapham walked past and became fascinated to uncover the cemetery’s history and learn why it has been abandoned. After she unlocked the padlock and removed the chain to take me around the cemetery one rainy day recently, I was alarmed when a woman leaned out of a first floor window opposite and began haranguing us for being there, but – to my surprise – Susie was pleased by this reaction to our presence. “It shows that somebody cares about this place,” she said to me, reflecting her own mission to see the cemetery tended and cared for once more.
Just a couple of hundred yards west from Bancroft Rd is the Velho Cemetery, London’s oldest Jewish Cemetery, established in 1657 in the corner of an orchard. By 1724, this was full and became superceded by the Novo Cemetery on the eastern side of Bancroft Rd. Interestingly, these names reflect the high proportion of Portuguese among the Jewish community at that time. Thus when the Maiden Lane Synagogue chose the site for their cemetery, this area one mile east of the City was already established as a suitable location.
Since the demise of the Maiden Lane Synagogue at the beginning of the twentieth century, their cemetery has fallen into neglect and suffered bomb damage in 1944, scattering stones into disarray. Yet the Board of Deputies of British Jews steadfastly refused requests to redevelop the site either as a public park or housing, even though a pile of correspondence and reports stretching back over the last hundred years testifies to the many attempts to quantify the decay and unsuccessful initiatives to restore dignity to the forlorn cemetery.
In this densely populated area of the East End, the cemetery offers a rare patch of green. Susie Clapham would like to see a shelter built that would permit visitors to appreciate the contemplative nature of the location and where they could learn of the significance of the site and history of the long-forgotten who rest there, thus restoring the meaning of the cemetery to the fabric of the city.
“It does not seem right that today, in the dark shadow of so much desecration and total destruction of cemeteries in Eastern Europe, and after the utter annihilation of our ancestors’ graves, this little place should be allowed to fall into such desolate abandon,” Susie told me, confirming that the Board of Deputies of British Jews has given its approval to her endeavour.
If you would like to support Susie Clapham in her project to take care of Bancroft Rd Jewish Cemetery, contact sclapham@flasc.co.uk
The cemetery in the sixties
There are a series of events in the East End marking Holocaust Memorial Day 2014
Colin Rosie, Hat Seller
Over this last autumn and winter, Colin Rosie has established himself as one of Spitalfields Market’s most celebrated characters. Always debonair in his grey three-piece suit with gloves and sporting a topper, Colin has brought distinction to the market and gets photographed as many as fifty times a day by admiring tourists.
With shiny patent leather shoes, glittering diamond ear studs and waving his tablet computer authoritatively, Colin can tell you everything you wish to know about his carefully selected range of characterful second hand hats.
But less than a year ago, Colin was homeless and living on the streets. Existing like some latter-day ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow,’ even while sleeping on the street, Colin was determined to hold onto his self-respect as manifested in his dapper duds – yet he did not ever expect that his sartorial swagger would become his salvation. As I learnt when I kept him company on a quiet afternoon recently, while he was steaming an old hat to restore its former shape, and he told me his story.
“I was homeless until the end of May 2013 when No Second Night Out, a homeless charity, approached me sleeping outside Victoria Station. They helped me to sign on at a Job Centre and then I got a room in a YMCA hostel. They told me I was the only homeless person they had ever picked up in a top hat! Only I wasn’t actually wearing my top hat at the time because I was sleeping in a doorway and using it as a pillow. I always wear my top hat and, when I signed on at the Job Centre, they asked me if I had ever given any thought to whether I could sell top hats. The gist of it was if I could raise £100 they would lend me £100, so then I bought a lot of top hats and came here in August to the Spitalfields Market, and I’ve been here seven days a week ever since .
I used to have long curly hair but one day I decided to change. I’ve worked all over the world as a photographer and, when I lived in Russia seven years ago, I couldn’t explain to a hairdresser how I wanted my hair cut, so I shaved my head and when I was next back in London I got a top hat. I used to sell my photos here in the Spitalfields Market years ago, so when I was going to sell hats this was my first choice.
