Viscountess Boudica’s Christmas
Let it be said that if anyone in the East End knows how to keep the spirit of Christmas, it is the Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green. At this time of year, her tiny flat near Columbia Rd is transformed into a secret Winter Wonderland where the visitor may forget the chill of the gloomy streets outside and enter a realm of magic, fantasy and romance in which the Viscountess holds court like a benevolent sprite or fairy godmother, celebrating the season of goodwill in her own inimitable style.
Boudica had already been at work for weeks when I arrived with my camera to capture the Christmas spectacle for your delight, yet she was still putting the finishing touches to her display even as I walked through the door. “You see these bells?” she said, reaching up to add them to the colourful forest of paper decorations suspended from the ceiling,“I bought them in Woolworths in Tottenham for 45p in 1984. When I think of all the people they have looked down upon – if only these bells could talk, they’ve seen it all!”
Evidence of the season was apparent wherever I turned my eyes, from the illuminated coloured trees that filled each corner – giving the impression that the room was actually a woodland glade – to the table where Boudica was wrapping her gifts and writing cards, to the corner where a stack of festive records awaited her selection, to the innumerable Christmas knick-knacks and figures that crowded every surface, and the light-up reindeer outside in the garden, glimpsed discreetly through the net curtains. “This is thirty years worth of collecting,” she explained, gesturing to the magnificent display enfolding us, “that set of lights is older than I am.”
In common with many, this is an equivocal time for Viscountess Boudica who does not have happy childhood memories of Christmas. “It was hell,” she admitted to me frankly, “We didn’t have any money to buy presents and, in our family, Christmas was always when fights and arguments would break out. The reason I have so many decorations now is to make up for all the years when I didn’t have any.” Yet Boudica remembers small acts of kindness too. “The local shops used to save me their balloons and give me scraps of fabric that I used to make clothes for the kittens in the barn – and that was the beginning of me making my own outfits,” she recalled fondly.
“People should remember what it’s all about,” Boudica assured me, linking her own childhood with the Christian narrative,“It’s about a little boy who didn’t have a home. They should think of others and remember there’s poor people here in Bethnal Green.” Naturally, I asked the Viscountess if she had a Christmas message for the world and, without a second thought, she came to back to me with her declaration – “Be kind to each other and get rid of discrimination!”
Boudica contemplates her Christmas listening – will it be Andy Williams or Jim Reeves this year?
“Whenever I hang up these bells, I think of all the people they have looked down upon over the years”
Wrapping up her gifts.
Filling her stocking
Nollaig Shona Dhaoibh!
Drawings copyright © Viscountess Boudica
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Christmas At Gardners Market Sundriesmen
Paul Gardner takes last-minute Christmas orders for paper bags
The grey streets were empty with the first drops of rain falling yesterday, as I made my way to visit my friend Paul Gardner, the paper bag baron and fourth generation proprietor of the Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, the oldest family business in Spitalfields. Yet the lights were gleaming brightly at his shop in Commercial St upon all the colourful bags, stacked in such appealing disarray as if a shipload of paper bags had been wrecked and washed up here upon the tide.
“Stephen’s been here helping me, as it’s been mental,” admitted Paul with a significant cheery gesture towards the mysterious darkness at the rear of the shop where his son – recently returned from Latin America – was now taking on the formidable challenge of organising Paul’s stock room. “People do wonder how I find anything and it doesn’t normally matter, but packets were falling on Stephen’s head,” Paul confessed to me with an explanatory grimace, “Now, if I say ‘twisted handle brown paper carrier bags’ he knows where they are.”
And thus it is that for the first time in a generation, the use of the plural on the shop sign, “Gardners Market Sundriesmen” has its literal meaning once more.
Meanwhile, as passersby struggled up Commercial St with their feeble umbrellas turning inside-out in the accumulating gale-force winds, inside Paul’s shop, the Christmas storm appeared to have already passed through. “I could possibly take the day off on Christmas Eve,” he deliberated idly, egged on by his son,“but I promised to deliver to the Beigel Bakery and I’ll be up at five-thirty anyway…”
Paul’s dilemma was left unresolved because Stanley, a fellow Market Sundriesman and long-standing customer who trades in paper bags from the back of a van, popped by to pick up stock and dispense greetings. “It’s changed a lot round here in thirty-two years, it’s a different life !” he declared in disbelief, shaking Paul’s hand forcibly with an excess of season goodwill, “Not that he has changed, just got more curly.”
