At Plashet Park Bowling Club
Photographer Colin O’Brien and I went over to visit the Plashet Park Bowling Club in hopes of witnessing some exciting action on the green and reporting back to you. But, with temperatures rising in excess of thirty degrees, we found the members had wisely decided not to venture beyond the Club House and were spending the afternoon sitting in the shade drinking tea and eating cake instead. We could not fault the wisdom of such a decision, especially as it gave Colin the opportunity to take their portraits and, enlivened by the novelty of photography, a spontaneous tea party ensued that filled the afternoon very pleasantly.
The Club has been in the headlines recently on account of a recent surge in membership from Asian people, reviving a flagging institution, but when we arrived none were to be seen. “They’re at the mosque today,” explained the Club Secretary, Joan Ayre, proudly – as we stepped into the kitchen for a cool glass of lemonade,“They’re really good players and they’ve made us a stronger and better Club.”
“We do have a history of acheivements,” interposed Cliff Dye, the youthful President & Chairman, standing up for the Club’s legacy, “In 1911, a group of men got together and founded this Club in Plashet Park as an offshoot of the Bowling Club at the Green Man, a pub which has gone now.”
“You know how all the pubs round here have car parks?” added Joan, unable to conceal her disappointment, “Well, those all used to be the Bowling Greens.”
“In 1999, there were fifteen Bowling Clubs in Newham,” revealed Cliff, quoting figures, “and now there are only six – lack of membership was the problem.”
“We are the originals,” continued Joan, clutching at the arm of her husband Nobby for moral support.
“We both joined twenty-six years ago when we retired,” Nobby admitted to me, “I am the second oldest member at eighty-five.”
“The Asians were rolling up every day to practice in the first year so, in the second year, we invited them to join our competitions,” Cliff informed me, eagerly picking up the narrative of the club’s recent ascendancy, “And they won them all because of the practising – they’re very good bowlers.” This last comment drew nods of agreement and approval all round.
“I am confident of the future of this Club,” Joan assured me as I studied the score boards, trophies and old photographs that adorned the Club House, “because we are going to become the first all-Asian Bowls Club in years to come.”
And I was touched by the many emotions present in Joan’s statement, of her relief that her precious Club would not die like so many others, of her delight in sharing it with new members, of her excitement at the renewed competitive future of the Club and her pleasure that her beloved sport had delivered the arena for a such an unexpected meeting of cultures united by their enjoyment of bowls.
By now, I spotted two Asian gentlemen who had sought the cool shade of a laurel hedge to relax and so I went over to discover their side of the story.“I only started playing bowls when I joined the club in 2010, though I was always keen on sports from volleyball, basketball, cricket and athletics when I was young.” confided Bashir Patel, known affectionately as “Bash,”It’s a very friendly club with very nice people and all suspicions on both sides have been dispelled.”
A heat haze hung over the green and it was necessary to retreat back into the Club House where we persuaded the members to gather for a group photo, before our taking our leave and promising to return later in the summer when all the members would be present to show us how a game of bowls should be played – and Colin can take portraits of all those we missed this time.
In the meantime, the Plashet Park Bowling Club seeks new members of all ages. Email Joan Ayre to learn more dayre657@btinternet.com
Plashet Park Bowling Club
Joan Ayre, Club Secretary and Member for twenty-six years – “I don’t go in for competitions anymore because I’ve won them all.”
Ted King – “I started playing bowls when I was sixty-one and I was eighty-seven on Sunday. I love bowls because it’s out in the open and this is a real friendly Club, that’s what I like about it. When the Asian chaps wanted to join, we was a bit amazed at first but we’ve accepted them and they’ve become really good members.”
Peter Chilkes -“I’ve been playing bowls for forty years, ever since I got injured playing football. And, in 1974, I was rhythm guitarist in Mike Berry & The Outlaws and our hit “Jumping Jeremiah” went to forty in the chart.”
Lilian Lucas
Barry Menzies – “Eight years, I’ve been a member of the Club. I learnt to play at the bus depot ten years ago when I was working on the busses.”
Margaret Springford , member since 1985 – “I love the social life and the camaraderie!”
Nobby Ayre – “I am the second oldest member at eighty-five”
Dot Mardle – “I only started bowling when my husband died. I’ve been a member for eighteen years and it’s been good because it opens up your life. You don’t do anything with your life if you don’t play bowls.”
