Orange Wrappers
This is the season for oranges and lemons, when every morning I begin the day by consuming a juicy blood orange. So I was more than delighted when Keren McConnell kindly sent me her glorious fruit wrapper collection from the seventies to share with you.
“I started collecting fruit papers when I was six years old, possibly inspired by a holiday in Spain in 1971. Most of the papers stuck in my small scrapbook were picked up while shopping for groceries with my mother at the local greengrocers in Blackheath. I think they reminded me of that holiday with their bright and graphic imagery.
I was drawn to the designs and texture and feel of the crinkly tissue paper. I also collected carrier bags and paper bags for their graphics, but this collection did not survive all our house moves.
Who knows? This book of fruit papers may have even informed my career. I became a print and graphics designer for fashion brands and retailers, sometimes using this scrapbook as reference material to inspire a T-shirt design.
As a child, particular favourites were the designs depicting animals, beautiful ladies and the smiling face on the Sicilian lemon is particularly appealing. I have no idea why the Tower of London was on a fruit paper from Spain. Perhaps the designer thought London was an exotic place, just as I had found Spain so exotic? Some of the designs seem to have been inspired by sport, such as horse racing and Formula One.
Are children today inclined to make collections like this? Mine was born out of boredom, particularly on wet Sundays when the days felt so long.”
Keren McConnell
You may also like to take a look at
T. Venables & Sons’ Almanack
In case you do not have an almanack yet for the new year, I am publishing this from T. Venables & Sons, Whitechapel, courtesy of Philip Mernick. This is an especially useful one because it includes a catalogue of drapery, carpets and furniture, as well as cab fares from Whitechapel, a chronicle of events of 1867/8 and a list of the powers of Europe, the Royal Family, Officers of State and Her Majesty’s Household.
Gertrude Gorham
‘Arabian’ bedsteads
Cots and bedsteads
Drawers and wardrobes
Drawing Room furniture
Tables and washstands
Toilet glasses and chairs
Silks and velvets
Uncle was laid up ill in bed in January 1882 quite helpless (gout)
Gertrude Gorham was examined at Westbourne Schools/82 (passed)
Aunt’s little bird died Saturday 1882
Mrs Pike fell downstairs and cracked her collarbone
Cab fares
Chronicle of events 1867-68: Explosion of nitro-glycerine in Newcastle. Bread and meat riots at Exeter. Hurricane at St Thomas.
Chief Powers of Europe and the Royal Family
T. Venables & Sons, 103, 104 & 105, Whitechapel and 2, 4, 6 & 8 Commercial St
You may also like to take a look at
Thomas Barnes, Photographer
The most prolific nineteenth century East End photographer was Thomas Barnes, responsible for producing over one hundred thousand portraits taken between 1858 and 1885 at his studio at 422 Mile End Rd in Bow.
Although these cartes de visite are nameless, Barnes numbered most of his pictures – enabling us to create a sequence and establish an indication of their dates, as demonstrated by these fine examples selected from Philip Mernick‘s collection gathered over the past twenty years.
Remembered today primarily for his widely-discredited before-and-after photos commissioned by Dr Barnardo, nevertheless Thomas Barnes’ studio portraits reveal a photographer of abundant talent and accomplishment. It is a poignant gallery of withheld emotion, bringing us face to face with anonymous long-dead East Enders who are now inhabitants of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.
Number 4178 – taken between 1858 & 1864
Unnumbered
Number 21236 – 1867
Number 33999 – taken around 1870
Number 34101 – taken around 1870
Number 37432 – taken after 1873
Unnumbered
Number 38774 – taken after 1873
Number 41536 – taken mid-1870s
Unnumbered
Number 43979 – taken mid-1870s
Number 44425 – taken prior to 1877
Number 47385 – taken prior to 1877
Number 53458 – 1877
Number 56157 – 1877
Unnumbered
Number 57248 – 1877
Number 65460 – taken between 1877 and 1880
Number 75384 – taken after 1880
Photographs reproduced courtesy of Philip Mernick
Biographical details of Thomas Barnes supplied by David Webb
You may also like to take a look at
Flowers Of 2024
Each Sunday, if I can afford it and have the time, I visit Columbia Rd Market to buy a bunch of flowers, seeking what is in season and avoiding repeats where possible. Here is the story of last year told in flowers. Looking back, I am reminded how much joy they brought me. Which are your favourites?