Upon his swift departure, a girl with waist-length red hair stumbled in from the storm, her bleary eyes widening in amazement at the spectacle. “Hello!” she announced in delight, “I’ve not been here before – it’s fantastic!” Paul proposed candy-striped bags, as the most suitable for the chocolates she was making as gifts. “Red and green are very popular at this time of year,” he ventured tentatively as she made a reckoning of the contents of the coins in her purse. “I only need about ten,” she revealed apologetically. “That’ll be fifty pence for ten,” Paul answered, causing her to break into a big smile. “I’ll take another five,” she decided recklessly.
The downpour had begun and an exhausted shopkeeper in a wet coat was next through the door. “F*ck Christmas! It’s so stressful,” he pleaded wearily, “I never get a chance to enjoy it, so I’m taking three days off including Friday – that’s not a luxury is it? I’ve had such a crappy year.” Paul, Stephen and me, we all nodded sagely in confirmation of his wise decision, and – resolved – he took his bags and left quickly.
Yet Paul was still uncertain regarding the big question of Christmas Eve opening.“I’ve stayed here before on Christmas Eve and taken a fiver and got fed up and gone home,” he recalled, thinking out loud for the benefit of Stephen and me, until we were interrupted again. “I’ve got to leave at once!” gasped the visitor, gesturing to his vehicle parked on the red route outside,“I’ve got all the cameras watching me with the compliments of the season.” Next came a man in an ankle-length military coat who wanted butcher’s hooks and then a fashionably-dressed woman who needed three hundred popcorn bags, “for the Secret Cinema at the Troxy.”
“My mum sounded fed up on the phone,” Paul confided to me during a lull in the morning,“So Stephen, Robert and me, we’re going to get up at dawn on Christmas Morning and drive down to her house at Frinton. Then we’re going to call her and tell her to get up because Father Christmas is outside, and Robert’s going to play his trombone!” Father and son exchanged a mischievous smile of complicity in anticipation of the imminent festival.
“All these bloody Christmas shoppers!” the manager of a local shoe shop exclaimed in near-hysteria – breaking our reverie as he barged through the door – dripping with rain and glowing in frustration,“The General Public turned into savages yesterday. Everyone’s buying double of everything – I only wish the coppers were going into my pocket.” Then he staggered off with an armful of carrier bags that seemed to placate his emotion. And there were no more customers and a silence fell upon the shop as the trade ebbed away.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised,” said Paul, when the time came to close up and depart into the raging storm outside, “It’s always hit and miss at Christmas.”
“I’ll come in early in the morning tomorrow and see what happens,” he decided, heartened by the day’s custom and discovering resolution all-of-a-sudden, “I’ve got two days holiday after that and then the weekend, so it’s not too bad.”
Paul’s son Stephen has just returned from travelling through Latin America
Paul & Stephen, fourth and fifth generation Market Sundriesmen
Paul mans the counter at the front …
… while Stephen organises the stock at the rear
Stephen takes a turn behind the counter – “Are you his son? You look like him?”
Stanley, a customer of thirty-two years standing, pops by to deliver a Christmas greeting – “It’s changed a lot round here in thirty-two years, it’s a different life! Not that he has changed, just got more curly.”
Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, 149 Commercial St, E1 6BJ (open from 6:30am on Christmas Eve)
You may like to read my other stories about Paul Gardner
Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Seller
At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Joan Rose at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Christmas Meat Auction At Smithfield
I am publishing my story of the Christmas Eve Meat Auction at Smithfield today as a reminder to any readers who may wish to go along tomorrow, because – unless SAVE Britain’s Heritage is successful in preventing the proposed demolition of the General Market next year – this could be your last chance to witness this annual tradition.
The carnivores of London converged upon Smithfield Market, as they do every year for the annual Christmas Eve auction staged by Harts the Butcher. At ten in the morning, the rainy streets were almost empty yet, as I came through Smithfield, butchers in white overalls were wheeling precarious trolleys top-heavy with meat and fowls over to the site of the auction where an expectant crowd of around a hundred had gathered, anxiously clutching wads of banknotes in one hand and bags to carry off their prospective haul in the other.
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien met me there. He grew up half a mile away in Clerkenwell during the nineteen fifties and, although it was his first time at the auction, he remembered his father walking down to Smithfield to get a cheap turkey on Christmas Eve more than sixty years ago. Overhearing this reminiscence, a robust woman standing next to us in the crowd struck up a conversation as a means to relieve the growing tension before the start of the auction which is the highlight of the entire year for many of stalwarts that have been coming for decades.
