Bob Rogers At Speakers’ Corner
“I’m old enough to know better and young enough not to care”
Despite the timbre of the message he has been wearing around his neck each Sunday at Speakers’ Corner for decades, Bob Rogers is not the lugubrious fellow you might imagine. Contrary to expectation, he wears it to cheer people up – as he explained to me when Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I joined him in the park on Sunday.
“It was the winter when British Rail reported ‘The Wrong Kind of Snow’ on the line and that became an Evening Standard headline. The next day, I saw ‘It’s Going to Get Worse,’ on the newsstand as I went through Piccadilly on a bus. So I jumped off and took it from the hoarding and put in my bag because I like the prose style of newspaper headlines,” he explained. “Then I came here on a Sunday in February and everyone looked so miserable that I took it out of my bag and held it up, and it made them all smile. It caught on to such an extent that I am pictured wearing it in guidebooks to London.”
A stalwart of more than half a century at Speakers’ Corner, always in his faded brown corduroy suit with a beret in winter or a bucket hat in summer, and the celebrated notice round his neck, Bob Rogers is an erudite historian and a self-appointed custodian of this celebrated British institution.“Unless I am very unwell, I always come here because it retains its function as a meeting place and you encounter people from all around the world,” he revealed to me, “I keep coming back because I know people here and they know me, so it has a social content as well as a social purpose.”
As if to illustrate this, one of Bob’s pals joined us and, realising I was doing an interview, he took the opportunity to make some points.”These days people are frightened of saying the wrong thing,” he assured me, rolling his eyes contemptuously, “It’s no longer about politics, it’s just a circus of religion – fifty seven varieties of Christianity and fifty-seven varieties of Islam and they all disagree with each other.”
The 1873 reform of the Parks Regulation Act of 1872 conferred legitimacy upon Speakers’ Corner, enshrining the right to give an address though not – as some assume – the right to free speech since speakers are still subject to the law.“I enjoy the weekly privilege of visiting the only place where people can gather without police permission,” Bob confided to me, lowering his voice and casting his gaze around,“When people ask me how many police undercover agents are in the park, I say, ‘Every third man.'”
“Over fifty years ago, I missed a connection on my bus and I looked over the railings and I saw all these people and what got me was the babble of their voices,” he continued, as we stood against the railings watching the excited crowds gathered around the speakers and the hecklers adding drama with their interruptions.“The Catholic Evidence Guild were here one hundred years ago and are here this week and that’s because this is the site of of Tyburn, the place of public executions,” Bob added, gazing through the perspective of time,“Even as we speak they are praying for the Catholic Martyrs.”
Then, swinging his arms wildly and intoning like a priest, Bob enacted the bizarre yet compelling performance style of Nutty Norman, the ‘arms-up’ man, one of the past legends of Speakers’ Corner. “You’d never know he was homeless, he carried all his possessions in a shoulder bag,” Bob revealed, protective of his mentor, “He inducted me to the night buses and sometimes he passed the night at Heathrow.” Gesturing to a charismatic speaker surrounded by an attentive gathering, Bob pointed out Heiko Khoo, a part-German-part-Icelandic ex-bus conductor who famously threw Sir Michael Joseph off his bus, declaring, “I’m not having any Tories on my bus!”
Even as Bob and I chatted, bystanders came over and formed an audience around us, in expectation of a colourful debate and making tangible the rare quality of this special place where we are free to speak with each other as humans, without the need to be introduced.
“Religious people talk about the power of God, I talk about Horse power!”
Omid Mankoo – “People’s lives are really fixated on the sex stuff and they’re neglecting everything else. I’ve written this book and I want to share my secrets.”
Matthew from St Albans – “Jesus told me to come here because the years of his blessing our nation are at an end.”
Christians praying
Christians spreading the Word
Thai people protesting against their corrupt government
Celebrating the Thai Royal Family
Proclaiming the Nigerian Messiah
“If that frightens you, give Jesus a call”
“Don’t be late like the foolish virgins”
Bob re-enacts the gestures of Nutty Norman the ‘arms-up’ man
Heiko Khoo – “I’m not having any Tories on my bus!”
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Sounds from the Park, an exhibition of the history of Speakers’ Corner runs at Bishopsgate Institute until 30th April
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Malcolm Johnson At St Botolph’s
Dan Jones’ painting of Malcolm Johnson at Botolph’s, Aldgate 1982
These days, with his gentle blue eyes and white locks, Reverend Dr Malcolm Johnson is one of the most even-tempered radicals that you could meet, yet the work he did at St Botolph’s in Aldgate was truly extraordinary in its bold and compassionate nature. From 1974 until 1992, Malcolm was responsible for the ‘wet’ shelter that operated in the crypt, offering sustenance, showers and moral support to those that everyone else turned away. While other shelters refused admission to homeless people with alcohol or drugs in their possession, St Botolph’s did not and when I sought further, asking Malcolm to explain the origin of this decision, he simply said, “I believe you have to accept people as they are.”
