At Charles Dickens’ Childhood Home
A gathering of Dickensians
Yesterday, I turned away from the throng of Saturday shoppers in Oxford St to seek the quiet streets of Fitzrovia, where around a hundred people met outside 22 Cleveland St for the unveiling of a new plaque upon Charles Dickens’ childhood home. Originally known as 10 Norfolk St, Dickens lodged here with his parents as a child, during 1815 and 1816, before his father’s imprisonment for debt, returning in adolescence, from 1828 until 1831, as he began to make his own way in the world.
Until recently, it was widely understood that the only one of Dickens’ places of residence to have survived in London was in Doughty St, Bloomsbury, but Ruth Richardson uncovered the existence of his childhood home in Fitzrovia while she was researching the history of the Cleveland St Workhouse, as part of a campaign to save it from demolition. This discovery led her to compare the distinctive regime and circumstances at the Cleveland St Workhouse with that described in ‘Oliver Twist’ and she realised that Dickens had used this workhouse just a few doors from his childhood home as the template for the one in his novel. Richardson tells the compelling story of her detective work in Dickens & the Workhouse and the success of her research led to a Grade II listing for the building, thereby ensuring its survival.
A key discovery for Richardson was the calling card that Dickens produced to gain employment as a shorthand writer while resident here. When she contacted the owner of the only-known copy of the card, Dan Calinescu of the Toronto branch of the Dickens Fellowship, he asked her why there was no plaque upon the building and, when she told him that there was no money for a plaque, he offered to pay for it. Thus I found myself shaking hands with Mr Calinescu yesterday, amidst a diverse crowd of fans – many in historic garb – that gathered to celebrate Dickens and consider the influence of this immediate environment upon the nascent writer.
Living in lodgings here above a grocer’s shop, young Dickens learned to read and write, and suffered the domestic insecurity brought about by his father’s gambling. Returning after his father’s imprisonment, Dickens learnt shorthand here and sought to establish his independence, applying for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum from this address. For the five years that he lived in this street, Dickens could not ignore the presence of the workhouse upon his doorstep – as the fate that he struggled to avoid – and the impression it made upon him inspired one of his greatest novels.
Preparing for the unveiling.
Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, Dickens’ great-great granddaughter, pulls away the cloth..
Ruth Richardson
Dickens’ calling card while resident in Fitzrovia. (reproduced courtesy of Dan Cilanescu)
The door where Charles Dickens once walked in.
Jennifer Emerson as Dolly Varden.
Cleveland St, with Dickens’ childhood home at number 22 – originally 10 Norfolk St.
Jane Wildgoose as Lady Dedlock
The Cleveland St Workhouse that served as the inspiration for the workhouse in Oliver Twist.
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In Fitzrovia
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Roland Collins’ Photographs
For a spell in the sixties, while Roland Collins was working as a commercial artist for the Scientific Publicity Agency in Fleet St, he had access to a darkroom which enabled him to develop his own photography, and he produced striking and imaginative photoessays – exploring different aspects of London life. Today, it is my pleasure to show this selection of Roland’s evocative images of the East End and the City, published for the first time since their original appearance. And next week, I am looking forward to introducing you to his paintings of the territory.
Fairground on the Hackney Marshes.
Salvation Army prayer meeting in the Lea Bridge Rd.
In Petticoat Lane.
In the East India Dock Rd.
Porters at Billingsgate.
Spirits are high as a porter is hoist onto his own shellfish barrow by his sixteen stone son.
A porter makes a bit extra on the side, street trading in boots and shoes.
The Monument.
View from the top of the Monument.
Looking down Eastcheap from the Monument.
Fish shop by the Monument.
Visitors at the top of the Monument.
The shadow of the Monument cast upon King William St.
Relief upon the Danish Embassy at Wellclose Sq at the time of demolition – now removed to Belgravia.
In Albury Rd, Rotherhithe.
At Limehouse Basin.
Photographs copyright © Roland Collins
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In Old Soho With Leslie Hardcastle
At the House of St Barnabas-in-Soho
There are some people who have the ability to transform a place that is familiar, by showing it to you through their eyes and revealing it anew. One such person is Soho resident Leslie Hardcastle. “There’s the Soho you see when you go out for the night and there’s the quiet Soho of people living their daily lives,” he informed me, by way of introduction to our afternoon stroll around the territory.
