At Jocasta Innes’ House
The first house I ever visited in Spitalfields was Jocasta Innes’. A quarter of a century ago I came here, one bitterly cold winter morning, with my friend Joshua Compston to visit Brick Lane Market, and it was an unforgettable adventure to step through the gate in the wall into the tiny courtyard and enter her secret enclave.
After all these years, the old house is unchanged but now Jocasta is gone – making it a poignant experience to return and photograph her home, recording the paint effects that became her speciality. Yet I was blessed with bright May sunshine and a welcome from Jocasta’s partner, the architect Sir Richard MacCormac, who graciously took me on a tour, revealing a few of the memories that this house contains for him.
“I remember when I first came to visit Jocasta after she moved in, in 1979. Only the top floor was habitable then and she was sitting upstairs typing her bestseller by the heat of a two-bar electric fire. That was ‘Paint Magic.’
Her decoration of the drawing room is inspired by Roman wall painting, She was incredibly well-read, she won an exhibition to Girton College Cambridge and she was imbued with the rigour of scholarship, that came from her mother who ran a little school and taught her daughters herself. There are three and a half thousand books in this house, including a great many cookbooks, and Jocasta had read all of them. When she wrote her ‘Country Kitchen’ the level of research was extraordinary, she learnt to make a smokehouse for curing herrings, how to make sausages and bake bread, but – with Jocasta – this knowledge was always presented with a jaunty attitude and a lightness of touch.
The pub next door was called The Romford Arms when Jocasta first came here and that’s where we met. In those days, the old residents of Spitalfields all wanted to get to Romford as soon as they could. It took a while for Spitalfields to recover. In ‘Ian Nairne’s London,’ he described it as ‘poor tottering Spitalfields.’ It was yet to be a cause for conservation and the Church Commssion were deliberating about demolishing Christ Church.
I bought part of the brewery next to the pub and another architect, Theo Crosby, had bought the other half, and Jocasta’s house was in the middle. She was sitting in the pub and I knew she detested architects, yet she pretended she didn’t know I was an architect. When I asked her what she was reading, she said ‘1001 Ways to do Without an Architect’ … and we lived together ever since.
She thought all architects were colour blind and to some extent she was right. We collaborated on the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University. She had read more Ruskin than I did, she appreciated his sonorous prose, whereas I had absorbed the idea that architecture could be imbued with a sense of time and memory. The interior of the library was lime-rendered in an ochre, and the archive itself was a big glass box coming up out of the floor, finished in polished red Venetian plaster. And that started off our collaboration. After that, we designed the exhibition ‘Ruskin, Turner & The Pre-Raphaelities’ at Tate Britain, using colour in a symbolic sequence throughout, and also “Surrealism, Desire Unbound’ at the same gallery in 2001.
In the days when Jocasta was restoring her house, my office was in Covent Garden and my supervising architect said, ‘You’ve got to come over to Spitalfields and see this. There’s this woman in a black and silver body suit up a step ladder with a blow torch, ordering men around!’ That was Jocasta. She was so brave, so dauntless.”
The exterior is lime wash on top of the brickwork using earth pigments.
The Drawing Room
In the Drawing Room, the walls are colour washed with a stencilled border and simple graining upon the door frame.
Jocasta’s Kitchen.
Jocasta’s dog Bella.
In the hallway and stairwell, trompe l’oeil Roman stone blocks above a splattered paint effect to evoke granite, with a checkerboard painted floor.
A mahogany wood-grained door on the right and concealed door to the left.
In the bedroom, the walls are loosely dragged and the tile effect in the fireplace is painted.
“There are three and a half thousand books in this house, including a great many cookbooks, and Jocasta had read all of them.”
Painted in Shanghai in the nineteen-twenties, a portrait of Jocasta’s mother who was of an Argentinian/Irish family.
Jocasta’s dog Bruno.
My thanks to Decorative Artist, Ian Harper, for specifying the paint effects.
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The City Churches of Old London
St. Michael, Cornhill, 1912
It was these murky glass slides of City churches (and a few nearby), taken for the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society a century ago and held in the collection at the Bishopsgate Institute, that inspired me to go out and take my own pictures of these same buildings last winter. Yet revisiting the old photographs, after I have taken my own, makes me acutely aware of how the cityscape around these curious architectural masterpieces has changed.