The project at St Botolph’s was eminently pragmatic, working with people individually to find long-term accommodation in hostels and providing support in establishing a life beyond their homelessness and addiction. But shortly after Malcolm left St Botolph’s in 1992, the shelter was closed by his successor and it has sat unused for the past twenty years, making it a disappointing experience for Malcolm to return and be confronted with the shadow of his former works.
“I can’t tell you how upsetting it is, seeing it like this – it used to be such a wonderful place, full of energy and life, and now its just a store” he admitted to me when Photographer David Hoffman & I accompanied him on a visit to the disused crypt last week. Yet it proved to be a pertinent moment for reflection, as Malcolm told me the story of how it all happened.
“I had been Chaplain at Queen Mary University for seven years and specialised in counselling gay and lesbian people, so the Bishop thought I needed a quiet City parish where I could get on with my writing next. But, when I arrived. the crypt had been operating for five years and was catering for seventy homeless people each night, and I felt that wasn’t enough. I realised that we were here in the City of London surrounded by big companies, so I went to ask their assistance and I was lucky because they helped me, and I persuaded the City of London Corporation to give us seventy-thousand pounds a year too. The volunteers were all sorts, housewives, city workers after a day at the office and students from the polytechnic. I decided that it would be a wet crypt and we wouldn’t charge for food.
I was the rector upstairs and the director down here in the crypt – I believed the church had to be one outfit, upstairs and down. I went to Eddy Stride at Christ Church Spitalfields to ask what I should do, I had no experience so I had to learn. Over time, we expanded the shelter, we had quite a lot of full-time workers and we established four long-term hostels in Hackney. We were getting about two to three hundred people a night and it was quite an experience, but I was never frightened. Only once did a man take a swing at me, and all the others gathered round and grabbed him.
I missed this place so desperately when I left because you never knew what was going to happen when you walked through the door, it was wonderful, but I felt eighteen years was enough. Then, quite suddenly after I left in 1992, my successor closed the crypt and they said it went bankrupt, although I never understood what happened because we’d done a benefit at the Bank of England shortly before and, if there had been problems, I know my City friends would have come in to save it.”
The crypt of St Botolph’s is still equipped as a homeless shelter, functional but abandoned, pretty much as Malcolm left it and still harbouring emotive memories of those who passed through, many of whom are now dead. Encouragingly, Malcolm told me the current rector is considering whether it could be reopened.
This would itself be sufficient story and achievement for one man, yet there was another side to Malcolm Johnson’s ministry. As one of the first in the Church of England to come out as gay in 1969, he established the office of the Gay & Lesbian Christian Movement at St Botolph’s and even became known as the Pink Bishop for his campaigning work.
“I had always thought that if clergy can bless battleships and budgerigars, we could bless two people in love,” was his eloquent justification for his blessing of gay couples. Unsurprisingly, it was a subject that met opposition within the Church of England but, by the mid-eighties, the subject of AIDS became an unavoidable one and St Botolph’s was the first church to appoint a full-time minister to care for those affected by the HIV virus, as well as opening a dedicated hostel for this purpose.
In spite of his sadness at the closure of his shelter in the crypt, it was inspiring to meet Malcolm Johnson, a man with an open heart and a keen intelligence, who had the moral courage to recognise the truth of his own experience and apply that knowledge to better the lives of others.
“If clergy can bless battleships and budgerigars, we could bless two people in love…”
At St Botolph’s, 1978
Malcolm Johnson recalls the wet shelter in the crypt, now disused
At St Botolph’s, 1978
“I believe you have to accept people as they are.”
At St Botolph’s, 1978
“I can’t tell you how upsetting it is seeing it like this, it used to be such a wonderful place full of energy and life, and now it’s just a store”
Malcolm Johnson stands left at this midnight mass for the homeless at St Dunstan’s Stepney in 1978
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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and the work of another heroic campaigner
Antony Cairns’ Dead Pubs
The Duke of Cambridge, Felix St E2, 1839 – 1998
Slowly and without anyone hardly noticing, pubs are being snuffed out like candle flames. As a connoisseur of quiet and neglected places, it cuts me to the quick to see this gallery that Antony Cairns had the prescience to photograph between 2001- 2003 (and subsequently) just as his subjects were taking their last gasp – or should that be gulp? Yet – even in this final degraded state, boarded up and shut down – these pubs still retain their presence as receptacles of collective memory, and their aristocratic names and architectural flourishes declare their former glory with undiminished pride.