A man of redoubtable character, Leslie had already cooked eleven stews and seventeen shepherd’s pies that day, in order that he and his wife Wendy might have them in reserve, set against the expediency of all the social and professional demands upon their time, living at the heart of such a lively milieu as that to be found in Soho.
“Under the table, we’ve got Dorothy L. Sayers,” he announced to me as we sat in the tower of St Anne’s Soho, where the renowned crime writer was once church warden and her ashes are now interred beneath the floor. This is the headquarters of the Soho Society, an organisation which has unified the diverse communities and fought for more than thirty years to preserve the identity of Soho by saving the old buildings, keeping the craftsmen and small businesses and the independent shops, and by creating the Soho Housing Association to provide homes to local residents. “There were all these people who had lived here for years and didn’t know each other, but had the same problems, and they were brought together by fighting against those who wanted to pull the place down and put up an office block.” Leslie explained, “Thelma Seears booked a room in Kettners Restaurant for thirty and one hundred and fifty people turned up, and the Soho Society was born.”
We climbed the ladder to the view the clock by Gillett & Co of 1884. Leslie discovered the pieces of it among twenty-five years of pigeon debris when the church permitted the Soho Society use of the space. Amazingly, all the bits were found except one and Leslie delighted to tell me that, when he rang up Gillett & Co, they still had it in stock.“We’ve got 40,000 clocks around the world and someone’s got to take care of them,” they told him. Here we also found the names of W.Collinson, Gravemaker, 1833 and I.Fox, 1822 incised upon the panelling. Mr Fox gained notoriety as the priest who burnt the coffins and dumped the bodies in a corner. Turning our minds from this macabre thought, we peered out to the grass below were people thronged, enjoying the sunshine. As we left the precint, Leslie told me that the reason you step up two metres to the churchyard was on account of the forty thousand bodies piled there.
As we walked out into the street, he pointed out the site of the former eighteenth century Watch House, now superceded by CCTV cameras at street corners, observed from a central control room at the Trocadero. “We’ve got fifty-three pubs in Soho,” he boasted as he put his best foot forward up the pavement. It was the first of many of the blessings of Soho life that I was to learn from Leslie that afternoon.“Mozart gave a concert in this street,” he added, for good measure, as we turned a corner.
“My uncle had a toy shop in Newport Place,” Leslie admitted, stopping to catch his breath and revealing how Soho first became irresistible to him as a boy, “He was an actor who appeared in almost every film of his era, for five minutes. As a child, I loved to come up from Croydon and give him a hand with his stock-taking, anybody who was anybody in British Cinema came to visit him in his shop.”
“My mother and father were on the stage and split up.” Leslie continued, “My mother was in ‘No, No, Nanette’ at the Royal Theatre Hull and it got bombed, so I left alone in the black-out, and crossed the country and came back to London.” Leslie’s first job was in Soho in 1943 at British Lion Films and he has lived in Soho since 1960.
As we turned into Soho Sq, now ravaged by trenches for the construction of Crossrail, Leslie delighted to evoke its former incarnation as King’s Sq, lined by the mansions of aristocrats and by embassies, scenes of social entertainments upon a extravagant scale where Casanova was once a guest. “Sixty-seven Members of Parliament have lived in Soho,” Leslie told me as we crossed the lawn.
By now, we were at St Barnabas-in-Soho, a magnificent eighteenth century dwelling built for the wealthy plantation-owning Beckford family, and still retaining its fancy plasterwork and panelling of 1754. As Soho became less fashionable in the nineteenth century, this became the Offices of the Metropolitan Board of Works where Joseph Bazalguette planned the London sewer system. Dickens was a frequent visitor and may have based the house of Dr Manette in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ upon the House of St Barnabas. As the area declined further, the building became a shelter for homeless families with as many as five hundred people in residence. One can only wonder what they made of the affluent architecture of former days.
“I was married here in 1947,” confided Leslie, as we drifted through the empty rooms and entered the hidden garden, seeking the cool of the nineteenth century chapel, “I was walking past one day and came in to ask, but we had to get permission from the Bishop of London because it is not consecrated. Fortunately – as we didn’t have much money – it is quite small, so we all went next door to an Italian cafe for our wedding breakfast.”
We crossed through Meard St towards Berwick St Market and along Peter St where a famous old brothel had gone.“They took the building down and you could just see the stairs,” Leslie recalled,“I wondered how many men had walked up and down that staircase.” Indicating another piece of new construction, Al Jolson had a Kosher Deli there,” he said.