As shabby old residents that have survived from another age, the churches speak eloquently of an earlier world when the City of London was densely populated and dozens of places of worship were required to serve all the tiny parishes crowded up beside each other. Yet in spite of the encroachment of towers around them, these intricately wrought structures stubbornly hold their own against newcomers today.
In the process of getting to know them, I acquired a literary companion – John Betjeman, who knew these churches as well as anyone and was refreshingly candid in his opinions. While grieving the loss of seven Wren designs to the German bombers in World War II, he managed to find a silver lining.“They did us a favour in blowing out much bad Victorian glass,” he declared with unapologetic prejudice.
Yet I could not but concur with his estimation of the contemporary significance of these churches when he wrote – “As the impersonal slabs of cellular offices rise higher into the sky, so do the churches which remain in the City of London today become more valuable to us. They maintain a human scale…” And that was in 1965, before most of the financial towers were built.
St Mary le Bow, Cheapside, 1910
St Augustine, Watling St, 1921 – now part of St Paul’s School
St Andrew Undershaft, St Mary Axe, c. 1910
St Mary Abchurch, c. 1910
St Margaret Patterns, Eastcheap, 1920
St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard St & Bank Tube station, c. 1920
St Stephen Walbrook, 1917
St Clement Danes, c. 1910
St Alban, Wood St, c. 1875 – only the tower remains
St Clement Danes, c. 1900
St Margaret, Lothbury, 1908
St George the Martyr, Borough, 1910
St. Katherine Coleman, Magpie Alley, c. 1910 – demolished in 1926
St. Magnus the Martyr, c. 1910
St Magnus the Martyr & the Monument from the Thames, c. 1920
St Dunstan in the East, 1910
St Dunstan in the East, 1910
St Dunstan in the West, Fleet St, c. 1910
St. Michael Paternoster Royal, 1922
St. Michael Paternoster Royal, 1922
St. Michael Paternoster Royal, 1922
St Bride, Fleet St, 1922
St Dunstan in the East, 1911
St Mary Le Strand
Images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
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and these other glass slides of Old London
The High Days & Holidays of Old London
The Fogs & Smogs of Old London
Blossom Time in the East End
In Bethnal Green
Let me admit, this is my favourite moment in the year – when the new leaves open fresh and green, and the streets are full of trees in flower. Several times, in recent days, I have been halted in my tracks by the shimmering intensity of blossom at its peak. And so, I decided to enact my own version of the eighth-century Japanese custom of hanami or flower viewing, setting out on a pilgrimage through the East End with my camera to record the wonders of this fleeting season that marks the end of winter incontrovertibly.
In his last interview, Dennis Potter famously eulogised the glory of cherry blossom as an incarnation of the overwhelming vividness of human experience. “The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous … The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.” he said and, standing in front of these trees, I succumbed to the same rapture at the excess of nature.
In the post-war period, cherry trees became a fashionable option for town planners and it seemed that the brightness of pink increased over the years as more colourful varieties were propagated. “Look at it, it’s so beautiful, just like at an advert,” I overheard someone say yesterday, in admiration of a tree in blossom, and I could not resist the thought that it would be an advertisement for sanitary products, since the colour of the tree in question was the exact familiar tone of pink toilet paper.
Yet I do not want my blossom muted, I want it bright and heavy and shining and full. I love to be awestruck by the incomprehensible detail of a million flower petals, each one a marvel of freshly-opened perfection and glowing in a technicolour hue.
In Whitechapel
In Spitalfields
In Weavers’ Fields
In Haggerston
In Weavers’ Fields
In Bethnal Green
In Pott St
Outside Bethnal Green Library
In Spitalfields
In Bethnal Green Gardens
In Museum Gardens
In Museum Gardens
In Paradise Gardens
In Old Bethnal Green Rd
In Pollard Row
In Nelson Gardens
In Canrobert St
In the Hackney Rd
In Haggerston Park
In Shipton St
In Bethnal Green Gardens
In Haggerston
At Spitalfields City Farm
In Columbia Rd
In London Fields
Syd’s Coffee Stall, Calvert Avenue
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Clive Murphy, Exhibitionist
Clive plays the giddy goat, 30th September 1992
“I’m definitely up to mischief because I’ve got a bare chest, but who the photographer is I have no idea…” chuckled Clive Murphy, the celebrated novelist and oral historian, when I pulled this photo out of one of the more than one hundred and fifty albums of pictures he has taken, recording every intimate detail of his life in Spitalfields in recent decades.