Can readers name the unidentified pubs and provide locations where I have none?
Marquis of Salisbury, Hermit Rd, Canning Town E16, 1881 – 1995
Durham Arms, Harleyford Rd SE11, 1869 – 2002
The New Concorde, Webster Rd SE16 – note concorde image upon sign
The Arundel Arms, Boleyn Rd N16, 1881 – 2007
Earl Derby, London Rd E13, 1870 -2010
The Royal Duke, Commercial Rd E1, 1971 – 1995
The Orange Tree Tavern, Stonebridge, NW10, 1881 – 2001 – now demolished
The Lord Napier, White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, 1874- 1996
Westbury Arms, Ripple Rd, Barking, 1650 -2008
The Star, Wellington St, Woolwich SE18
The Willow Tree, Balls Pond Rd, 1869 – 2007
Lovat Arms, Burdett Rd, Limehouse, 1862 – 2004 – now demolished
The Lord Cecil, Median Rd E5, 1872 – 2005
The Cowshed (formerly The Admiral Blake), Ladbroke Grove W10, 1881 – 2013 – now demolished
Red Cow, The Grange, Bermondsey, 1869 – 2010 – now demolished
Unknown pub
The Angel, Church St, West Ham, E15
Prince & Princess of Wales, Bagshot St, Walworth, 1881 – now a shop
Clarence Arms, Kentish Town Rd, NW1
Camden Falcon, Royal College St, NW1, 1869 -2010
The Globe, Tollington Rd N7, 1874 – 2007 – now demolished
The Star, Snowshill Rd, Manor Park, E12
The Duke of Clarence, Borough Rd SE1, 1856 – 2007 – now demolished
The Crown & Cushion, Bell Water Gate, SE18, 1840 – 2008
The Royal Oak, Loampit Vale, Lewisham SE13
Old Metropolitan, Southwark Bridge Rd
The Mitre, Downham Rd N1, 1864 – 2006
The Bricklayers Arms, Hannibal Rd E1, 1891 – 2004
The Prince Arthur, Forest Rd, Dalston, 1861 – 2008 – & open again!
The Lee Arms, Marlborough Rd, E2, 1856 – 2003
Photographs copyright © Antony Cairns
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and these other pub pictures
The Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl
Charles Spurgeon’s Londoners
Charles Spurgeon the Younger, son of the Evangelist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, took over the South St Baptist Chapel in Greenwich in the eighteen-eighties and commissioned an unknown photographer to make lantern slides of the working people of Greenwich that he could use in his preaching. We shall never know exactly how Spurgeon showed these pictures, taken between 1884 and 1887, but – inadvertently – he was responsible for the creation of one of the earliest series of documentary portraits of Londoners.
Champion Pie Man – W.Thompson, Pie Maker of fifty years, outside his shop in the alley behind Greenwich Church
Hokey-Pokey Boy – August Bank Holiday, Stockwell St, Greenwich
Knife Grinder – posed cutting out a kettle bottom from a tin sheet
Rabbit Seller
Toy Seller – King William St outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Ginger Cakes Seller – King St, near Greenwich Park
Sweep
Shrimp Sellers – outside Greenwich Park
Crossing Sweeper (& News Boy) – Clarence St, Greenwich
Sherbert Seller – outside Greenwich Park
Third Class Milkman – carrying two four-gallon cans on a yoke, King William’s Walk, Greenwich
Second Class Milkman – with a hand cart and seventeen-gallon churn
Master Milkman – in his uniform, outside Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Chairmender – Corner of Prince Orange Lane, Greenwich
Kentish Herb Woman – Greenwich High Rd
Muffin Man
Fishmongers
Try Your Weight – outside Greenwich Park
Glazier
News Boy (& Crossing Sweeper) – delivering The Daily News at 7:30am near Greenwich Pier
Old Clo’ Man – it was a crime to dispose of infected clothing during the Smallpox epidemics of the eighteen-eighties and the Old Clo’ Man plied a risky trade.
Blind Fiddler – outside Crowders’ Music Hall Greenwich
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Mark Jackson’s Magic Lantern Show
Photographer Mark Jackson will be showing his pictures of Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market, and talking about their origin, at the Bishopsgate Institute next Thursday 13th March at 7:30pm Click here to book online
In the last eighteen months of the Fruit & Vegetable Market in Spitalfields, photographers Mark Jackson & Huw Davies set out to record the nocturnal life of the market that operated on this site for over three centuries before it closed in 1991. As recent graduates, Mark was working in a restaurant and Huw was a bicycle courier. Without any financial support for their ambitious undertaking, they saved up all their money to buy cameras and rolls of film, converting a corner of their tiny flat into a darkroom.