By now, we were in need of refreshment and I followed Leslie up a creaky stair to a tiny dining club with harsh acoustics where, in the mid-afternoon, literary gents with red faces and white hair, sporting bow ties and tight collars, were chattering like magpies and roaring like hyenas at each other’s jokes while quaffing red wine. “This room was last decorated in 1840,” said Leslie in disappointment as I grew accustomed to the din. Making hasty retreat, we confronted the site of the former police station in Broadwick St, recently demolished. “We were the only village with two hundred and fifty policemen sleeping over every night,” Leslie commented, turning melancholy now at the site of destruction upon such a scale.
Our destination was the Georgian terrace in Great Pulteney St where Leslie has lived since 1963. “Hadyn composed his symphonies and Polidori wrote ‘The Vampire’ here,” he said, as he searched for his key. “In 1970 , it was sold to a property developer who wanted to demolish it but we wouldn’t leave,” he explained as we climbed the crooked staircase, “We got the lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and we won. From that the Housing Association was formed and this building is now twelve flats with new homes built at the back.”
Hours had passed as we tramped the dusty streets and I had learnt more about Soho than I could cram into my notebook or this article. “I sometimes wonder why I go on beefing about Soho?” Leslie mused, thinking out loud, but he had already answered the question with his own passionate monologue that had filled the afternoon so pleasantly.
Old Compton St is named after Henry Compton.
In the tower room of St Anne’s, Soho.
In the clock room of St Anne’s, Soho.
“We’ve got 40,000 clocks around the world and someone’s got to take care of them,” said W.Gillett & Co when Leslie rang to get a replacement part for this clock from 1884.
Looking down upon the churchyard.
St Anne’s, Soho.
Eighteenth century shopfront in Dean St.
Sculpture telling the story of the Huguenots at the protestant church in Soho Sq.
“Excuse me! Is this your coat?” – Charles II sculpted by Caius Cibber in Soho Sq, 1681.
House of St Barnabas-in-Soho where Bazalguette planned London’s drains.
Bust of Henry Munro from the Bethlem Hospital in Spitalfields who founded the House of Charity.
Plasterwork from 1754 and metal prop to guard against the effects of Crossrail excavations.
“Soho has always been a naughty place.”
Back stairs at the House of St Barnabas with bannisters designed to accommodate crinolines.
The original front door of the House of St Barnabas on the original ground floor of 1720, which became the basement once the ground level of Soho was raised two metres by 1740.
Eighteenth century house on the corner of Meard St and Dean St.
The landowners disagreed upon the alignment of the terraces where their properties met in Meard St.
Camisa, a Soho landmark.
Walker Court where the Soho Society wants a preservation order upon the sex shops before classy boutiques take over.
In Berwick St Market.
Leslie Hardcastle, long-term Soho resident.
Terry Scales, Painter
Terry Scales
Terry Scales has lived for more than fifty years in a quiet back street in a forgotten corner of Greenwich where the tourists do not stray. To find him, I wandered through narrow thoroughfares between modest old terraces that splayed off at different angles with eccentric geometry, just like lines upon a protractor, to reach the park at zero degrees Longitude.
In the front room, Terry’s wife, Cristiana Angelini, was painting and he ushered me past. “She has the best room, but I have the best light,” He whispered with a sly grin as he led me quickly into his crowded studio overlooking the garden. There, among a proliferation of handsome pictures of boats upon the Thames that are his forte, Terry showed me the first oil painting that he did at art school – an accomplished still life in the manner of Cezanne – and a fine pencil drawing of him in his teens by Susan Einzeg. A portrait that is recognisable seventy years later on account of Terry’s distinctively crooked aquiline nose and feverish youthful energy.
I know of no other painter so well placed to paint scenes of the Thames as Terry Scales since, alongside his natural facility with the brush, he is able to draw upon a lifetime’s experience, growing up in a family that made its living upon the river for generations and then working in the Docks himself. “Because of the strikes, people think that dockers were all muscle and brawn, but we had men who left solicitors’ offices to work in Docks. It has to do with the independent lifestyle, you were never working for just one company, you were working all over the shop.” Terry assured me, eager to dispel the notion of dockers as an unsophisticated workforce, “Among that vast body of men, there were many very talented people.”
“They discovered I was a professionally trained artist and asked me to draw portraits,” he revealed, showing me his work for the National Dock Labour Board magazine in the fifties, “but my senior colleagues were very suspicious and conservative. I grew a beard after two years in the Docks and they were all scandalised!”