“You can almost guarantee getting a turkey,” she reassured us with the authority of experience, revealing she had been in attendance for fifteen successive years. Then, growing visibly excited as a thought came into her mind, “Last year, I got thirty kilos of sirloin steak for free – I tossed for it!”, she confided to us, turning unexpectedly flirtatious. Colin and I stood in silent wonder at her good fortune with meat.“We start preparing in October by eating all the meat in the freezer,” she explained, to clarify the situation. “Last night we had steak,” she continued, rubbing her hands in gleeful anticipation, “and steak again tonight.”
Yet our acquaintance was terminated as quickly as it began when the caller appeared in a blood-stained white coat and red tie to introduce the auction. A stubby bullet-headed man, he raised his hands graciously to quell the crowd. “This is a proper English tradition,” he announced, “it has been going on for the last five hundred years. And I’m going to make sure everybody goes away with something and I’m here to take your money.”
His words drew an appreciative roar from the crowd as dozens of eager hands were thrust in the air waving banknotes, indicative of the collective blood lust that gripped the assembly. Standing there in the midst of the excitement, I realised that the sound I could hear was an echo. It was a reverberation of the famously uproarious Bartholomew Fair which flourished upon this site from the twelfth century until it was suppressed for public disorder in 1855. Yesterday, the simple word “Hush!” from the caller was enough to suppress the mob as he queried, “What are we going to start with?”
The answer to his question became manifest when several bright pink loins of pork appeared as if by magic in the hatch beside him, held by butchers beneath, and dancing jauntily above the heads of the delighted audience like hand puppets. These English loins of pork were soon dispatched into the crowd at twenty pounds each as the curtain warmer to the pantomime that was to come, followed by joints of beef for a tenner preceding the star attraction of day – the turkeys! – greeted with festive cheers by the hungry revellers. “Mind your heads, turkeys coming over…” warned the butcher as the turkeys in their red wrappers set out crowd-surfing to their grateful prospective owners as the cash was passed hand to hand back to the stand.
It would not be an understatement to say that mass hysteria had overtaken the crowd, yet there was another element to add to the chaos of the day. As the crowd had enlarged, it spilled over into the road with cars and vans weaving their through the overwrought gathering. “I love coming for the adventure of it,” declared one gentleman with hair awry, embracing a side of beef protectively as if it was the love of his life, “Everyone helps one another out here. You pass the money over and there’s no pickpockets.”
After the turkeys came the geese, the loins of lamb, the ribs of beef, the pork bellies, the racks of lamb, the fillet steaks and the green gammon to complete the bill of fare. As the energy rose, butchers began to throw pieces of red meat into the crowd to be caught by their purchasers and it was surreal to watch legs of lamb and even suckling pigs go flying into the tumultuous mass of people. Finally, came tossing for meat where customers had the chance of getting their steaks for free if they guessed the toss correctly, and each winning guess was greeted with an exultant cheer because by then the butchers and the crowd were as one, fellow participants in a boisterous party game.
Just ninety minutes after it began, the auction wrapped up, leaving the crowd to consolidate their proud purchases, tucking the meat and fowls up snugly in suitcases and backpacks to keep them safe until they could be stowed away in the freezer at home. In the disorder, I saw piles of bloody meat stacked on the muddy pavement where people were tripping over them. Yet a sense of fulfilment prevailed, everyone had stocked up for another year – their carnivorous appetites satiated – and they were going home to eat meat.
As I walked back through the narrow City streets, I contemplated the spectacle of the morning. It resembled a Bacchanale or some ancient pagan celebration in which people were liberated to pursue their animal instincts. But then I realised that my thinking was too complicated – it was Christmas I had witnessed.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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David Hoffman At Crisis At Christmas
Almost by chance, at the end of the seventies, photographer David Hoffman found himself recording the formation of an organisation called Crisis at Christmas that opened up disused spaces and created temporary shelters staffed by volunteers to provide accommodation for the homeless through the holiday season when other shelters were shut.
As a participant rather than a visitor, David was able to take intimate photographs of those who sought refuge, capturing emotional images which are compassionate yet void of sentimentality.
There is a timeless quality to many of these pictures that could equally be of refugees from a war zone or in some apocalyptic dystopian vision of the future, yet this is London in the recent past and Crisis at Christmas is still with us and the work goes on.