I am a Orcadian from Kirkwall and in Orkney, they say, ‘Either you all stay or you all leave.’ None of my family is in Orkney any more, I haven’t lived there for over forty years but I’ve got aunts, uncles and cousins who’ve never left. I’m fifty now and I left Orkney at nine years old, forty-one years ago. I grew up in army bases around the world but, whether I’ve lived in Iceland, Lithuania, Russia or America, I’ve always gravitated back to London.
Just because you are homeless, you don’t have to look homeless. I had gone from being well-off to having a cardboard box for a bed. I owned only a holdall containing an overcoat, some trousers, a pair of shoes and my top hat. I had just 56p in my pocket. I put on my overcoat and top hat and got into all these fancy hotels to wash and shave. I did whatever I could to keep up appearances but, when everyone was heading home at night, I’d be left walking the streets. My shoes had no soles and I was eating daily in soup kitchens. Most nights, I walked around Kensington & Chelsea, because obviously I stood out like a sore thumb in my top hat and three piece suit, and I found it was safer there. I travel light, I could pack in half an hour because I don’t have many possessions.
I came here to Spitalfields for two months in June and July, getting to know the market before I started in August. I just came along and said I wanted to sell hats but I didn’t have enough for a stall, so I entered into an arrangement with Mal Hallett who let me have a table on his stall. I sold all my eight top hats on the first day, and then I went out and bought more hats and I never looked back. Within three weeks, I was off benefits and in profit. Now Mal & I are business partners – fifty-fifty – and our business is called ‘Last Stop For the Curious.’ I raise money for No Second Night Out – ten per cent of my turn-over goes to them.
I like hats. I wear them and they sell themselves. I’m talking with hatmakers Locke & Co, and Christies have been in touch too. Locke & Co came to see me at the weekend and I’m going to be their only outlet in the East End. I’ve taught myself how hats are made and how to restore them through research, I’ve worked with milliners since I started in the market. I’ve met a lot of milliners, some have even heard about me and come and approached me.
If you think you’ll never suit a hat then you never will and then there are those who collect hats, and everybody else is in between. You can easily tell someone’s shirt or shoe size by looking at them but heads are deceptive, the average head size is 57.”
Colin gets photographed by admirers as many as fifty times a day.
Colin Rosie, Hat Seller in Spitalfields Market
You may like to read these other Spitalfields Market stories
Smithfield Slang
Jonathon Green, the foremost lexicographer of slang, introduces his predecessor Robert Copland who is believed to have recorded slang for the first time at the entrance to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield in the sixteenth century.
Jonathon Green in Smithfield
After thirty years as a lexicographer of slang, everything appears through the gaudy, gruesome, grubby prism of the vulgar tongue, the resolutely oppositional vocabulary I call the ‘counter-language.’ Even Smithfield, which has taken life from its hosting of dead flesh – both human and animal – for eight-hundred years and is now facing cultural extinction at the hands of ever-vampiric, philistine greed.
Occasionally, I like to walk there in the early hours, dodging the abattoir trucks and glorying in this longevity, but glorying above all that across the way, outside St Bartholemew’s Hospital, the first devotee of my craft assembled the first slang ‘dictionary’. It is not quite a dictionary, just a few words included in a lengthy narrative poem, and it is not exactly slang, as spoken by the mass, but simply the ‘cant,’ or criminal jargon of wandering beggars. Yet even slang lexicographers need a creation myth and this is it. That Barts was founded by Rahere, who may have played jester to Henry I, compounds the pleasure – for what else does slang do but let wit murmur doubt in the ears of complacent power?