Terry’s work is the outcome of an intimate relationship with his subject, both the working life of the river and its shifting climate. “Most of the subjects of my paintings have gone now,” he confessed, casting his eyes fondly around the gallery of maritime scenes that surrounded us, evoking the vanished world of the Docks with such vibrant presence. I was fascinated to learn how Terry had combined his employment as a docker with his artistic endeavour – so that each fed the other – and he obliged by telling me the whole story.
“I was born in 1932 in St Olave’s, Rotherhithe, and my family lived in that area for as long as anyone knew. My mother’s people came over from Ireland in the eighteen-fifties after the potato famine, and they were called O’Driscoll which they changed to Driscoll. On both sides, my family worked in the Docks, and my father was a ganger in the Albert Docks and a lighterman. A hundred years ago, they were very adventurous, with my grandfather travelling to Australia and America, taking ships here and there, and picking up work. On my father’s side, they were all dockers in Bermondsey working on the grain wharfs near Cherry Gardens Pier – the lightermen’s stopping point where they changed barges.
I was evacuated to Seaton in the West Country which opened my eyes to the splendour of landscape and I returned after the war with a broad Devon accent to live in one of the prefab villages in Bermondsey. After a good schooling in Devon, I was sent to school in Rotherhithe which was appalling – there was a complete lack of discipline and I learnt absolutely nothing. The Labour government brought in a scheme where pupils that were talented but not academic could go to a college and learn a craft. So, at the age of thirteen, I applied to Camberwell School of Art and was accepted. And when I arrived there it was like heaven, because we had the best painters in England teaching us and, being thirteen I took it very seriously indeed – there was Victor Pasmore, Keith Vaughan, John Minton, William Coldstream and members of the Euston Rd Group.
I think the teachers must have appreciated that I was such a serious student because, by the age of sixteen, I had sold paintings to all the staff and William Coldstream bought a canal scene of mine. So I was doing very well as a student artist. Keith Vaughan, John Minton and Susan Einzig, they were the Neo-Romantic group and they took me under their wing. But the members of the Euston Rd Group taught me to draw because they were keen on observation, so I owe my drawing ability to them. There was an ideological war going on between their subdued English Realism and the Neo-Romantics who were influenced by Picasso and Matisse.
I was the youngest in my year and, when we graduated in 1952, I had to do National Service so I applied to the RAF. A Jazz musician called Monty Sunshine told me I should be a telephonist because it was the cushiest job. So I applied to do signals in the Far East, but they sent me to work at East India Docks and I was able to live at home. By the time I was demobbed all my friends were teaching, but I didn’t fancy that, as I was only twenty-one, so I took a job at a publicity studio in Fleet St that did posters for Hollywood films and I became a background artist. Once, I painted a brooding sky with lightning as the background to the poster for ‘The Night My Number Came Up’ but after they had put a great big aeroplane on it, and the stars’ faces, and the title, you could hardly see any of my work! I was paid a very low wage, the painters who did the stars’ faces got the top money with the lettering artists below them, so I realised it would be a long time before I earned any money.
I was ambitious, so my father said to me, ‘This is peanuts – why don’t you come and work in the Docks? You could build up your bank balance.’ In 1955, I took a docker’s brief at number one sector, Surrey Docks, and over a five year period I worked every wharf from Tower Bridge to Woolwich. In the summer, once the Baltic Sea thawed, I worked on the timber ships. They came with huge cargoes and every strip had to be manhandled into barges. I worked quite hard, earned very good wages and had no accidents.
One day, I finished early after unloading a ship of Belgian chocolates, so I decided to go over to Camberwell and see my old teachers. I dropped in on the Foundation Course and they said, ‘Thank God you’ve turned up because one of the tutors has been taken ill! Can you take the class?’ And afterwards, they said, ‘Can you come back tomorrow?’ Prior to that, I had an exhibition at the South London Gallery and I continued painting while I was working at the Docks. I painted a whole exhibition once during an eight week strike.
I knew the Welfare Officer at the Surrey Docks and I said, ‘I’m going to leave to teach.’ He said, ‘Teaching is a very insecure profession, you shouldn’t give up the Docks.’ But the Docks closed ten years later and I stayed teaching at Camberwell in the Fine Art Department for the next thirty years, until I retired in 1990 to concentrate on my own work.