“At the time, I was known for my photos of the homeless at St Botolph’s in Aldgate and I was going out with a girl named Peta Watts, who was working at Crisis at Christmas – so when she asked me to take pictures there, I leapt at the chance of becoming the Crisis photographer, and I did it for three years.
This was the early days of these shelters and they used derelict churches. One of them was St Philip & St Augustine in Whitechapel, round the corner from the squat where I lived in Fieldgate Mansions, and the next year it was at the Tradescant church of St Mary’s in Lambeth. So there were very little facilities – perhaps only a cold tap and one toilet for hundreds of people – and the whole thing was a chaotic feat of organisation, but somehow it all worked. They got donations of food and clothing and toys. And I remember some of the guys found an old bath tub in a skip and brought it in and filled it with water, so they could wash themselves. There was no regard to Health & Safety or regulation as we know it, but it all worked brilliantly and everyone was very well looked after. There was no hierarchy and the homeless people would be involved in the cooking and arranging the mattresses, and keeping the whole thing running.
I photographed it because it was a wonderful event and – like at St Botolph’s – some of the people were couples, and I took their pictures and brought them prints the next day. Many of these people had been living on the streets all year and the photographs helped them to have a more positive self-image.
Some would be shooting up and and others would be drinking, and an ambulance would come two or three times a day to pick people up. There were fights too, and I remember there was an unspoken rule that only one volunteer would approach to break it up by speaking softly – and it never failed. Many of the volunteers were middle class people who would work eighteen to twenty hours a day. What I liked about it was people coming together and doing things for themselves – and it just worked, and the homeless people looked after each other.”
Photographs copyright © David Hoffman
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Midwinter Light At Christ Church
Today is the shortest day of the year and, at eleven minutes past five this afternoon, we pass the solstice taking us back towards shorter nights and longer days. At this time when the sun is at its lowest angle, Christ Church Spitalfields can become an intricate light box with powerful rays of light entering almost horizontally from the south and illuminating Nicholas Hawksmoor’s baroque architecture in startling ways. Yesterday’s crystalline sunlight provided the ideal conditions for such phenomena and inspired my to attempt to capture of these fleeting effects of light.
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Stephen Armstrong, Postman
Occasionally, people write correspondence addressed simply to “The Gentle Author, Spitalfields” and it is to the credit of the East End postal service that these letters arrive on my doormat. So today I return the favour with this interview of Whitechapel Postman, Stephen Armstrong – and Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien accompanied him on his round yesterday to take these pictures.
Stephen Armstrong
Stephen Armstrong and I met in the early afternoon in Whitechapel, once the day’s round was done, and he ate mince pies with hot chocolate to revive his flagging spirits, after being awake since before dawn.
We were just across the road from sorting office which is only five minutes walk away from where he lives to the south and ten minutes walk from his round, which is to the north.
Steve spends a lot of time pounding the pavements of Whitechapel and it is unlikely that anyone knows the minutiae of these streets better than he. Reserved in manners yet resilient in spirit, Stephen has found his metier in delivering letters and becoming the spiritual guardian of his particular corner of the East End.
“I’ve been up since five this morning, that’s late for me! It gives me a little time to myself, to get ready and pootle around – because six o’ clock is when I start.
I always remember when I joined the Post Office, because it was the the day after the Poll Tax Riot, 1st April 1990. I got myself sacked from an oil refinery for edible oils for not working hard enough, then I did thirteen months training to be be a Dispensing Optician. That was all because I had mucked up my A Levels and was a general under-acheiver all round. Then I failed my Optician exams, so I needed a way out and the Post Office seemed like the ideal place to get my head together. It started as a temporary job but I’ve been here ever since.
I grew up in Dartford and worked in Dartford, until they more or less shut down the sorting office there. By then, I had met my wife Karen and moved to Whitechapel and I’d been trying to get a job in the Whitechapel Sorting Office for years. It was very difficult for me to get from Whitechapel to Dartford to start work at five in the morning, so they offered me the possibility of a transfer to Rochester. Eventually they said, ‘We might be able to transfer you to Whitechapel but you’ve said you don’t like going out doing deliveries.’ I said, ‘I don’t know because I’ve never tried it,’ and when I did it was a baptism of fire, but I absolutely loved it. That was just last year, 2012.
I like being outdoors and walking across the same piece of ground everyday, you see the changes that people in the city are normally cut off from, the flowers opening and leaves falling. You are in touch with time passing.