Alf Goring
George Gale – “I’m eighty-two and I’ve been playing bowls for eighteen years, I love it. I need my exercise because I’ve had a lot of accidents.”
Betty Ayrton
Frank Adams
Hazel Clarke
Les Langford – “I’m retired and it gets me out of the house.”
Bashir Patel (known as “Bash”) – I only started playing bowls when I joined the club in 2010, though I was always keen on sports from volleyball, basketball, cricket and athletics when I was young.”
Moosa Patel
Patrick Hickey
Cliff Dye, President & Captain
Members of Plashet Park Bowling Club – (Click photo to enlarge)
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Delwar Hussain, Writer & Anthropologist
Delwar Hussain in Puma Court
This is Delwar Hussain in his long attic room at the very top of the family house in Puma Court where he grew up. Within the shadow of Christ Church, Delwar’s window overlooks the rooftops of the old houses at the heart of Spitalfields. Downstairs, his mother tends to the tiny courtyard garden, while his sister’s children play up and down the stairs but, up here in the quiet, Delwar presides over his own intellectual territory, defined by the enormous crowded bookshelf that fills an entire wall at one end of the room.
Delwar’s perspective is upon borderland, yet not just with the City of London that is visible from his eyrie but across continents to the land of of his family’s origin and the boundary between India and Bangladesh, where Delwar spent two years conducting interviews to write his first book Boundaries Undermined, completed as the culminate of his doctorate at Cambridge University. With its eloquent authoritative prose and generous shrewd sensibility, it is a strong debut – a highly readable book of real stature, introducing an important subject of international significance that was previously unexplored.
Yet the wonder is that Delwar can still inhabit his childhood world in Spitalfields with ease, overseeing his nephews and nieces playing in Puma Court and reconciling this with his intellectual endeavours as Writer, Anthropologist and occasional Correspondent for The Guardian upon Bangladeshi affairs. Thus our conversation was interrupted by a nephew seeking Delwar’s signature upon a note for his teacher, the house cat entering and stretching out upon the floor, and the general hullabaloo of busy family life – all without any disruption to Delwar’s line of thought as he told me his story.
“I was born in the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. My grandfather came to this country first, when he was in the Merchant Navy. My father came in the sixties, he worked in the garment trade and my mother joined him in the seventies. When I was born, they were living in one of the big old houses in New Rd and I still have an affection for houses with a step up to the front door because of that. Then we moved here to Puma Court in the late eighties.
The book came out of my Phd thesis looking at borders. I think I am interested in borders because I grew up in Spitalfields where there are so many borders, not just the one with the City but borders of ethnicity and class too. Growing up in a borderland, I’ve always been comfortable crossing boundaries, and I am fascinated by how different kinds of people can live together and form a life together in such places.
So I thought my upbringing was a preparation for going to the border region where India is building a two-and-a-half-thousand mile barbed-wire fence around Bangladesh. I turned up in Boropani, this village in the coal-mining region, where the mines are in India and the miners on the Bangladeshi side. The miners have to pay the border guards and cross the border illegally every day just to go to work. I wrote about these people and how their lives are there.
Yet Spitalfields did not prepare me for what I found. It is is one of the most dangerous border regions of the world – one of the most violent places I’ve been, comparable to the East End in the nineteenth century – where killings are a regular occurrence but where somehow people carry on their lives. The nature of work is changing there, people who were once peasant farmers have lost their land to soil erosion and their homes to floods. The circumstances reflected issues of globalisation – climate change destroying land and people forced to work in Indian coal mines that are supplying China with power for industry.
After two years, I came back with a large collection of notebooks of my interviews, and sat in a library in Cambridge writing them up – conveniently directly connected to Spitalfields by rail through Liverpool St Station. I did a degree in Anthropology at Goldsmith’s College first before going up to Cambridge University and I was always aware that I was privileged to be there. My mother doesn’t speak English and, when I was a child, we used to ask neighbours to help us out filling in forms. It was only at Cambridge that I was told I came from a deprived background and I actually believed it, until I turned up in this village on the India/Bangladesh border, then I realised what deprivation and poverty means.”
At this moment of the publication of his first book, I asked Delwar whether he considers himself more of an Anthropologist or a Writer. “Often Anthropologists are more interested in theories and arguing about those, rather than the people they claim to be interested in,” he assured me with a significant frown, “whereas Writers tend to be more interested in people than the theories.” If I had not guessed it already, it was ample confirmation of where Delwar’s sympathy lies.