The appeal of painting the Thames for me is not just because of my personal background, but because the river has space. In London, you are aware of being closed in yet when you see the Thames it has a grandeur, and when the tall ships are there you feel the magnificence of it. You get changes of light and, although I’ve often been prevented from finishing paintings because of surprises, like breaks in the weather or the sudden appearance of smoke, it always adds something. You start to paint a ship on a Monday, it rains on a Tuesday and it’s a different ship there on the Thursday – but if you are a landscape artist seeking qualities of light, ambiguity has to be part of it.”
Terry in his studio, sitting with the first painting he ever did at art school. “A man who paints puts his heart on the wall and in that painting is the man’s life” – John Minton, 1951.
Bert and James, Barges, Prior’s Wharf, 1990
Hungerford Bridge
View from the Festival Hall
Pier at Bankside
Red Tug passing St Paul’s
Shipping off Piper’s Wharf, 1983
Greenwich Peninsula.
The ‘John Mackay,’ Trans-Atlantic Cable Layer, Enderby’s Wharf, 1979
Mike Canty’s Boat Yard, 1988
Terry with his shed that he constructed entirely out of driftwood from the Thames.
Paintings and drawings copyright © Terry Scales
London Lore at Dennis Severs’ House
Mysterious forces are at work at the former Empire Pipe Factory in Hoxton where sculptor Richard Sharples is contriving boxes that contain moving figures and even apparitions – conjuring the world of mythology and superstition, and ensnaring it like a genie in a bottle, just so that you may enjoy the opportunity of sticking your nose in and taking a peek. These are the preparations for the London Lore exhibition by the Museum of British Folklore at Dennis Severs House in Folgate St which opens on Friday 14th June.
Once a familiar sight upon the London street, Peep Shows or Raree Boxes manned by itinerant performers were recorded in the capital as early as the fifteenth century. In the days before cinema, those in search of innocent entertainment could pay a penny to peer through the peep hole and be transported by the vision beyond, either of a newsworthy event or a royal occasion, or a celebrated scene from fiction. By pulling strings to move scenery and opening slits in the box to admit light, the shimmering mirage appeared to animate with its own life, while the attendant read a description elucidating the meaning of the spectacle thus revealed.
In a similar vein, the boxes placed in each of the rooms at Dennis Severs’ House will dramatise the customs, characters, rituals and legends of the capital. Mixing history with myth, they include evocations of Spring-Heeled Jack, The Queen’s Remembrancer and Henry Croft, the road-sweeper who founded the Pearly Kings & Queens. You can also expect miniature tableaux of the Fire of London, Doggett’s Coat & Badge Race, the Annual Clowns’ Service in Dalston and the legend of Bleeding Heart Yard. All accompanied by ethereal harmonies created by sound artist Richard J. Lockley-Hobson of the Hauntological Society.
Naturally, the method and the means cannot be revealed here – you must visit Folgate St and take a peek through the lenses into the infinite darkness captured within these boxes to discover for yourself the hallucinations of old London that transmogrify.
A veteran of the Napoleonic war makes his living at Hyde Park corner as Showman in 1812.
From a jigsaw puzzle of the Cries of London, c.1820
French illustration of a mother lifting up her child to peep show, c.1820
Illustration by Eugène Hippolyte Forest, c.1840
The peep show, anonymous oil painting, c. 1840
Delft tile illustrating a peep show, c. 1840
Delft tile illustrating a peep show, c. 1840
Painting of a peep show upon a paper maché cheroot case, c.1860
Cover of American children’s book, 1890.
The Children’s Peep Show, 1890.
Engraving by Harry Tuck, 1894.
Sculptor Richard Sharples, Peep-Show-Maker of Hoxton.
Illustrations of peep shows courtesy Richard Balzer
There are special opening times for London Lore which runs from 14th June – 5th July: Wednesdays & Fridays, noon – 4pm. Normal opening times at Dennis Severs’ House – Sundays, noon – 2pm & Mondays, noon – 2pm. Dennis Severs’ House, Folgate St, E1 6BX
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Mick Pedroli, Manager at Dennis Severs’ House
Jimmy Nash, Foreman & Manager
In 1947, Jimmy stands on the threshold of W.H.Clark aged nineteen years old.
When Jimmy Nash started at W.H.Clark, London’s oldest ironmongers, established in the Hackney Rd since 1797, he wore a freshly-ironed shirt with a neatly-tied tie to work every day and his employer provided the long khaki coat which was laundered weekly. Jimmy always carried a fountain pen in his top pocket too, because – as he put it – “biros hadn’t been invented yet.” Little did Jimmy know when this picture was taken, just five years into his tenure, that he would spend sixty-six years there behind the counter.