I walk five minutes from my home in Adelina Grove and kick off at Whitechapel Sorting Office at six each morning. The machine will have sorted everything from yesterday in order, there is a slot for every letterbox in the frame. Then it’s ‘walk sorted’ and you sort whatever mail has come in during the night – that’s about an hour’s work. At nine o’clock, it is breakfast time. You go off and have breakfast, by which time anything from the other East End districts will come in and we sort that.
Once you have got all your work, you make it into bundles with those elastic bands – the notorious ones that we drop all over the place. You pack your bag with the first bundle of work, it cannot be more than sixteen kilos. Some postmen have a trolley but I don’t, instead I have dropboxes where the rest of the mail is dropped off to me at each end of my area. Generally, it takes about two and a half to three hours walking to make my deliveries. There are lots of streets where no-one notices you, you become part of the street furniture. A few old ladies ask you to do this and that and I don’t mind. I’m not a friend, I’m an acquaintance – but I like to think I can be trusted.
I don’t mind the weather, though I can’t really handle the heat because you can’t take off any more than the minimum. I’ve got a collection of silly hats – a sou’wester for rain and a sunhat for summer. I love dogs though there are a couple who jump up to take the letters out of your hands but, if you are careful, you can save your fingers. I desperately try to make friends with all the dogs on my route. I had a dog of my own, Laika, for seven years and I miss her a lot, so I’m borrowing other people’s dogs briefly.
I think there’s going to be more post in future but it’ll be more parcels not letters. A lot more comes through mail order these days, but all business is done by emails so there’s fewer letters. It would be a sad thing if the regular post goes, yet nobody writes anymore they just send texts and emails. Even I don’t receive any mail anymore.”
Steve delivers to Henrietta Keeper, Ballad Singer of Bethnal Green
Back to the drop box to pick up another load of letters
Off on the rounds again …
Bye!
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
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London Salt-Glazed Stoneware
As one who thought nobody else shared my passion for old salt-glazed stoneware, I was overjoyed to meet Philip Mernick and be granted the opportunity to photograph these fine examples from his vast and historically-comprehensive collection which is greatly superior to my modest assembly.
In London, John Dwight of Fulham ascertained the method of the salt glaze process for rendering earthenware impermeable in 1671, thus breaking the German monopoly on Bellarmine jugs. Yet it was Henry Doulton in the nineteenth century who exploited the process on an industrial scale in Lambeth, especially in the profitable fields of bottle-making and drainpipes, before starting the manufacture of art pottery in 1870.
It is the utilitarian quality of this distinctive London pottery that appeals to me, lending itself to a popular style of decoration which approaches urban folk art. “I like it for its look,” Philip Mernick admitted , “but because nothing is marked until the late nineteenth century, it’s the mystery that appeals to me – trying to piece together who made what and when.”
Jug by Vauxhall Pottery 1810
Blacking bottles – Everett 1910 & Warren 1830
Gin Flagon, Fulham Pottery c. 1840
Spirit Flask in the shape of a boot by Deptford Stone Pottery c. 1840
Spirit flask in the shape of a pistol by Stephen Green and in the shape of a powder flask by Thomas Smith of Lambeth Pottery c. 1840
Reform flasks – Wiliam IV Reform flask by Doulton & Watts, eighteen- thirties, and Mrs Caudle flask by Brayne of Lambeth, eighteen-forties
Spirit flask of John Burns, Docks Union Leader, Doulton Pottery 1910
Nelson jug by Doulton & Watts 1830
Duke of Wellington jug by Stephen Green of Lambeth Pottery 1830
Mortlake Pottery Tankard, seventeen-nineties
Old Tom figure upon a Fulham Pottery Tankard c. 1830
Silenus jug by Stephen Green of Lambeth Pottery c. 1840
Victoria & Albert jug by Stephen Green of Lambeth Pottery 1840
Stag hunt jug by Doulton & Watts c. 1840
Mortlake Pottery jug, seventeen-nineties
Doulton jug hallmarked 1882
Jug by Thomas Smith of Lambeth Pottery 1840
Fulham Pottery jug c. 1830
Stiff Pottery jug c. 1850
Mortlake Pottery jug 1812
Figure of Toby Philpot on Mortlake jug
Deptford Pottery jug 1860
Stiff Pottery jug, with seller’s name in Limehouse 1860
Vauxhall Pottery jug with image of the pavilion at Vauxhall Gardens and believed to have been used there in the eighteen-thirties
Tobacco jug by Doulton & Watts, eighteen-forties
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