Clive is an unapologetic and self-declared exhibitionist, though “only indoors and for one other person” he emphasised – just in case anyone gets the wrong idea.“I am an actor at heart and I just love playing for the camera,” Clive continued, “Unfortunate guests get asked, ‘Would you mind if I dress up and you take my photo?'”
These photographs permit us to participate in the private drama of Clive Murphy’s imaginative world, contained within the two crowded rooms above the Aladin curry house on Brick Lane where has lived since 1973. One of Spitalfields most charismatic interiors, it has become crammed with pictures, papers and mementos of the passing years, until today you can barely get in the door. Assuming alternative identities is in the nature of a novelist and in Clive’s photographs we see it made manifest, in images that record the early stages of accumulation in his famous flat.
“I thought all these pictures had gone to landfill, but I see some escaped,” admitted Clive, referring to the many hundreds of photographs of him in his underpants which he resigned to the recycling bin at the time of transferring his personal archive to the Bishopsgate Institute earlier this year. “I am a pants and beachwear fetishist,” he confided to me, as if any explanation were necessary for his compulsive “dressing down” in front of the lens. Yet those pictures will remain an eternal enigma in the cultural history of Spitalfields and instead we must content ourselves with these playful shots of Clive dressing up.
22nd December 1991, picture by Mr Gaffar. “Observe how ornate I am with two necklaces and a bangle. and those aren’t socks, they’re stockings…”
21st May 1992, picture by Billy Ranoo. “Look at the hand on the hip , I’ve put down a sheet on the kitchen floor and put those black cushions there for the picture.”
22nd December 1991, picture by Mr Gaffar. “I’m wearing one of several dressing gowns. I like dressing gowns and robes, but it must have been freezing with only my underwear and socks on underneath.”
22nd December 1991, picture by Mr Gaffar. “This was in my kitchen when it had a decent carpet. I’m rather pleased to see I had a tan in those days.”
21st May 1992, picture by Billy Ranoo. “I like this picture very much because it makes me look macho and interesting.”
27th November 1991, admiring cyclamen in an aesthetic manner. “Just to show I do dress normally sometimes.”
21st August 1992 “I was upstairs and we rearranged the furniture for the photo. It may be taken in the card room above my flat where my landlord let his pals play cards.”
Photographs courtesy of the Clive Murphy Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to read my other stories about Clive Murphy
Clive Murphy’s oral histories are available from Labour and Wait
and his ribald rhymes are available from Rough Trade
The Statues & Effigies of Old London
Queen Anne gazes down Ludgate Hill eternally
Do you ever get the feeling you are being watched from above? That there is a silent figure observing from a strategic vantage point? Many of the statues and effigies of old London – as photographed a century ago by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute – are so familiar as to be invisible to the casual passerby, but they have got their eyes on you.
Over the years, they have seen everything from their plinths – riots and marches, weddings and funerals, bombs and parties, war and peace, tourists and commuters. With frozen postures and implacable composures, the statues and effigies have no choice but to carry on watching – growing infinitely wise and eternally bored.
Gods, monarchs, Nelson & Wellington, and Victorian worthies alike, after all this time, many are shorn of the details of their original significance, exchanging it for a simpler heroism derived from the longevity of their images. The statues and effigies of London are the oldest residents of the streets, and – over time – these familiar weathered stone and bronze figures have become universally appreciated for their usefulness as memorable landmarks and fond embodiments of the places they inhabit.
Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Sq, c. 1910
Achilles in Hyde Park, c. 1910
Prince Albert, c. 1910
Alfred the Great in Trinity Sq, Southwark, c. 1910
Charles II, c. 1910
Caroline of Brunswick, c. 1910
Thomas Coram, c. 1910
Charles Darwin in the Natural History Museum, c. 1910
John Franklin, c. 1910
General Gordon in Trafalgar Square, c. 1910
Crimean Memorial, c. 1900
Rowland Hill in King Edward St, c. 1910
Capt Maples at Trinity Almshouse, Mile End Rd, c. 1920
Gog at the City of London Guildhall, c. 1910 – note the box camera caught in the left corner of the frame
Magog at the City of London Guildhall, c. 1910
Richard the Lionheart in Palace Yard, c. 1910
Sir Hans Sloane in Apothecaries’ Gardens, Chelsea, c. 1920
Temple Bar, Fleet St, c. 1870
Queen Anne at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1920
James II, c. 1910
House of Parliament, St Stephen’s Hall, c. 1920
One of Landseer’s lions at the base of Nelson’s Column, c. 1910
George Peabody, c. 1910
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, c. 1915
Physical Energy in Kensington Gardens, c. 1910
Duke of Wellington, c. 1910
Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner, c. 1880
Duke of York’s Column at Waterloo Place, c. 1900
Images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
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The High Days & Holidays of Old London
The Fogs & Smogs of Old London
In the Company of Mr Pussy
Unless I am out on the streets pursuing the subjects of my interviews, I spend most days of the week alone in the house with my old cat, Mr Pussy. When I am sitting writing, he likes to doze and thus offers undemanding company, savouring the quietude that reigns while I am composing my sentences. If I am working in bed, he will curl up on the covers so that I can just feel his weight pressing against my leg. If I am writing at my desk, he will perch upon an old stool with a seat woven of straw, attendant like a loyal secretary. If I am sitting beside the stove for warmth late at night, he will stretch out upon the bare floor to his greatest extent, until he resembles an animal skin rug.