“It was a life of work really, up and down, round and about.” admitted Jimmy, “Sometimes we’d shift ten tons of steel a week.” Yet Jimmy was not complaining and he did not contradict his wife Gwen when she declared, “W.H.Clark was his first love in his life and I was his second.” However, now that Jimmy is retired, Gwen has nearly eclipsed W.H. Clark, as they celebrate their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary this year – just one year less than Jimmy worked at Clark’s.
“When we were children, the East End was our playground – there was no traffic only horsedrawn,” recalled Gwen, who met Jimmy over her nan’s garden wall in Scawfield St off the Hackney Rd. Once she returned from a spell in the Land Army, they wed and now have three children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, and she and Jimmy are enjoying a peaceful retirement on the banks of the River Roding in Loughton.
W.H.Clark, named ‘Daniel Lewis & Son’ since 2001, is to leave the Hackney Rd this year after more than two centuries trading from the same location. So I made a visit to Loughton yesterday, eager to learn as much as I could of the life of this venerable ironmongers, and Jimmy graciously obliged by telling me this story.
“I started work at W.H.Clark in the Hackney Rd 1942 when I was fourteen. I was born nearby in Mansford St and I went to Mansford St School. My father worked in munitions at Woolwich, but after London Fields Station was bombed he had to catch the train from Cambridge Heath Station, so he walked down the Hackney Rd past W.H.Clark and he saw a sign in the window saying, ‘Lad Wanted.’
I went there and saw Mr Hill & Mr Simmons, the proprietors, and I got the job. Mr Simmons led me through the shop to the yard at the back where the engineering shop was and I met a chap there named Joe Hallam, he was the engineer. Three of them emerged in all, Joe, Arthur Hinton the shop foreman and Jack Rudd, who was in charge of the timber shed. They all took one look at me and looked at one another. Then Joe said, ‘You come in with me into the engineering shop,’ but Arthur also wanted me to work at the counter and Jack needed help in the timber shed too. We were very busy at the time with horse-drawn carriages because of petrol rationing.
I went to work in the timber shed among the curved felloes used for making the wheels, the spokes and the hubs. There were two spokes to every felloe and we had timber shafts, two types – sawn shafts of ash that were four by three and then steam-bent shafts that were seven by six. In the timber shed, we had no racks, we had all the timber standing – ash poles, elm beds for axles and then we had flexo-metal panels of twenty-four gauge aluminium laminated onto plywood.
In the engineering shop, there was a forge, two lathes, a grinding machine and an old Ajax threading machine upstairs. The two chaps that worked with Joe were enlisted, so he was left to run the workshop alone and, after three months, he was called up to serve as an artificer on HMS Mendip and they closed the engineering shop. Originally, there were more than a dozen working at Clark’s – Ernie Simmons and Bert Hill, the lads in the shop, Arthur Hinton the foreman, Joe Hallam and his two engineers, Jack Rudd in charge of the timber shed, John Fowl the office manager (everyone called him ‘chick-chick’), a secretary, a woman who did the accounts, and me. But during the war, once Arthur Hinton and Johnny Fowl were conscripted, there was just a skeleton staff left.
From 1943, I worked in the shop behind the counter and we were handling bar metal and heavy stuff, like axles. An axle is made of two pieces of metal stuck together by putting them into the furnace and hammering them with graphite. Before he was enlisted, Johnny Fowl asked me to do some office work. They rationed metal, so I had to keep a record and if a customer ordered more than a certain limit, they wouldn’t be supplied again until the next month. I made myself useful by designing graphs for stocktaking all the nuts, crews and bolts. I drew the graphs in ink and filled them in with pencil, so I could erase it and use them again because paper was scarce. There was just three lads and me in the shop by then. We had no foreman, but Jack Rudd was in the timber shed if we needed him to take charge of the shop. There was just five of us to run the whole ship!
So then I realised I’ll be called up to the army next, but it wasn’t to be. My friend Sidney Hamilton and I were fishing down the River Lea, one beautiful hot summer’s day, and we drank a bottle of lemonade. We’d swum in the water and we were fishing, and Sidney filled the bottle with water and we both thought it looked clear, so we drank it. But when we had to go for our medicals, they found we had liver infections. I was heading for the RAF and he was headed for the army. We both received letters summoning us to hospital, he went to Barts and I went to St Leonards. The local GP said, ‘It looks like it’s cleared up but do you really want to go?’ The war was over and Sid joined the army, but I just went back to Clark’s.