7th January, bulbs
14th January, paper whites
27th January, cherry blossom
28th January, hyacinths
5th February, snake’s head lilies
11th February, quince blosssom
25th February, tulips and anemones
17th March, tulips and hellebores
7th April, anemones and lilies of the valley
14th April, anemones and verbena
5th May, sweetpeas
12th May, Essex pinks
19th May, delphiniums
23rd June, peonies, astrantias and antirrhinums
7th July, spurge, camomile, antirrhinums and delphiniums
14th July, lilies, delphiniums, spurge and camomile
21st July, sunflowers
28th July, ranunculus
11th August, dahlias
18th August, camomile and michaelmas daisies
8th September, roses
22nd September, artichokes and chrysanthemums
6th October
You may also like to look at
In Search Of Daniel Defoe
I am proud to publish this edited extract from GRAVE STORIES by a graduate of my writing course. ‘The Gravedigger’ invites you to come into the graveyard, where all of human life is to be discovered.
Follow GRAVE STORIES
I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 1st & 2nd.
Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.
Defoe’s obelisk at Bunhill Fields
A year after Lockdown I turned to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to compare notes. His experience was much like ours in many ways: the first signs in Holland, followed by rumours regarding possible origins in Italy or the Levant, mirrored our own experiences watching Italy and Wuhan. The gradual spread from St Giles and the West End to Cripplegate, Clerkenwell and the City reflected our monitoring of Covid hotspots.
The flight of the court and the well-heeled to their second homes was familiar. Likewise the first deaths and the sudden desolation in the streets with shops closed, Inns of Court shut up, theatres, alehouses, and taverns all dark. Attempts to control wandering beggars resembled our own government’s sudden concern to house the homeless. The sick were either sequestered and died apart from their families or whole households were shut up in their homes, as happened in our hospitals and care homes.
When Defoe bemoaned the lack of enough ‘pest houses,’ he might have been speaking of our own shortage of Covid wards leading to the construction of the Nightingale hospitals. Quack medicines appeared, just as hydroxychloroquine and the possibility of injecting bleach found favour in certain quarters in the twenty-first century.
Defoe recorded people moving onto boats in the Thames or to camp in Epping Forest and similarly, at the height of Covid, caravans and camper vans occupied green sites. Daily and weekly recording of illness and death rates confirmed that then as now, the poor, living in overcrowded conditions with inadequate ventilation and unable to avoid the breath of others, sickened more than the wealthy.
As the plague intensified, people rushed to stockpile provisions and there were shortages. Without contactless cards to replace cash, they soaked their money in vinegar. The poorest found themselves out of work, unable to purchase food or pay for their lodgings. Charity, like our food banks, supplemented Parish Relief which like our Universal Credit proved inadequate.
Servants were redeployed as nurses, sextons, gravediggers. In Defoe’s London, burials took place before sunrise and after sunset, and neighbours and friends could not attend church funerals. When people died in the streets, their bodies were removed to mass graves. In 2020, as morgues and mortuaries became overwhelmed, contract workers in hazmat suits dug mass graves in New York. When the death rate began to decline, doctors issued certificates of health to permit travel anticipating our own vaccine passports, but as people became careless the rate rose again..
There were also great differences, not least in the presence of religion in Defoe’s Britain: sects, fortune tellers, and astrologers flourished. Solomon Eagle stalked the streets, naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head, calling on the populace to repent. Though some clergy fled, others kept their churches open and, when the plague ended, Defoe gave credit for the recovery to God. Conversely, there was less respect for the medical profession and, far from clapping for carers, Defoe wrote of nurses finishing their patients off and stealing their goods. While pet ownership increased during lockdown, Defoe’s London witnessed the wholesale killing of cats and dogs.
Defoe was only five years old in 1665 and his vivid ‘eyewitness account’ originated from his uncle Henry Foe, supplemented by Defoe’s own research. A man of many talents – merchant, spy, novelist, poet, political pamphleteer, and activist – Defoe’s life was a rollercoaster of excitement, achievements, and disasters.
