At Butler, Tanner & Dennis in Frome
Book Designer, David Pearson, with pages of The Gentle Author’s London Album
Everyone that loves books knows the name of Butler & Tanner, Britain’s oldest and foremost colour printer – established in Frome in 1845 and nowadays known as Butler, Tanner & Dennis. This was the printer that Allen Lane went to in 1935 to print Ariel, the first Penguin Book, and so it was my great delight to go down to Somerset with Book Designer, David Pearson, and Contributing Photographer, Patricia Niven, to see the pages of The Gentle Author’s London Album roll off the presses at the same print works.
We met at Paddington Station before dawn and the sun was just rising as the train sped through the West Country to deliver us to Frome, where we walked from the station to our destination in the aptly-named Caxton Rd. Upon arrival at the unexpectedly quiet print works, we were ushered into a waiting room and told that the first page would be ready shortly. Once we were led through into the factory we encountered the clamour of the machines, where vast presses – each one the size of whale – were spewing forth huge pages of print.
Here we met printers Paul Wrintmore and Clive Acres, and I saw pages of the Album for the first time, laid upon a brightly-lit table that simulated daylight. To my right, the great machine sat humming to itself with impatience as it waited to run off thousands of copies. But first we had to give our approval and I had to sign off the sheet. Each sheet contains twenty-four pages and here, in these unfamiliar surroundings, I was delighted to find my old friends The Dogs of Old London, The Pointe Shoe Makers, The Car Crashes of Clerkenwell and The Spitalfields Nippers. This was one of those moments when you confront something entirely familiar as if you are seeing it for the first time. It all looked well to me, with sharp details and good definition even within the darker areas of the pictures and, where there were flat areas of colour, the tones were even. I could find no flaw.
Yet I stood back, deferring to David Pearson as the design professional, and he leaned over close, casting his critical gaze upon his beautiful pages. The printers stood behind us, exchanging expectant glaces in silence. This was not a moment to discover a mistake and thankfully we did not find any. Most importantly, we were both satisfied with the quality of the printing and I signed the sheet, setting the great press in motion. After a tour of the factory, we came back to see the second sheet and were satisfied again and I signed it off too, content now to leave the rest of the book in the safe hands of the printers.
The early start and the emotionalism of the occasion caught up with us, and we were happy to climb back onto a train and, feeling relieved, we dozed all the way back to Paddington. Yet I took copies of each of the sheets of the Album with me as souvenirs and I have been examining them for errors ever since. I have not found any yet – but I am still looking.
W.T.Butler’s Steam Printing works in Frome, 1857
W.T. Butler, 1850
Early print specimen from Butler & Tanner
Joseph Tanner went into partnership with W.T. Butler in 1863
Early print specimen by Butler & Tanner
Butler & Tanner Print Works, 1905
Paper to print The Gentle Author’s London Album
Setting up the type, 1920
A special colour of ink mixed for The Gentle Author’s London Album
Adjusting the press, 1930
Pumping the ink to print The Gentle Author’s London Album
Typesetting, 1950
David Pearson inspects one of the plates to print The Gentle Author’s London Album
Printing machine, 1935
Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 162 printing press, standing by
Printing Works Beano, 1950
Paul Wrintmore, one of the printers of The Gentle Author’s London Album, with the first page
Plate making, 1950
Clive Acres, one of the printers of The Gentle Author’s London Album
Printing press, 1950
The first page of the Album to come off the press
Digital typesetting, 1970
David Pearson scrutinises the first page
Printing press, 1978
Sewn-together copies heading for the bindery
Digital printing, 1988
In the bindery
1912, Sherlock Holmes
1935, Ariel – the first Penguin Book
1950, The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe
1965, James Bond
2013, The Gentle Author’s London Album
Colour photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
Archive images courtesy of Butler, Tanner & Dennis
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Vegetable Bags from Leila’s Shop
When Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven subscribed to the weekly £10 bag of vegetables from Leila’s Shop in Calvert Ave, she had not counted upon the photographic inspiration that the contents would deliver. Leila McAlister goes to Covent Garden each Monday night to choose the best seasonal produce she can find and these bags comprise London’s freshest vegetables. Yet for the lucky recipients they provide not just nutritious fare but a changing calendar of the seasons of the year and a weekly reminder of the life of the fields.