The poem’s author was Robert Copland, a printer, bookseller and stationer, of whom we know frustratingly little beyond a professional life spanning the years 1508-47. He worked primarily as an assistant to the printer Wynkyn de Worde who, in turn, had been William Caxton’s principle assistant from 1476 until the master-printer’s death c.1491. Indeed Copland claimed to have worked for Caxton too. In the preface to his book Kynge Apollyon of Thyre (1510) he states that he gladly follows ‘the trace of my mayster Caxton, begyninge with small storyes and pamfletes, and so to other,’ but given their respective dates, this relationship is more likely figurative than factual.
By 1547, it would seem that Copland in his turn had taken on the role of London’s leading printer, although this position had fallen upon him through chronology – de Worde had died in 1535 – rather than any particularly outstanding talent. Andrew Borde, writing that year in Prognostications or The Pryncyples of Astronamye, mentions ‘old Robert Copland… the eldist printer of Ingland.’ Somewhat later, writing in his Bibliographica Poetica, the eccentric eighteenth-century antiquary Joseph Ritson described him as ‘the father of his profession’ but this was overly generous. Still, the Dictionary of National Biography credits his contribution to the evolution of printing and, in The xij Fruytes of the Holy Ghost (1535), he uses the comma stop for the first time in a black letter book. Prior to that, the virgule (a thin sloping or upright line occurring in medieval manuscripts either denoting the caesura or as a punctuation-mark) or dash was the norm. He worked at times with his brother William who may have been that same William Copland who as church-warden of St Mary Bow donated a new bell, the Bow-bell, which chimed fifth in the ring. It was heard every night at nine, cheering the London apprentices, who on hearing the Bow-bell knew their day’s work was over. And to be within the sound of that bell, as would become traditional, was to mark one a true Londoner, a Cockney.
Copland’s catalogue ranged widely, including the first English translation of the surgeon Galen (1542) and the scatological Jyl of Braintford’s Testament (c.1535), an early repository of the fart joke. Sometime between 1529 and 1534, Copland created the work for which he remains known. The Hye Way to the Spytell-Hous, loosely translated as ‘The Road to the Charity Clinic’- a spytell house being a form of charity foundation, dealing specifically with the poor and indigent and especially with those suffering from a variety of foul diseases. It is a verse dialogue, supposedly conducted between Copland and the Spytell House Porter. Bart’s is not specified, but it has always been the assumed backdrop and it would have been a short walk from the printer’s shop at the sign of the Rose Garland near the Fleet bridge.
Trapped in the hospital porch by a snow storm, Copland strikes up a conversation with the Porter, taking as their subject the crowd of beggars who besiege the Spytell House ‘Scabby and scurvy, pock-eaten flesh and rind / Lousy and scald [scabby], and peeléd [naked] like an apes / With scantly a rag for to cover their shapes, / Breechless, barefooted, all stinking with dirt.’ The pair discuss why some are allowed in and others rejected and, within this framework, Copland notes and the Porter describes the various categories of beggars and thieves, as well as the tricks and frauds that are their stock in trade.
The Hye Way falls into two halves, the first focussing on beggars, the second on fools. Whatever the source of the ‘criminological’ verses, the second half would appear to have been influenced by Robert de Balzac, one of the minor French writers whose work Copland would have known, and author of Le Chemin de l’Ospital (The Road to the Hospital) 1502. And while de Balzac’s catalogue of fools does not deal in crime, it undoubtedly gave the English author his title.
Copland provides vivid descriptions of a wide range of what would become known as ‘the canting crew’ – ‘diddering and doddering, leaning on their staves, / Saying “Good master, for your mother’s blessing, / Give us a halfpenny.”’ Some, explains the Porter, are justified in their beggary, others are not.
The Porter also describes such ‘nightingales of Newgate’ (the great prison was but a stone’s-throw from Bart’s) as those who claim to have been imprisoned in France ‘and had been there seven years in durance,’ or falsely imprisoned in London only to face poverty on their release. And explains how, once enough money has been earned, all such villains repair to brothels and taverns, dressing up in far from ragged finery and making ‘gaudy cheer.’ There are false scholars, and quack doctors, and – inevitably – corrupt clergy, whom the Porter characterises as monks, driven from the dissolved monasteries and posing as Pardoners. And as his descriptions reach their end, the Porter offers a list.