In 1685, he participated in the Monmouth rebellion against James II but escaped retribution in the Bloody Assizes and, when William III came to power, he became a secret agent of the crown. His poem The True Born Englishman defended William against racial prejudice, reminding xenophobic readers that they were all descended from immigrants.
The succession of Queen Anne led to the persecution of nonconformists and Defoe’s arrest in 1703 for pamphleteering, political activity and satires directed against high-church Tories. Prior to his removal to Newgate, he was placed in the pillory for three days but his poem Hymn to the Pillory resulted in him being garlanded with flowers rather than pelted with rubbish.
Over five hundred works have been attributed to Defoe including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain and of course A Journal of the Plague Year. No stranger to the debtors’ prison during his life, he died – as he had often lived – in debt.
Defoe was buried in the non-conformist cemetery at Bunhill but his headstone was struck by lightning and broken in 1857. The editor of Christian World, a children’s newspaper, encouraged readers to donate 6d each for a new memorial, setting up two rival subscription lists, one for girls and one for boys.
Samuel Horner, a stonemason from Bournemouth who erected the obelisk, took the gravestone home with him, selling it as part of a general lot from his yard. Then it became part of the kitchen floor at Bishopstoke Manor Farm until the manager moved to 56 Portswood Road in 1883 where it remained in his front garden for over sixty years. Charles Davey acquired it in 1945 and gave it to Stoke Newington library. An appropriate resting place since Defoe lived in Stoke Newington from the age of fourteen, but by the time I arrived it had been moved to Hackney Museum where it I found it sitting beside a bust of Defoe, backed by an image of the famous pillory.
Inscription on Daniel Defoe’s obelisk
Daniel Defoe’s headstone is now in Hackney Museum
You may also like to read about
David Power In Spitalfields
Continuing my tribute to David Power who died on 15th December aged ninety, here is my account of a return visit he made to Spitalfields where he grew up.
David Power at The Golden Heart where he played the piano in 1946
One frost morning, David met me for a celebratory drink by the fireside at The Golden Heart after he had paid a visit upon Wilton’s Music Hall to arrange a date for an evening of Music Hall for which he was to be impresario and compere. “I was spellbound,” admitted David, in wonder at seeing Wilton’s for the first time, “I closed my eyes and expected to hear Burlington Bertie…”
David’s appearance at Wilton’s Music Hall marked his return to the East End as an entertainer for the first time since he performed in Spitalfields as a youth. “I played the piano in here when I was fourteen years old, in the nineteen forties just after the war,” he recalled, casting his soulful eyes around the empty barroom. “I had to wear a hat and a false moustache because I wasn’t old enough to go in a pub. I played Friday, Saturday and two sessions on Sunday, and I got a pound.”
“They mostly sold stout in them days and there were very few women in here. Instead, the men took their wives and mothers home a bottle of stout just to keep them quiet. The piano player had fallen ill and they heard me playing the piano from the window of my Aunt Sarah’s at 98 Commercial St. Now I loved my Aunt Sarah, but every word out of her mouth was swearing, while my Uncle Jimmy, he was the gentlest, mildest man you could imagine and my cousins were the same. Yet Aunt Sarah made up for the lot of them, she had more front than Tower Bridge.”
We braved the cold to revisit the doorstep of the notorious Aunt Sarah at 98 Commercial St and found her long gone. “It’s very difficult for me to explain to you, because it was a very tough life round here,” David confided to me with a grimace. “‘You’ve been with the kurwas?’ they used to ask,” he said, raising a significant smile as we entered the park next to Christ Church, known to David as Itchycoo Park, “That means you’ve been in here having sex on a gravestone with a prostitute.”