A modest creature, he draws pleasure from my company and I am always flattered that he seeks me out to rest nearby. He does not draw attention to himself – just the occasional shrill exclamation upon entering the house to announce his return and sometimes a gentle tap of the paw upon my leg, as a reminder, should I neglect to fill his dish. At mealtimes, he commonly positions himself at my feet as I settle in the wing chair to eat my dinner, tracing the air with his nose to ascertain the menu. Yet he is rarely insistent and, if I grant him a morsel or permit him to lick the plate, he will do no more than taste, since he is curious rather than greedy and his concern is not to satiate his appetite but to feel included.
Even if others are around, it is in the nature of writing that it is a solitary activity. A connoisseur of stillness and a creature of tact, Mr Pussy understands this instinctively. He lounges in a silent reverie while I am working, before falling asleep and snuffling quietly to himself. During these long afternoons of contemplation, if I should lose concentration upon the task in hand, my thoughts often turn to my mother and how the pattern of my day has come to reflect hers. Once she had finished the housework, she delighted to sit for hours reading a novel just as I settle down to write once the day’s errands are accomplished – each of us enjoying the company of a cat.
I remember vividly how, when she was dying, she sought to make a reckoning of her life. My mother was insistent that I must have no doubt of her love for me and of my father, forgiving his volatile nature that had coloured the happiness of their marriage. “He couldn’t help it,” she admitted to me with a distracted frown. And then, quite unexpectedly, referring to the grey tabby that was my childhood pet, she said, “And the cat, she helped me, she was always with me.” In that moment, I recalled how the creature followed her around each day as she did the housework which caused her such anxiety and I remembered how, returning from school, I found her once cradling it as she wept for her loneliness. When the beloved animal expired, she vowed never to have another, such was the depth of her attachment.
Yet, after my father died, I acquired a black kitten in Mile End and presented it to her as a distraction from her grief. And thus, in my mother’s company, Mr Pussy grew accustomed to the afternoon routine, the empty house and the presence of one silently absorbed. Thus, when the cat and I are all alone now in the stillness of the middle of the day, it is as if time stops. My mother’s placid nature moulded his behaviour and, years after she died, his habits are the same. Mr Pussy seeks me out each afternoon to share the passage of the hours before nightfall and I acquiesce, thankful for the peace that prevails in his company.
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The Cats of Spitalfields (Part One)
The Pub That Was Saved By Irony
A new dawn for The Marquis of Lansdowne
Thanks in no small part to the passionate campaign waged by you, my esteemed readers of Spitalfields Life, The Marquis of Lansdowne is saved.
Yesterday, I asked “How can it be that a museum which exists to protect our heritage wants to use public funds to destroy an historic building?” The jaw-dropping irony of this situation was not lost upon the members of Hackney Council Planning Committee who were unconvinced by the Geffrye Museum’s scheme involving the demolition of The Marquis of Lansdowne, rejecting it outright by six votes to two.
Consequently, the Geffrye has lost its Heritage Lottery funding for the development and has no choice but to go back to the drawing board, recognising that any future proposal needs to include the restoration of The Marquis of Lansdowne. “I am aware that there is a prejudice against concrete,” exclaimed architect Sir David Chipperfield, in bewildered disbelief at the tide of events.
Celebrating this glorious May Day success which grants a future to The Marquis of Lansdowne, I am republishing the story of George Barker who was born there in 1931 and whose family ran the pub from before 1915 until after World War II.