The clewner, a senior villain, may be linked to the Gaelic cluainear, a cunning fellow, a hypocrite, Erse cluanaire, a seducer, a flatterer, or Manx cleaynagh, a tempter. The Roger pretended to be a poor scholar from Oxford or Cambridge. pronounced with a hard ‘g’, the word is ostensibly a version of Southern-English rogue, but may be linked to Gaelic ruaigair, a pursuer, a hunter, and Lowland Scottish rugger, an outlaw. The aurium is a fake priest, possibly from Latin aurius, an ear (i.e. that which hears confession), and the sapient a travelling quack, from Latin sapiens, a wise man, a term also found, with the same meaning, in the Liber Vagatorum.
In all, Copland’s verses offer fifty-one examples of cant. Among them are apple squire, a pimp – bouse, alcohol and bousy drunken – callet, a whore – cove, a man – darkmans, the night – dell, a young female tramp, still perhaps a virgin but seen as an embryonic whore – dock, to have sex, especially to deflower – gan, the mouth – instrument, the penis – jere, excremen – lift, to steal – make, a halfpenny – nab-cheat, a hat – nase, drunken – nug, to enjoy sexual foreplay – patrico, a priest or wandering beggar posing as one – peck, to eat – poke, a wallet or purse – poll, to rob by trickery rather than violence –prancer, a horse-thief – ruffler, a villain, of the ‘first rank of canters’ who posed as a discharged soldier though equally likely might have been a former servant – tour, to spy on and win, a penny.
Public execution at Smithfield, 1546
Etching of Robert Copland, possibly early nineteenth century (Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)
Robert Copland’s printer’s device
Robert Copland’s The Hye Way To The Spyttell House (1529-1534)
Jonathon Green’s history of slang, Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue, will be published by Atlantic Books in April
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At Odds With Mr Pussy
Mr P
When my old black cat, Mr Pussy, woke me in the night by clawing at the bedclothes and crying out in the dark, I learnt to pick him up and settle him down upon the sheepskin covering the end of the bed, where he would rest peacefully until morning. It was my only option because turning over and going back to sleep would be an invitation to mayhem, with him pulling out the copy of King Lear from the bookshelf to send it crashing onto the floor or jumping on the dresser and knocking everything off. Similarly, shutting the bedroom door granted no peace either, drawing a litany of painful cries that would make sleep impossible.
Privately, I was relieved to have devised the solution to his nocturnal disturbances, calming his anxiety by exerting my authority as a human over an animal. Yet, over time, I found a new pattern had evolved in which he came to the bedside and waited in anticipation. No longer jumping onto the covers to sleep as he once did, now he expects me to lift him up and pet him before he settles down to sleep. Unwittingly, I had become part of a new ritual in which he played the part of the dependent child and I enacted the role of the devoted parent, tucking him up at night. This realisation neatly relieved me of my complacency, returning me to the subtly-troubling question of whether my cat or I have the upper hand.
I cannot resist indulging his favour, since his motive is not duplicity but devotion. As he ages, his need for human contact grows. He strays less from the house and he stays closer and he sleeps more, and with a deeper abandon in his slumber. He has acquired a new sound, an ecstatic cooing that rises from deep inside. I have woken to find him sitting upon my chest with his face inches from mine and he lets out this coo of delighted recognition. He looks at me with his deep golden eyes that are alert yet unknowing, seeking consolation.
These days, he stretches out his right arm when he sleeps as if to get a better purchase upon existence or to prevent it slipping away while he dozes. The external world means less to him and he prefers peace over excitement. He is withdrawing and yet seeking more ways to engage with me. Sometimes when he lies upon me, treating me as the human mattress, he reaches out his right arm in an unspecified exhortation.