Crossing Commercial St, we entered Toynbee St passing the Duke of Wellington. “That’s where Stafford murdered his son, he got involved in slot machines,” David declared dryly, in passing, as we approached the former premises of Hymie the Barber. “All the stars used to come here for a shave and a haircut for a half crown,” he announced, “all the market boys.” Turning down Brune St, we crossed into the old market building where David started work at fifteen. He stood and scratched his head, surveying the chain restaurants and office workers doing their Christmas shopping, on the site where he was once employed in the fruit & vegetable market. “This place, years and years ago, it was alive,” he assured me, “People came from miles and miles around. At three o’clock in the morning it was buzzing, like a great theatre, and the cafes were open twenty-four hours a day. Most of those men were strong as lions.”
“I’m going back seventy years, I’ve never been back before,” David protested, in trepidation, as we walked down Commercial St, turning into Thrawl St in search of Faulkner St where he grew up. We found the buildings were gone and the street renamed Nathaniel Close. Similarly, in Old Montague St, where David’s grandparents lived there was no trace of the two-up-two-down cottages that he remembered. We stood amidst the chaos of the building works at the rear of the London Metropolitan University. “My grandfather, David Solomon, was the British Lightweight Bare-Fisted Boxing Champion,” David asserted, as if to conjure him into existence to spite the erasure of his world.
Seeking refuge from the chill, we entered a cafe in Middlesex St for hot mugs of tea, and within five minutes a woman came in and asked David, “How’s your cousin? Thereby confirming the unexpected truth that even after all this time, the movements of people and the rebuilding of neighbourhoods, ties of kinship among East Enders do survive. David was heartened enough to order a sausage and tomato. “Whether it was good or bad, we didn’t know any different,” he ruminated, as he cut his sausage.”But I think you would have liked it, living in my time, in the nineteen fifties,” he conceded tenderly.
As we tucked in to our lunch, I realised we had been on an emotional journey together and I understood how it important it was for David to perform again after all these years. “There’s going to be a lot of top professionals. I’ll get the TV down, they have nothing on for over forty-fives. All you see is murder and killing and X Factor, but there’s so much more talent out there.” he bragged, “We’ll have an opera singer and a Russian musical prodigy and a magician, and I’m going to get Roy Hudd.”
Outside 98 Commercial St where David’s Aunt Sarah lived in the thirties and forties – “She had more front than Tower Bridge.”
In Itchycoo Park, “‘You’ve been with the kurwas?’ they used to ask…”
At the former premises of Hymie the Barber in Toynbee St -“All the stars came here, all the boys in the market.”
“My cousin Sammy Lissner stood here for seventy years on the corner of Wentworth St selling fruit & vegetables.”
Read my original profile
So Long, David Power
I am sorry to report the death of David Power on 15th December at the age of ninety
David Power 1934-2024
David Power lived in a comfortable Peabody flat round the back of the London Coliseum and, with his raffish charm, flowing snowy locks and stylish lambswool sweater, he was completely at home among the performers of theatre land. Yet, although David might have travelled only a short distance to the West End from his upbringing in the East End, it had been an eventful and circuitous journey to reach this point of arrival.
Blessed with a superlative talent, both as a pianist and as a composer, David interrupted our conversation with swathes of melody at the keyboard – original compositions of assurance and complexity – and these musical interludes offered a sublime counterpoint to the sardonic catalogue of his life’s vicissitudes. Settled happily with his third wife, David organised charity concerts which permitted him to exercise his musical skills and enjoy a lively social life too. At last, winning the appreciation he always sought, David discovered the fulfilment of his talent.
“I’ve done a lot of things in my time. All my family were boxers. In those days you had thirty or forty fights a week before you could make a living. It was a different world. Them days we had some good fights but they were hungry then. They punched the fuck out of each other but they were all friends too.
Me, I love boxing but I was a prodigy at the piano at the age of five. My mother, Lily Power, she couldn’t afford no piano lessons for me because we were poor. People have no idea how hard it was in the thirties and forties. I was born in Hounslow and my mother moved us back to Spitalfields where she was from.
My mum paid five shillings a week rent at 98 Commercial St but she wouldn’t let me answer the door when the rent collector came round. Today you couldn’t buy it for two million. Wilkes St was called the knocking shop because the brass went round there for the top class girls. They said, “Can we help you out, any way you like?” Itchy Park, next to the church, we called that Fuck Park – you could get it in there for sixpence. It was a wonderful, wonderful world.