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
Leila’s Shop, 15-17 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP
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At the Boys’ Club 89th Anniversary Dinner
Maxie Lea MBE, member since 1941
Maxie Lea, 1941
In recent years, it has been my privilege and delight to attend the annual dinner held by the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club in Russell Sq and this year Contributing Photographer Jeremy Freedman came along to take portraits of some of the boys.
Originally established in 1924 by undergraduates of Cambridge University as a Jewish Boys’ Club in Chance St, the Club opened its doors to everyone in 1936 in response to Oswald Mosely and his fascists in the East End. For the price of just halfpenny a week, boys from the Boundary Estate and the surrounding streets at the top of Brick Lane were able to attend every night and participate in sports and cultural activities that were designed to cultivate an egalitarian sense of decency and raise their expectations of life. As Ron Goldstein, who joined in the Club 1933, put it to me plainly, “Half of the boys would have ended up as the next generation of gangsters and criminals if it had not been for the Club.”
Such was the importance of the Club for its members that they still meet annually to celebrate it, even after all this time – because, rather than turn out as the next generation of gangsters and criminals, many did rather well by staying on the right side of the law, becoming company directors and executives. Most significantly, the bonds of friendship that were established all those years ago in the old East End have endured a lifetime, which renders these reunions as emotional occasions, coloured by sentiment and deeply-held affection and causing the boys to revert to their playful childhood personas.
Manny Silverman recalled how he walked through the blackout in 1944 to join the Club and the first person to greet him was Club Secretary Maxie Lea. Nearly seventy years later, Maxie Lea is still Club Secretary and was the first to greet Manny as he arrived at the dinner this year – such is the astonishing continuity of the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club.
Before the meal commences, grace is said and a moment of grave contemplation in silence is always observed as the names of those who have died in the previous year are remembered. Imagine the wonder and joy among so many senior gentlemen to discover there were no names to read out this year! It was a happy overture to yet another lively evening.
At each dinner, I ask couple of people if I may interview them during the coming months and the result is a growing collection of stories that record the lives of the Club members. Those I have written to date are listed below.
Monty Meth, member since 1938
Manny Silverman, member since 1944
Manny Silverman, 1944
Ron Goldstein, member since 1934
Ron Goldstein, 1934
Aubrey Goldsmith, member since 1938
John Platt, member since 1945
Aubrey Silkoff, member since 1951
Aubrey Silkoff, 1951
Des Gammon, member since 1941
Ron Davis, member since 1934
Dennis Frank, member since 1938
Alf Mendoza, member since 1933
Colour Photographs © Jeremy Freedman
Archive Photographs by Harry Tichener MRPS
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Farewell to the Crispin St Night Shelter
“I am standing in the one-time women’s dormitory and have brought a photograph of my friend Peggy. Her husband had died and she could not bear to remain alone in her home surrounded by thoughts of him. Chance, desperation and loss brought many people to Providence Row, myself included, and its existence was a lifeline – a refuge from the ruthlessness of life.”
Providence Row, the night shelter for destitute men, women and children in Crispin St, opened in 1860 and operated until 2002 when it moved to new premises in Wentworth St, where it continues now as a day centre. Twenty years on, photographer Moyra Peralta, who worked at Providence Row in the seventies and eighties, returned to have a final look at the familiar rooms that had seen so much life and she took these evocative pictures published here for the first time.
Reconstructed and expanded to create an uneasy architectural hybrid, the building is now student housing for the London School of Economics, where once it housed Students of the London School of the Economics of Pennilessness. Famously, this was where James Mason came to interview those dignified gentlemen down on their luck in ‘The London Nobody Knows.’
Over one one hundred and forty years, Providence Row offered refuge to the poorest and most vulnerable of Londoners and, at the last moment before the building was gutted, Moyra went in search of the residue of their hope and despair, their yearning and their loneliness. She found a sacred space resonant with echoes of the past and graven with the tell-tale marks of those who had passed through.
Peggy
Memorial plaque to the opening of Providence Row in 1860
The yard where Roman skeletal remains were excavated
Looking towards the City of London
HE WHO OPENS THIS DOOR SHALL BE CURSED FOR A HUNDRED AND ONE YEARS
Former women’s dormitory
Women’s dormitory in the sixties
This free-standing disconnected facade is still to be seen in Artillery Lane
Gerry B
“I am struck by the notion that with a careless step or two, I too might meet a premature end as I circumnavigate holes in floors and gaping apertures in walls.”