“It was quite a struggle,” Mark Jackson confided to me, “because we weren’t earning a lot of money. But Spitalfields fired our imaginations. We caught the last tube to Liverpool St and spent the night there taking photographs, before heading into work next morning.”
This particular set of images take us on a cinematic journey from the busy nocturnal world, when the market was active, through dawn into the early morning after the drama subsided. Mark & Huw photographed a dignified gallery of the market traders and the homeless people who were drawn by the fire that always burned to alleviate their discomfort ever since the market was granted its charter. We no longer see any of these characters in Spitalfields. These men would look displaced here in the renovated market today, they are soulful faces from a universe that is gone. When I walk through the empty Spitalfields Market at night now, it lacks the performance of the nightly drama that ran from 1638 when Charles I signed the licence to commence trading.
Even though Mark & Huw took their pictures only a little more than twenty years ago, they describe a society that feels closer to the world Charles Dickens knew than our own present tense in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Inspired by Tom Hopkinson and Bert Hardy’s work at Picture Post, these photographs were to become the first of a series documenting all the markets of London, that might have become a lifetime’s vocation for Mark & Huw. It was not to be. Life intervened and, without any support, the projected sequence was abandoned. Mark became a writer and Huw is now a teacher – they each have lives beyond their nascent photographic enterprise – but these pictures are an honourable contribution to the canon of British documentary photography.
Photographs copyright © Mark Jackson & Huw Davies
Magic Lantern Shows by John Claridge on 2nd April and Phil Maxwell on 10th April
Take a look at more of Mark Jackson & Huw Davies’ photographs
Spitalfields Market Portraits, 1991
A Walk Through Time With C A Mathew
Concluding my series of features about photographer C A Mathew, I publish Adam Tuck‘s haunting montages blending his pictures of the streets in 2012 with those of his predecessor a century earlier.
Sandys Row from the north
After seeing the work of photographer C A Mathew published in these pages, Adam Tuck was inspired to revisit the locations of the pictures taken a century ago. Subtly blending his own photographs of Spitalfields 2012 with C A Mathew’s photographs of Spitalfields 1912, Adam has initiated an unlikely collaboration with a photographer of a hundred years earlier and created a new series of images of compelling resonance.
In these montages, people of today co-exist in the same space with people of the past, manifesting a sensation I have always felt in Spitalfields – that all of history is present here. Yet those of a hundred years ago knew they were being photographed and many are pictured looking at the camera, whereas passsersby in the present day are mostly self-absorbed. The effect is of those from the past wondering at a vision of the future, while those of our own day are entirely unaware of this ghostly audience.
It is hard to conceive of the meaning of time beyond our own lifespan. But these photographs capture something unseen, something usually hidden from human perception – they are pictures of time passing and each one contains a hundred years.
Sandys Row from the south
Looking from Bishopsgate down Brushfield St, towards Christ Church
Steward St
Looking down Widegate St towards Sandys Row
Looking down Middlesex St towards Bishopsgate
From Bishopsgate looking up Middlesex St
In Crispin St
In Bell Lane
In Artillery Lane looking towards Artillery Passage
From Bishopsgate through Spital Sq
Frying Pan Alley
Montages copyright © Adam Tuck
C A Mathew photographs copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
Exhibition of C A Mathew’s photographs opens today Friday 7th March at Eleven Spitalfields in Princelet St and runs until 27th April
Take a look at more of C A Mathew’s photographs and read my earlier stories
Upon The Subject Of C A Mathew’s Pictures
In September 2010, I wrote speculatively about the photographer C A Mathew and his pictures of Spitalfields 1912 held in the collection at the Bishopsgate Institute. Today I reconsider the nature of his fascinating work and its meaning in the light of new research into his life by Vicky Stewart.
What is the subject of this photograph?
This is – perhaps – the least-examined of the twenty-one photographs which Charles Arthur Mathew took in Spitalfields on Saturday 20th April 1912. It is entirely lacking in the drama of spontaneous street life that has drawn a wide audience to his other photographs in recent years. Yet – although it may appear to the contrary – this curiously mundane picture is not without interest, since it is the key to understanding C A Mathew’s intentions as a photographer on that day.