George Barker in the yard at The Marquis of Lansdowne aged six in 1937
The Marquis of Lansdowne is the only old building left on Cremer St, yet it contains the history of the people who have been there for the last two centuries, their culture, their society and their industry. For George Barker, born in the upper room of the pub in 1931, it was his family home, spanning three generations of Barkers – his grandfather William who came from a village in East Anglia at the end of the nineteenth century, his mother Lilian who ran the pub alone through the war and opened up every day during the Blitz, and lastly himself, the one who got a grammar school education and a Masters degree in Maths and has lived for the last fifty years in a beautiful house in Chorleywood.
No infamous killer took his victim to The Marquis of Lansdowne for her last drink. Charles Dickens did not visit The Marquis of Lansdowne and base a character in one of his novels upon a local eccentric discovered propping up the bar. In fact, the story of The Marquis of Lansdowne is a more important one that either of these, it is that of the working people who lived in the surrounding streets, for whom it was the centre of their community and meeting place for their extended families. In this sense, it is a quintessential East End pub and the history of this place cannot be told without reference to these people.
Haggerston has changed almost beyond recognition in recent decades and, all this time, The Marquis of Lansdowne has remained as the lone sentinel of a lost world. Yet when I met George Barker and he told me the story of his family and the life they led there, he brought that world alive.
“My earliest memory is of being a kid playing on the street, everybody played on the street in those days. A couple of times, I went into the Geffrye Museum and we collected caterpillars in the gardens. They used to have a playground with swings and a place to play football at the back of the museum.
I was born at The Marquis of Lansdowne in February 1931, but my family’s involvement with the pub goes back to the beginning of the century. My grandfather William George Barker told me that the Barker family came from a group of villages near Ipswich, moving to Hoxton at the end of the nineteenth century. He came to London in 1899 and worked as a barman for year in the East End before becoming a policeman for twenty years.
Frederick Daniel Barker, my grandfather’s brother, was licensee of The Marquis of Lansdowne until he died of TB in 1919, when my grandfather took it over from Frederick’s wife Mary Ann. Then, when my grandfather died in the thirties, my father George Stanley Barker took it over until he died in 1937 when my mother Lily ran it. She remarried in 1939 and, as Lilian Edith Trendall, she held the license until 1954 when her husband Frederick Trendall took over after her death. I think they all made a living but it wasn’t a terribly easy life.
We had a side bar and then another one on the corner we called the darts bar, as well as the front bar and the saloon bar. Even then, there were redundant doors which meant that at one time the pub was divided up into more bars. The saloon bar had upholstered bench seats and bar stools, but the other bars just had wooden benches with Victorian marble-topped tables. The curved bar itself was in the centre, spanning all the divisions with a tall central construction for display of spirits and optics, and the beer pumps were in the front bar. I remember, as you came in the side door from Geffrye St, the wall had a large decorative painted panel advertising Charrington’s Beer and there were mirrors at the rear. The pub windows were of etched and cut glass, and above the main door was an illuminated panel with the words ‘Toby Beer.’ It was a Charrington pub and a wagon came with dray horses to deliver once a week from the brewery in Mile End. Further down Cremer St was the Flying Scud, a Truman’s pub, and the Star & Pack, a Whitbread pub.
On the Geffrye St side of the building was a kitchen which was – in effect – where we all lived, and an office. Above the kitchen was my bedroom, with a window looking onto Geffrye St and the railway arches. On the first floor at the corner was the front room where we didn’t go very often, and the main bedroom – where I was born – was on Cremer St, divided from the front room by a construction of wooden panels, as if it once had been one big room. All the arches were coal depots in those days. It was brought by railway every morning at six thirty and all the coal men would be filling sacks, and bringing their horses and wagons to carry it away. But it never woke me up though, because I got used to it.
In those days, on one side of the pub was a terrace of houses and on the other there were three shops. I remember Mrs Lane who ran the sweet shop next door and Mrs Stanley who had a cats’ meat shop where they sold horsemeat. In the thirties, there was a couple of fellows making springs for prams in the building across the road which became a garage in the nineteen forties. I recall there was a baker’s on the other side of the street too and H.Lee, a big furniture manufacturer, on the corner of the Kingsland Rd.