The room where Moyra Peralta slept when she worked at Providence Row and where she wrote these words – “Only the present is real – for some reason I feel this most of all when listening to the lorries moving at the street’s end and the slamming of crates being unloaded in Crispin St. There is a rhythm to the deep sound of the slow low-thrumming engines that I like to contemplate. On sleep-over, rising early from my bed following the refuge nightshift, I watch what is now – 6:00am. A thousand cameos change and regroup under my gaze. Jammed traffic forms and reforms where the roads meet.”
Photographs copyright © Moyra Peralta
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The Doss Houses of Spitalfields
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The Gentle Author’s Pub Crawl
Feeling in need of exercise and refreshment, I set out on a walk to visit some favourite pubs along the way and I took my camera with me too.
Mitre Taven, Hatton Garden, opened 1546
George & Vulture, City of London, opened 1600
Bust of Dickens in the dining room at the George & Vulture
Jamaica Wine House, City of London, opened 1660
The Blackfriar, Blackfriars, opened 1905
The Old Bell, Fleet St, opened in the sixteen-seventies
The Punch Tavern, Fleet St, opened 1839
Old Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court, opened 1538
Ship Tavern, Gate St, opened 1549
Cittie of Yorke, Holborn, opened 1696
Seven Stars, Carey St, opened 1602
The Lamb & Flag, Rose St, opened 1623
At the Lamb & Flag
The Anchor, Bankside, where Samuel Pepys watched the Fire of London
The George, Borough High St, opened in the fourteenth century
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Remembering A S Jasper
Albert Stanley Jasper
“The initials stand for Albert Stanley, but he was always know as Stan, never Albert,” admitted Terry Jasper, speaking of his father when we met at F. Cooke’s Pie & Mash Shop in Hoxton Market recently. A.S. Jasper’s A Hoxton Childhood is one of the classic East End childhood autobiographies, acclaimed since it was first published in 1969 when The Observer described it as “Zola without the trimmings,” and Terry is understandably proud to welcome a new edition this month.
“In the late sixties, my mum and dad lived in a small ground floor flat. Looking out of the window onto the garden one morning, he saw a tramp laying on the grass who had been there all night. My dad took him out a sandwich and a cup of tea, and told him that he wouldn’t be able to stay there,” Terry recalled, “I think most people in that situation would have just phoned the police and left it at that.” It is an anecdote that speaks eloquently of Stan Jasper’s compassionate nature, informing his writing and making him a kind father, revered by his son all these years later.
Yet it is in direct contrast to the brutal treatment that Stan received at the hands of his own alcoholic father William, causing the family to descend in a spiral of poverty as they moved from one rented home to another, while his mother Lily struggled heroically against the odds to maintain domestic equilibrium for her children. “My grandmother, I only met her a couple of times, but once I was alone with her in the room and she said, ‘Your dad, he was my best boy, he took care of me.'” Terry remembered.
“There are a million things I’d like to have asked him when he was alive but I didn’t,” Terry confided to me, contemplating his treasured copy of his father’s book that sat on the table between us, “My dad died in 1970, he was sixty-five – It was just a year after publication but he saw it was a success.”
“When he was a teenager, he was a wood machinist and the sawdust got on on his lungs and he got very bad bronchitis. When I was eight years old, the doctor told him he must give up his job, otherwise the dust would kill him. My mum said to him that this was something he had to do and he just broke down. It was very strange feeling, because I didn’t think then that grown-ups cried.”
Stan started his own business manufacturing wooden cases for radios in the forties, employing more than seventy people at one point until it ran into difficulties during the credit squeeze of the fifties. Offered a lucrative buy-out, Stan turned it down out of a concern that his employees might lose their jobs but, shortly after, the business went into liquidation. “He should have thought of his family rather his workers,” commented Terry regretfully, “He lost his factory and his home and had to live in a council flat for the rest of his life.”
“My dad used to talk about his childhood quite a lot, he never forgot it – so my uncle said, ‘Why don’t you write it all down?’ And he did, but he tried to get it published without success. Then a friend where I worked in the City Rd took it to someone he knew in publishing, and they really liked it and that’s how it got published. When the book came out in 1969, he wanted to go back to Hoxton to see what was still left, but his health wasn’t good enough.”