Gwen came home from the Land Army and we went to to see the VE parade together and we had a party on Scawfield St. When Gwen and I got married, we just had two rooms in Scawfield St until we moved to Hoxton to a brand new flat, years later, with its own bathroom. Very flash!
Over the years I was at Clark’s, it changed from horse-drawn vehicles to motor vehicles, trucks and vans. Bedford, Ford and British Leyland used to supply just the chassis and engine to the coach builders and we would sell them the materials, everything was made of wood then. We used to do a lot of work for the Co-op and that’s where I saw the Royal Coach being repainted for the Coronation. Arthur and I had our photograph taken in front of it. We supplied gold leaf and the size to stick it on with for London Transport, and we supplied it for the coach too.
Eventually, Mr Simmons and Mr Hill died and Tom Hartley, our commercial traveller, bought the company. He used to answer the phone by saying, ‘Hartley, Hartley – You know, Hartley’s jams and marmalade!’ David Lewis’ father Daniel came in to the company in 1947 as a office boy and, when Hartley was preparing to retire, Daniel’s father who ran Lewis Dairy nearby came over and negotiated to buy the business and Daniel became the boss. I used to laugh at him because he always sat in the office smoking with his feet up on the chair. At first, he wasn’t interested in work at all but that changed once he became the governor. Yet Danny knew nothing about the company, because all he had done was sit in the office. By that time, I was doing the buying and selling, and writing the invoices. It was a one man band, there weren’t enough hours in the day. I did the invoices at home at night and got to work at 7am each morning. When Danny took over, I left at 4pm to avoid the traffic and I made the job suit myself. I retired at sixty-five, although I kept going back to solve problems until I was well over seventy.
Over my sixty years at Clark’s, it all changed around. I remember when Danny died and David his son called me. ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some bad news – dad’s dead. Would you come down and get the keys and open the shop?’ I did like the work. Sixty-six years is a long time to work at one company and I saw all the changes – I saw people coming and people going, and people dying. It was a combination of needs must when the devil drives.”
Jimmy’s mother Elizabeth and her sisters as children in Shoreditch, c. 1900
Elizabeth Nash stands left of this picture taken at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Elizabeth and her son Jimmy, c. 1931
Jimmy in his first suit.
Jimmy (left) and his cousin Ernie, Shoreditch c. 1934.
Jimmy in a naval outfit.
Jimmy with his brother John, c. 1936.
Jimmy and John, c. 1939.
Jimmy and Gwen, c. 1946.
Jimmy and Gwen at their wedding in 1949.
Jimmy (second from right) outside W.H.Clark in 1950.
Jimmy’s self-tinted portrait.
Jimmy in his shed in Loughton.
Jimmy and Gwen.
Jimmy with his collection of horsedrawn vehicles, recalling the days when he started at W.H.Clark.
The One Stop Metal Shop, Daniel Lewis & Son Ltd, 493-495 Hackney Rd, E2 9ED
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Jonathan Miller in Fournier St
Jonathan Miller, comedian, polymath and celebrated intellectual, visited 5 Fournier St last week, to see the house where his grandfather Abram lived and brought up his family more than a hundred years ago. Abram came to London from Lithuania in 1865 and worked as furrier in the attic workshop, the same room where Lucinda Douglas Menzies took this portrait of Jonathan.
Jonathan does not know when Abram acquired the surname Miller. His grandfather arrived in the Port of London as an adolescent and found work as a machinist in the sweatshops of Whitechapel, where he met Rebecca Fingelstein, a buttonhole hand, whom he married in 1871. Somehow Abram worked his way up to become his own boss during the next ten years, running his own business from premises at 5 Fournier St by the time his son (Jonathan’s father) Emanuel was born in 1892, as the youngest of nine siblings. Emanuel’s sister Clara remembered how the children fell asleep listening to the whirr of sewing machines overhead.
As a supplier of fur hats to Queen Victoria and bearskins to the Grenadiers, Abram aspired to be an English gentleman with a pony and trap. Yet, at 5 Fournier St, the horse had to be kept in the back yard which meant leading it through the front hall, blindfolded in case it reared up at the chandelier.