Delwar’s grandfather, Haji Mofiz Ali
Delwar’s father, Haji Abdul Jallil
Family portrait at a studio in Vallance Rd, 1980. From left to right – Arful Nessa (mother), Haji Abdul Jalil (father), Hafsa Begum (sister), Rahana Begum (sister), Faruk Miah (cousin), Shiraz Miah (cousin) and Delwar Hussain.
Delwar Hussain
Portraits of Delwar Hussain copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Click here to order a copy of BOUNDARIES UNDERMINED by Delwar Hussain
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Bob Mazzer On The Tube Today
These days, visionary photographer Bob Mazzer no longer works in a porn cinema in Kings Cross and has moved out to Hastings, but he still takes pictures on the tube whenever he gets the chance. “I love taking photographs of people on the tube,” he admitted to me, “I say to them, ‘You look fantastic, can I take your picture?’ and they say, ‘Yes.'”
Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer
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“In all my time taking pictures on the tube, only one person ever objected, ” revealed photographer Bob Mazzer, “and that was a guy with a huge teddy bear on his lap, which was a pity because it would have been a great picture.”
“I think if you love people, they respond to that and find it perfectly natural to be photographed,” he confessed to me.” I feel compelled to take photographs on the tube now, and I can’t travel without a camera because I can’t bear the thought I might miss something.”
Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer
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Bob Mazzer On The Tube
“There’s definitely a link between being born in Aldgate and taking all these pictures on the tube,” admitted photographer Bob Mazzer, “You don’t think you are starting a project, but one day you look back over your recent pictures and there are a dozen connected images, and you realise it is the beginning of a project – and then you fall in love with it.”
“For a while in the eighties, I lived with my father in Manor House and worked as a projectionist at a porn cinema in Kings Cross. It was called The Office Cinema, so guys could call their wives and say, ‘I’m still at the office.'” recalled Bob affectionately, “Every day, I travelled to Kings Cross and back. Coming home late at night, it was like a party and I felt the tube was mine and I was there to take pictures.”
Photographs copyright © Bob Mazzer
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Barn The Spoon at Leila’s Cafe
Behold the mighty Barn the Spoon, a titan among Spoon Carvers
“It was Leila’s idea,” confessed my friend Barn the Spoon, when I came upon him fitting this handsome willow spoon rack at Leila’s Cafe in Calvert Avenue next to Arnold Circus. “I’m doing it so that regulars can have their own spoon made by me and then keep it here to use whenever they visit the cafe.” he explained helpfully, “They’ll eat their soup or porridge with it and then afterwards it goes back on the rack.”
“When I was eight, my mother took me to Le Chartier in Paris, where the diners keep their own napkins on the wall in pigeon holes,” recalled Leila McAlister, revealing her fond inspiration for the project,“and it became an illicit mail service with people leaving notes for each other – so maybe that will happen here?”
By now, Barn had fitted his rack – which he hopes will be the first of many if the idea is successful – and then he stood back to examine his handiwork critically, arranging a few spoons to test the effect.
First on the rack was an alder spoon made as a gift for Leila, with her name graven on the handle. “Leila’s spoon is a Scandavian design from a bent branch, so it was very complicated to carve, ” admitted Barn, placing the cherished implement reluctantly in its new home,“It’s so beautiful, I really wanted to keep it.” Beside this, he put a cherry spoon based upon a medieval London spoon at the Museum of London and then a Welsh cawl spoon in sycamore wood to complete the trio.
“I think eating with a wooden spoon is a beautiful thing, it’s a different way of life,” Barn suggested to me, stroking his beard and getting lost in contemplation of his handiwork, “You’re going to become a different person if you eat with your own handmade spoon.”
The three of us stood in silence admiring the completed spoon rack. “It looks so at home already,” added Leila with a smile of approval.
From left, traditional Welsh cawl spoon in sycamore wood, medieval London spoon in cherry wood based upon an example at the Museum of London and Scandanavian style spoon in alder wood.
Spoon made for Leila McAlister from a bent branch of alder from Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.