Terry ‘s memories of his father’s struggles are counterbalanced by warm recollections of family celebrations.“He always enjoyed throwing a party, especially if he was in the company of my mother’s family. It wasn’t easy obtaining beer and spirits during the warm but somehow he managed to find a supply. He was always generous where money was concerned, sometimes to a fault, and he had a nice voice and didn’t need much persuading to get up and sing a song or two.”
A.S. Jasper’s ‘A Hoxton Childhood’ is an authentic and compelling story of survival and of the triumph of a protagonist who retains his sense of decency against all the odds. “He said he would always settle for the way life turned out,” Terry concluded fondly.
Terry Jasper at F Cooke in Hoxton Market
Cover design for the first edition of A Hoxton Childhood drawn by James Boswell
William Jasper – “His main object in life was to be continually drunk”
Lily Jasper – “I asked her what made her marry a man like my father”
Stan (on the right) with his brother Fred
Stan and his wife Lydia
Terry as a boy
Terry in 1960
Terry with his dad Stan
Stan and his sister Flo
Stan
Terry with Stan & Lydia at Christmas
High jinks at a family Christmas party
A S Jasper – “So, out of so disastrous a childhood, I am now surrounded, in spite of poor health, with love and happiness.”
What Became of Stephen Long’s Antiques
Solar plate etching by Jane Waterhouse
You may recall that I photographed the last day of Stephen Long’s celebrated antique shop in the Fulham Rd before the stock was removed for auction. Dennis Severs had bought china from Stephen Long’s shop for many years to furnish his time-capsule house in Folgate St, and it was David Milne, curator of the house, who took me over to visit the shop after Stephen Long died.
Although many of the contents were not of great monetary value, Stephen Long had a distinctive eye and collected items that appealed to him personally, combining them imaginatively to create displays that were artworks in their own right. He had an instinctive response to the human quality of artifacts, objects that carried their history of use and that evoked an entire world. For this reason, he was not troubled if antiques were damaged or inferior specimens, because it was the poetry of things which fascinated him.
When Stephen Long’s shop was cleared out, everyone wondered what would become of his things. Yet artist and printmaker Jane Waterhouse became so inspired by the collection that she obtained permission from Cheffins, the Cambridgeshire auction house that was selling them, to photograph them all and she has now embarked upon a series of subtly-toned elegaic prints of the pieces that speak most powerfully to her. “There was a particular quality to Stephen’s eye that I felt a rapport with,” Jane admitted to me, “so I have produced these fugitive prints.”
“I felt I needed to do it with solar plate etchings as close to photographs as possible but not photographs, and the process is quite beguiling – you can expose the plates by laying them in the sun, she explained. At present, Jane has completed a portfolio of nine etchings entitled ‘Belonged,’ printed in pale silver and in a lustrous velvet black, and collected in a grey canvas portfolio. These ethereal images resemble ghosts of the objects, communicating presence without substance, which suits the subjects very well because now they are all gone, dispersed and sold to new owners. “Heaven knows where the objects in these prints are now,” Jane confessed with a shrug.
“It has been calculated that we interact with well over five hundred and twenty objects each day.” Jane assured me, “The vast majority we hardly register. Some we will take stock of – maybe the early morning cup of tea or coffee? Maybe a bag to leave the house with – for putting more things in? Objects may be useful, or practical function may not apply. There are, though, some objects that cannot be disregarded – those that are to be cherished. Objects that endure. These seem to have a kind of potency – an ‘aliveness.’
We surround ourselves with these objects, some inherited, some saved for, some found, others purchased on a whim. Some might be gifts. The selection of these pieces, the act of taking them into our homes and our lives may be strategic or not. These are objects, the gradual accumulations of things that speak not only of their owner but to their owner.”
At Stephen Long’s antique shop
Zinc container with wicker frame
Oak leaf curtain tie
Eighteenth century teapot
Steel tray
Posy dish
Metal base
Tea bowl
Nineteenth century teapot
Eighteenth century hand-held fire screen
Pie mould
Mochaware pot
Tureen
Ridged bowl
Staffordshire poodle
Shell-shaped dish
Nineteenth century ceramic box
Pot mended with rivets
Earthenware mug
Prints & photographs copyright © Jane Waterhouse
Visit Jane Waterhouse’s website to learn more about her work and buy her prints
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