I recognise I am his home and my vicinity is his safe place. Thus he takes great pleasure in the things I do for him as my reciprocation of his adoration. After dinner or when he is satiated with heat from lying by the iron stove, he desires to be let out from the room, sitting patiently by the door as an indicator. Once in the stairwell, he will settle upon a pile of paper bags that are conveniently placed to permit him to peer through the uncurtained window and observe life in the street outside. As soon as he tires of this and feels the chill and longs for heat once more, he will cry for re-admittance and I open the door again. Yet within ten minutes, he may wish to go out again and then return five minutes later, entering the room with one of his ecstatic cooing sounds – provoking my realisation that more pleasurable to him than the change of rooms is the opening of the door by yours truly. His prime delight is that I am his flunkey.
Just as when I settle him to sleep, he has drawn reassurance from my action and sought its repetition as a means to engage. He wants something from me, beyond food and shelter, and this is how he expresses it. This is why he reaches out his arm to me. Yet I am caught on the literal surface of things, encouraging him to be quiet so I can sleep or playing the flunkey, letting him in or out of the door. I do my best to comply but I do not understand his language and so I cannot answer the question he is asking of me. This is how I am at odds with Mr Pussy.
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Mr Pussy Gives his First Interview
and take a look at
The Cats of Spitalfields (Part One)
Adam Dant’s Map Of The Coffee Houses
Click on the map to enlarge and read the stories of the Coffee Houses
These days, London is riddled with Coffee Shops but, at the start, there was just the Jamaica Coffee House, which was opened in 1652 by Pasqua Rosee in St Michael’s Alley in the City of London. More than three hundred and fifty years later, it is still open and so I met Adam Dant there yesterday to learn about his new map – which you see above – drawn in the shape of a coffee pot.
“I’ve always wanted to do a map of the Coffee Houses, because it marks a moment when intellectual activity had a parity with mercantile activity. They called them the penny universities,” he explained, eagerly quaffing a glass of Italian red wine in the mid-afternoon. “And it wasn’t just coffee they sold but alcohol too,” he added, fleshing out the historical background as he sipped his glass, “so you could get drunk in one corner and sober up with coffee in another.”
The first Coffee Houses became popular meeting places, facilitating introductions between those of similar interests, fostering deals, trading, and business enterprises. Lloyds of London began as a Coffee House, opened by Edward Lloyd in Lombard St around 1688, where the customers were sailors, merchants and shipowners who brokered insurance among themselves, leading to the creation of the insurance market.
“People complain about the proliferation of Coffee Houses today,” admitted Adam Dant with a sigh, before emptying his glass, “But there were thirty here in these streets behind the Royal Exchange, until a fire that started in a peruke shop burnt them all down. The only reason we know where they all were is because somebody was commissioned to draw a map of them, assessing the damage.”
Executed in ink of an elegant coffee hue and bordered with Coffee House tokens, Adam Dant’s beautiful map gives you the stories and the locations of nineteen different Coffee Houses in the City. Fulfilled with such devoted attention to detail, Adam’s cartography of caffeine led me to assume this must be a labour of love for one who is addicted to coffee, yet – to my surprise – I discovered this was not the case.”I drink expresso at Allpress in Redchurch St,” Adam confessed to me, “but the best coffee is at Present, the gentlemen’s clothiers, in Shoreditch High St. I like to drink three cups before dinner and one after, but, fortunately, I am not a creature of habit and I could easily go three months without drinking coffee.”
Adam Dant at the Jamaica Coffee House in St Michael’s Alley
Map copyright © Adam Dant
You may like to take a look at some of Adam Dant’s other maps
Map of the History of Shoreditch
Map of Shoreditch in the Year 3000
Map of Shoreditch as the Globe
Map of the History of Clerkenwell
Map of the Journey to the Heart of the East End
Rush Hour At Liverpool St Station
On Blue Monday, I present my account of the mighty phenomenon that is Rush Hour at Liverpool St Station, complemented by the pictures of Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney, who passes through regularly at that time of the morning and always carries his camera.