Then I was evacuated to Worcester but I ran away about nine times. Each time, the police picked me up when I got to Paddington Station and put me on the train back again, I was nine years old. It was very funny.
They gave my mother an old pub in Worcester and she took in twenty armaments workers. There was no water, it was outside in the scullery. She charged one pound fifty a week for bed and breakfast and I used to get up at five-thirty to do the fires each morning in 1940. The most wonderful thing was when they brought gas into the house and we had a gas stove, and I didn’t have to worry about making up the fire each morning and heating the water for everyone for bath night on Friday. I got in a lot of trouble at school because I was Jewish and they used to say, “Show us your horns!” and that’s how I got into fighting.
I started work in Spitalfields Market when I was fourteen, I worked with a Mr Berenski selling nuts – peanuts and walnuts. The place was piled high with nuts! I had to stack them up with a ladder. I remember once the sack split and the nuts went everywhere and he chased me around the market. But Harry Pace, my cousin, he was a middleweight, he protected me.
I got a job in The Golden Heart playing the piano at weekends, earning one pound for two sessions. An old guy asked me to play, “When I leave the world behind,” and I thought, “He ain’t got long to go.” I earned three pounds, seventeen shillings and tuppence but, when my father discovered, he hit me round the ear and said, “You’ve been thieving!” Then my mother explained what I had been doing, and he took the money and gave me two bob.
After the war, my mother moved to Westcliff on Sea and that’s when she could afford two and sixpence for piano lessons for me, but by then I was much more interested in sport. As a child, I could play any music that I heard on the radio but, when I had my first lesson at ten years old, I thought crochets and quavers were sweets. There was a big Jewish community in Westcliff and I went to Southend Youth Club and started boxing there until I was called up for the army. I played football for Southend, we won the cup and I scored two goals. In the army, I sent my mum one pound a week home, but I was supposed to have been a concert pianist at eighteen. Fortunately, my Colonel liked music and I was in the NAAFI playing the piano and he asked me to play for the officers. They shipped me out to Hong Kong and Singapore and I played twice a month in the Raffles Hotel on Sundays and for the Prime Minister of Hong Kong.
When I came out the army, I was supported by Harriet Cohen, a concert pianist. I told her I was a ragged man but she wrote to the principal of the Guildhall School of Music. The professor told me to play flat, so I lay on the floor. I said, “You asked me to play flat, you fucking nitwit.” Then I went for an audition at the Windmill Theatre but they only offered me eight pounds a week for playing fourteen shows, so I jacked it in and did the Knowledge and became a cab driver, and got married in 1960. Then I decided to go into the markets and I worked in Covent Garden for twelve months as a porter, until my wife’s dad and I went into hotels – The Balmoral in Torquay and Hotel 21 in Brighton, but in the recession of the nineties I went bankrupt. We couldn’t compete with the deals offered by the big chains where businessmen used to bring their dolly birds at weekends.
Then I went on the road selling and I was earning three or four hundred pounds a week, especially in Wales. They didn’t know what a carpet was there. I once bought ten thousand dog basket covers for five pounds and sold them all at four for a pound as cushion covers in Pitsea Market. And that’s when I went into Crimplene, and then china, and then ties. Those were great days. Eventually, I went back in the taxi, worked like a slave, had a heart attack and died. Half of my heart is dead. I’ve been in and out of hospital with the old ticker ever since, so I decided to give something back by holding concerts for University College London Hospital. I do it all. I know talent when I see it and we have shows every month.
I never played the piano for twenty years, until ten years ago I went back to it – I wrote a piece of music when my wife died. I always wanted to be a pianist because music is something I get wrapped up in. A lot of people never believed I played the piano because I was so ragged, I had a ragged upbringing. If you come from the background that I came from, you’ve got keep putting money on the table. To be dedicated to music, you to have to be rich or a fool. I’m a born showman, that’s what they tell me, “David, you’re a showman.””
David (on the left) enjoys a picnic with his mother Lily and brothers and sisters in Itchy Park, Spitalfields in the nineteen thirties
David as a young boxer in the nineteen fifties
Concert Pianist Harriet Cohen encouraged David to become a professional pianist.
David Power, Showman