Jonathan’s aunt Janie wrote her own account of her childhood there – “We lived in a large Queen Anne House in Spitalfields and part of the house was taken over by my father’s business who was a furrier. Needless to say, we all had coats trimmed with fur… My earliest recollection was my first day at the infant school in Old Castle St, and I remember the summer holidays we spent in Ramsgate for two weeks, year after year.”
Janies’s younger brother Emanuel looms large in her narrative – “We moved to Hackney when he was eight and he went to Parminter’s School, and from there got a scholarship to the City of London School and then another scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge. I remember spending a really lovely week in Cambridge for May Week, attending the concerts etc and meeting all Emanuel’s friends. After leaving Cambridge, he went to the London Hospital in Whitechapel where he qualified as a doctor and served in the 1914 war as a Captain RAMC, and helped to cure the shell-shocked soldiers.” It was a long journey that Emanuel travelled from his father’s beginnings in Whitechapel and, as Janie records, he rejected the family trade in favour of the medical profession, “Emanuel refused to go into the business, as he had been to Cambridge and wanted to be a doctor, and he won the day.”
Jonathan Miller does not recall Emanuel speaking about the East End. “I never talked to my father very much because I was always in bed by the time he was back from his work, so I was completely out of it” he admitted to me, “I am only a Jew for anti-Semites. I say ‘I am not a Jew, I’m Jew-ish!'”
Although intrigued to visit the house where his father was born and where his grandfather worked, Jonathan was unwilling to acknowledge any personal response. “I’m not interested in my ancestry,” he joked, “I’m descended from chimpanzees but I am not interested in them either.” Like many immigrant families that passed through Spitalfields, in Jonathan’s family there was a severance – the generation that moved out and rose to the professional classes chose not to look back. And for Jonathan it was a gap – in culture and in time – that could no longer be bridged, even as we sat in the attic where his grandfather’s workshop had been a century earlier. “I know nothing about their life here,” he confessed to me, gesturing extravagantly around the tiny room and wrinkling that famously-furrowed brow.
As one who has constructed his own identity, Jonathan rejects distinctions of religion and ethnicity in favour of a broader notion of humanity to which he allies himself. Yet he was proud to tell me that his father came back and founded the East London Child Guidance Clinic in 1927, acknowledging where he had come from by bringing his scholarship to serve the people that he had grown up among. “He was interested in juvenile dilinquents and he was really the founder of child psychiatry in this country,” Jonathan explained me, and the work that his father began continues to this day – with the Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services on the Isle of Dogs housed in the Emanuel Miller Centre.
So I found a curious irony in the fact that the son of a leading figure in the understanding of child development in this country should admit to no relationship to his father, and therefore none to his family’s past either. When 5 Fournier St was renovated, the gaps between the floor boards were found to be crammed with clippings of fur and every inch of this old house bears the marks of its three hundred years of use. Constantly, people come back to Spitalfields to search for their own past in the locations familiar to their antecedents, yet often the past they seek is already within them in their cultural inheritance and family traits – if they could only recognise it.
Clearly, Jonathan Miller’s choice to study medicine was not unconnected to his father’s career. When Jonathan reminded me of the familar Jewish joke about asking the way to get to Carnegie Hall and receiving the reply, ‘Practice, practice!’, he suggested that the pursuit of fame as musicians and as comedians had proved to be an important means of advancement for Jewish people. And I could not but think of Jonathan Miller’s own distinguished work in opera and his early success with ‘Beyond the Fringe.’ It set me wondering whether ancestry had influenced him more than he realised, or was entirely willing to admit.
Eighteenth century roof joists, exposed during renovations, still with their original joiner’s numbers which reveal that the roof was made elsewhere and then assembled on site.
Weatherboarding revealed between 3 and 5 Fournier St during renovations, indicating that until the mid-eighteenth century number 5 was the end of the street, before number 3 was built.
Abram Miller arrived from Lithuania in 1865 and is recorded at 5 Fournier St in the census of 1890 .
Wallpaper at 5 Fournier St from the era of Abram Miller.
Watercolour of Fournier St, 1912 – the cart stands outside number 5.
Emanuel Miller was born at 5 Fournier St in 1892.
“I remember the summer holidays we spent in Ramsgate for two weeks year after year.” Emanuel is on the far right of this photograph.
Fournier St in the early twentieth century, number 5 is the third house.
5 Fournier St today, now the premises of the Townhouse.
The hallway where the blindfolded horse was led through.
Emanuel Miller as an old man.
Jonathan Miller
Portraits of Jonathan Miller © Lucinda Douglas Menzies