At seven, the dark streets of Spitalfields were empty, save the traders waiting outside the market in the rain, yet by then the first commuters were already crossing Liverpool St Station, descending from the trains and walking purposefully into the underground. At this hour before dawn, I found the station hushed and barely anyone spoke, walking swiftly and preoccupied, many were almost sleepwalking – as if they still inhabited the dreams of the night, as if the moment of awakening would be the point of arrival at their destination.
More trains were arriving from eastern counties, each one announced by a loud rattle, thump and hiss, reverberating throughout the cavernous station before another wave of passengers in dark raincoats, and clutching umbrellas and briefcases, poured out into the luminous white concourse. Among a crowd seemingly still intent upon their nocturnal journeys, just a few runners and cyclists punctuated the muted rhythm of the multitude.
Lined up along one side of the vast space, brightly-lit kiosks sold hot drinks – but everyone passed them by, heading for the far end where the escalator creaked, at this hour serving only to transport travellers upward and out of the station. Streaming diagonally from the north-east, where the mainline trains arrive, the primary migration courses towards the City of London at the the south-west corner, drawing all as if by some magnetic force.
Arriving from Walton-on-the-Naze, Thorpe-Le-Soken, Turkey St, Brimsdown, Wivenhoe, Seven Sisters and Silver St, after eight o’clock, the current of humanity is swollen and grown animated, no longer pacing in unison, with more chatting and the occasional smile. The day has broken and the bare murmur of an hour earlier has become the hum of a swarm, teeming through the station. Standing in midst of the current of people when it peaks at eight-thirty, you cannot see through the crush to either end of the station. The momentum of the crowd is palpable, acting upon you as it flows around you like water round a stone in a river. You feel as invisible as a ghost.
You see the masses but you notice the individuals, drawing your attention by a private smile or a fleeting scrap of conversation, and you imagine the dark bedrooms and the alarms that snatched them prematurely from their slumbers, the hot showers that wakened them and the hasty walks to get them to the station.
For a hundred and forty years and throughout the twentieth century, this surging current of humanity has coursed through Liverpool St Station, growing in force. A phenomenon to compete with any migration the natural world has to offer, whether eels, or geese, or even ants, the spectacle of this daily wonder is a fleeting spectre that ebbs and flows, but is entirely incidental to the participants in transit who protect their personal equanimity by resisting the presence of their fellow travellers.
Yet I spot a group of school children in high spirits who are immediately awestruck by the sight of it – as I am – and to them it evokes the magic of the fairground or the carnival, momentarily liberating them to misbehave and play. They recognise the truth of it. With elaborate decorative arches towering overhead, the station is a theatre staging a great epic, performed twice daily, with an infinite cast of characters filling the stage in a chorus of which every one is a leading character, and the drama is called ‘Rush Hour At Liverpool St Station.’
Photographs copyright © Simon Mooney
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Signs Of Life
First Snowdrops in Wapping
Even now, in the depths of Winter, there is plant life stirring. As I travelled around the East End over the past week in the wet and cold, I kept my eyes open for new life and was rewarded for my quest by the precious discoveries that you see here. Fulfilling my need for assurance that we are advancing in our passage through the year, each plant offers undeniable evidence that, although there may be months of Winter yet to come, I can look forward to the Spring that will arrive before too long.
Hellebores in Shoreditch
Catkins in Bethnal Green
Catkins in Weavers’ Fields
Quince flowers in Spitalfields
Cherry blossom in Museum Gardens
Netteswell House is the oldest dwelling in Bethnal Green
Aconites in King Edward VII Memorial Park in Limehouse
Cherry Blossom near Columbia Rd
Hellebores in Spitalfields
Spring greens at Spitalfields City Farm
The gherkin and the artichoke
Cherry blossom in Itchy Park
Soft fruit cuttings at Spitalfields City Farm
Seedlings at Spitalfields City Farm
Cherry blossom at Christ Church
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