My mother, Lily, ran The Marquis of Lansdowne singled-handed through World War II. It was heavily bombed in the surrounding streets and, when there were raids, she took shelter in the spirit cellar which had been reinforced with stanchions. She had grown up in the area, and most people knew her and she knew them, and they had been to school together. She was quite an outgoing woman who enjoyed a bit of banter and a lot of chat with the customers. She was the daughter of James Wilson who ran the scrap iron yard opposite across Cremer St under a couple of arches. He started the business there and he had a place in Tottenham, so he left his three sons to run it.
There was a friendly community on our doorstep, she ran the pub and her three brothers ran the scrap iron business across the road, and there was another uncle called Harmsworth who had another two arches where he ran a furniture business – one of my aunts married him. All my uncles and aunts lived within about one hundred yards of each other. They were the Barkers, the Wilsons and the Cheeks. A Barker married a Wilson and then a Wilson married a Cheek and then a Cheek married a Barker. My mother had another three children with my stepfather in the forties, and we all lived together in the Marquis of Lansdowne. There was me and my sister Eileen, plus the twins Maureen and Christine, and their younger brother Freddie.
At the age of eight, I was evacuated during the Blitz, but when I came back it was still quite dangerous so I went to stay with an aunt in Kensal Green. I never lost contact because I cycled over at weekends and moved back at the end of the war when I was thirteen.
In the fifties, the business started to drift away. People didn’t have much money and television came along, so it could be quiet on week nights but it was always busy at weekends, and for celebrations like VE Day and the Coronation we got a special licence and opened from midday until midnight. Even if people had moved away, they came back for Saturday evenings to meet with their relatives and friends. I would be serving behind the bar – probably a little younger than I should have been – and by the age of eighteen I was regularly working there. I always looked after the place when they went in holiday.
My mother died in 1954 and my stepfather took over the pub. I studied for a Masters Degree in Maths at Woolwich Polytechnic and I was away from 1954-56 doing National Service. In 1957, I left The Marquis of Lansdowne forever – I was working for Hawker Aircraft in Langley by then. I only went back occasionally after that, not too often. As people moved out, it started dwindling away and I think my stepfather sold it to a family called Freeland who had been coalmen under the arches and then he moved away too.
If it had been up to me, I probably would have become a publican but I wasn’t going to wait for everyone else to die off first and, because of the war, I went to grammar school and then to university. I haven’t been back to Haggerston since the nineteen sixties.”
George Barker today.
George Barker was born in the bedroom facing onto Cremer St, indicated by the window on the left.
At The Marquis of Lansdowne, 1957. George Barker on right, aged twenty-five, with sister Eileen, centre back. The other three are his half-brothers and sisters from his mother Lilian’s second marriage to Frederick Trendall. The twin girls are Maureen on the left and Christine on right, with their brother Freddie between them.
George Stanley Barker & Lilian Edith Wilson, married at St Leonards, Shoreditch on 7th September 1929. Lilian ran the pub after the death of her husband in 1937 until she died in 1954.
Ex-policeman William George Barker who ran The Marquis of Lansdowne from 1919 – photographed in 191o, with his wife Annie Susannah Oakenfold and son George Stanley Barker, who took over from his father and ran the pub until 1937.
20th December 1911, William George Barker is reprimanded for bring caught in pubs in Shoreditch and Spitalfields while on duty as a policeman – eight years later he became landlord of The Marquis of Lansdowne and spent the rest of his life in a pub. – “Inattention to duty and wasting his time by being off his Division and being in the White Hart Public House, High St, Shoreditch, out of the City from 3:30 to 4:50pm (1 hour & 2o minutes) while on duty on 13th instant. Also, being in the King’s Stores Public House, Widegate St, from 5:05 to 5:40pm (35 minutes) while on duty, same date.”
February 22nd 1919, William George Barker applies to leave the police to take over the running of The Marquis of Lansdowne from his sister-in-law after the death of his brother Frederick Daniel Barker. “I respectfully beg to apply to the Commissioner for permission to resign my appointment as Constable in the City of London Police Force, one month from the above date. My reason for doing so is that my sister-in-law Mrs Mary Ann Barker Licensee of The Marquis of Lansdowne Public House, No 32 Cremer St, Kingsland Rd, is unable to carry on the business in consequence of a nervous breakdown and she wishes me to hold the license and conduct the business on my own responsibility.”
May 9th 1919, Charrington’s, Anchor Brewery, Mile End, seeks a reference for William George Barker from the Commissioner of Police at Snow Hill. Presumably, the incidents of Christmas 1911 were discreetly forgotten.
Dating from the Regency era, The Marquis of Lansdowne is the only old building left on Cremer St.
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