Get your own spoon from
Barn the Spoon, 260 Hackney Rd, E2 7SJ. (10am-5pm, Friday-Tuesday)
and keep it in the rack at
Leila’s Cafe, 17 Calvert Ave, E2 7JP. (10am-6pm, Wednesday-Saturday, until 5pm Sunday)
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Roger Pertwee, Manufacturing Stationer
Roger Pertwee with his envelope-making machine
When Roger Pertwee joined his family firm of Baddeley Brothers, the City of London was full of printers – as it had been for centuries – producing elaborate share certificates, decorative cheque books and fine hand-engraved notepaper for banks and financial companies of all kinds. Today the printers have gone from the Square Mile, replaced at first by electronic printing that has itself now been superceded by computerisation. Yet of all those erstwhile companies, Baddeley Brothers is the rare survivor, thriving in our uniformly digital age, in which – paradoxically – their exquisite, labour-intensive techniques of engraving, die-stamping, embossing and debossing have gained a new currency and an enhanced appeal.
In 1859, John Baddeley opened the company bank account, recorded as trading from Little Bell Alley near St Paul’s in the City of London in 1865, where he was joined by his sons John James and William Henry. They were the original Baddeley Brothers, who took over the running of the business in their twenties upon their father’s unexpected death in 1869. Yet the story goes back as far as Phineas Baddeley who was admitted to the Clockmakers’ Company in 1661 and, through the intervening centuries, members of the family participated in the interrelated trades of clockmaking, die-sinking and engraving.
With an ambition characteristic of Victorian entrepreneurs, the Baddeley Brothers oversaw the industrialisation of a business that had been artisanal for generations, building a towering printing works in Moorgate in 1885 and crowning the achievement when John James Baddeley became Lord Mayor of London at the ripe age of eighty in 1921. Twenty years later, the factory was destroyed in the Blitz, yet just a few pattern books survive today as tantalising indicators of the intricate lost glories of their die-stamped motifs and the lush sophistication of their illustrated headings for engraved notepapers.
“There was a gap, and I joined when I was twenty-seven, as a factory-come-officer gofer,” admitted Roger, whose sons Charles and Chris run the business today,“My uncle David ran the business then, he was tough Victorian taskmaster and, prior to that, it had been run by my grandfather William and two of his cousins.” When Roger started in the sixties, there were two factories – one in Tabernacle St which did the envelope making and die-stamping, and one in Paul St which did the engraving and lithography. In the eighties, he oversaw uniting all operations in a single building on the corner of Boundary St and Redchurch St.
“There were lots of little printers around Liverpool St, Fenchurch St, The Minories and Eastcheap – and, if there was financial take-over, any number of legal documents would need to be printed overnight,” explained Roger, recalling the days when he and his brother went round the City twice a week in their Burton suits taking orders, “It all started to go in the eighties with the advent of electronic printing but we were still producing engraved letter headings. We used to do runs of fifty to a hundred thousand letter-headings and we did all the letter-headings for Barclays Bank at one point. We had our own engravers then, they were a law to themselves – seven engravers and an artist, individuals who were creative and precise in their work, a nice crowd.”“
“We kept the dies and, in those days, all the partners in an accountancy firm were shown on the letterhead. So whenever a partner joined, we had to reprint the notepaper – which was good for business. We bought the dies from McCreedys in the Clerkenwell Rd, and they were ground and polished by hand.” he revealed, explaining the process whereby the dies could be softened for hand engraving and then hardened again for printing,“We used cyanide to harden the dies and the basement was like an inferno, but we’re perfectly ok – we’re all still here!”
Thanks to Roger’s tenacity and prudence, Baddeley Brothers survived the technological revolution, that wiped out printers in the City, by moving the family business back to Hackney – not so far from where John Baddeley operated his engraving and die-sinking works beside Mare St, two hundred years ago, before he moved down to Little Bell Alley near St Paul’s in the first place.
London Fields is where gilt-crested envelopes are produced today with unmatched finesse for those top institutions which discretion prevents us disclosing and where the fine notepaper adorned with coats of arms for venerable colleges is printed. The methods that Baddeley Brothers have kept alive, which were commonplace a century ago, have become unfamiliar now and words that sit upon the page, subtly raised or embossed or sunken, have a charismatic life of their own which no other technique can rival.
Baddeley Brothers, Little Bell Alley, business card from the early nineteenth century
Baddeley Brothers, Moorgate, constructed in 1885, this building was destroyed in the blitz of 1941
Baddeley Brothers at the corner of Boundary St and Redchurch St, 1989-1993 – now the Boundary Hotel.
Roger Pertwee, Manufacturing Stationer and Heroic Printer
Portraits of Roger Pertwee copyright © Colin O’Brien
Archive images © Baddeley Brothers