From the evidence of this picture, it is apparent that his primary intention was not to capture the people of Spitalfields – who have come to form the central point of interest in his photographs, a century later. The fact that C A Mathew made this handsome yet unremarkable commercial building the subject of his photograph, while neglecting to take a picture of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church nearby, also tells us that he was not setting out to photograph sights of historic or cultural interest. It raises the question whether the qualities we appreciate in his work today were merely incidental to C A Mathew’s photographic intention.
Following in his father’s profession, C A Mathew worked as Clerk to the District Surveyor in Walthamstow in the first decade of the last century before setting out to make a living as self-employed photographer in 1910 at the age of forty-seven, two years before he came to Spitalfields. He was familiar with using a surveyor’s tripod and it would not have been very different setting up a camera. Furthermore, C A Mathew labelled his Spitalfields pictures in his precise surveyor’s handwriting and it is this information which reveals their subject.
He gave each of the pictures their locations and several are also labelled to indicate sites in the photograph where buildings have been demolished, and those portraying streets leading to these sites are labelled with their width to the nearest inch. Thus the nature of C A Mathew’s commission becomes apparent, he was undertaking a photographic survey to permit comparison of development sites. The primary importance of access suggests they were developments that would be used by large numbers of people.
In fact, the vacant lots he photographed in Steward St, Crispin St, Wheler St and Norton Folgate are all within reach of the Central Line and a debate about the viability of an additional station between Liverpool St and Bethnal Green has rumbled on for more than a century. The picture of 92 Middlesex St reproduced above and others to the south of Spitalfields in Cutler St and Devonshire Sq are situated in the vicinity of the line between Liverpool St and Aldgate, suggesting that C A Mathew’s pictures were in service of future railway development. Yet, frustrating any conclusion, C A Mathew’s prints reveal no indication of who commissioned him and the coming of World War I precluded whatever proposal was being considered.
Thus the paradox of C A Mathew’s pictures is that his unusually natural portrayal of people in the street, which permits us to connect with them, stems entirely incidentally from a technical photographic survey. C A Mathew was not actually photographing the people, they are simply curious bystanders watching him at work who got recorded for eternity as a byproduct of his task and, in several pictures, he may even have asked them to stand back out of the way. Consequently his work lacks the preconceptions of his age. He did not set out the deliver a picturesque view to charm us or use photography to expose the poverty of the East End in order to draw our sympathy.
C A Mathew’s commission was to make series of technical photographs that showed the built environment clearly. The irony is that it was his complete lack of ego or aspiration to an artistic style which produced photography of the highest calibre. Transcending his own subjectivity and that of his contemporaries, his fascinating images speak across time and offer us a uniquely unclouded window into our own past without any moral or aesthetic judgement.
We may conclude that C A Mathew’s pictures were not the result of filling time while waiting for a delayed train at Liverpool St Station, as I once imagined, nor of a wealthy plutocrat commissioning a record of his beloved childhood streets, as has also been previously suggested.
Historically, Spitalfields has been an area defined by volatile change – from the time Henry VIII dissolved the Priory of St Mary Spital and turned their lands into his artillery ground, to our own day when Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, acted in a similar vein last year by insisting upon the demolition of the Fruit & Wool Exchange against the unanimous wishes of the elected local council.
We value C A Mathew’s pictures for their human quality, in offering the best vision we have of life a century ago in a place that has seen dramatic social change. Yet it appears his beautiful pictures were themselves the outcome of this same process of relentless urban redevelopment that was ultimately to remove the people he photographed from the streets.
Steward St and Artillery Lane, buildings demolished 1907
Crispin St and Duval St, buildings demolished 1908 – the development site can be seen to the left and right of the pub
Wheler St, width 23ft, no 88 demolished 1891 – the development site is down the street to the right
Vacant site on Norton Folgate
Artillery Lane from Bishopsgate, width 16 ft 3 inches – primary access to the Steward St site
Sandys Row, 13ft 8 inches, looking south from Artillery Lane – access to the Steward St site
Spital Square, width 18ft – access to the Wheler St site
Widegate St 16ft looking towards Artillery Passage 8ft 6 inches & Sandys Row intersecting – access to both Steward St and Crispin St sites.
Frying Pan Alley, access to the Crispin St site – the children have been told to stand back
View looking south towards Aldgate Station, showing space occupied by Inner Circle Railway taken from Cutler St at the corner of Harrow Alley and looking down Back Gravel Lane.
C A Mathew photographs copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
Exhibition of C A Mathew’s photographs opens at Eleven Spitalfields in Princelet St on Friday 7th March and runs until 27th April
Take a look at more of C A Mathew’s photographs and read my earlier stories
