Michaela Cucchi, Trader in Fruit & Veg
If you are looking for high quality fruit & veg with a touch of swagger, then – on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays – Bethnal Green is the place to be, when Michaela Cucchi is stalling out. And from personal experience, I can vouch that the only Bramley apples of any reasonable size and quality – an unexpectedly scarce commodity – that I have found in the East End this season were discovered at Michaela’s immaculately ordered stall.
With her woolly hat pulled down over her ears, her broad smile and her indefatigable humour, Michaela is a popular character in the Bethnal Green Market. Shrewd and streetwise in the way that only those who have been in the markets for generations can be, yet possessing a certain Latin flamboyance which attests to her Milanese father, Michaela proved to be a natural storyteller when I sat down at a table at Pelliccis with her and her partner, Narve Dearan, recently.
Significantly, Michaela found her way back to Bethnal Green after exploring the wider world and other professions. Simultaneously a sharp businesswoman and a born romantic, she won satisfaction by picking up the threads of her family’s tradition of market trading in the East End.
“Market trading has always been in my family since the days of my grandfather, Henry Smith, and his generation. He was from Bethnal Green, one of thirteen children, and he became a rag and bone man. His brothers ran a second hand shop down the Bethnal Green Rd and a stall in Cheshire St on Sunday. They used to do house clearance, it was called totting, and they looked in the Jewish Chronicle to see who had died and went round and offered to buy the diamonds. They weren’t exactly the most honest of people years ago.
My nan, she ran the Bishop Bonner and the Bonner Arms, and she had a shop in Bethnal Green where she did sewing. They had four children, which was – my mum, Shirley Smith, and then Ethel Smith, Brenda Smith, Sylvie Smith and Henry Smith, who took over the business. All the women became machinists, but my mum wanted to travel and better herself, and on a number eight bus she met my father Giovanni Cucchi. He was here studying English but he spent most of his time in the cinema watching Tom & Jerry. He proposed to her and she said ‘No’ because he was five years older than her, and she thought it was wrong.
Eventually, they married at St Mary of the Assumption in Bethnal Green and moved to Italy, to Milan. It turned out my father’s father owned most of Milan, he had a big distillery that made liqueurs. During the war, he smuggled Jews into Switzerland. He built a false wall in the warehouse with flats behind it and, when the coast was clear, they filled the sugar barrels with sugar but underneath was a false bottom and they hid a person there – and that’s how they smuggled them over the border. He was very well connected and went to a ball in Argentina with Eva Peron. He was so well respected that no-one in Milan would take any money off my mum when she went shopping.
But then my nan had a major heart attack and my mother said, ‘I’m going home.’ It was after I was born. So we came back to Bethnal Green. Out of all locations in the world I could have ended up, I ended up in Bethnal Green! My nan passed away, and the family said to my father, ‘Either you stay in Milan or you go to London and give it all up.’ So he came to London. It was his love for my mother. He started up a business under a railway arch importing wines and spirits, and he was the first to import San Pellegrino into this country.
I never spoke English until I came here. I went to school at St Anne’s in Spitalfields and Bishops Challoner’s. Then I worked for an estate agent in Pall Mall. After a couple of years, I left and ended up buying Bennetton for Selfridges. I bummed around for a while, and went off to America and lived on Fire Island. Then I came back and met Narve Dearan. I started working for his mum at her pub in Mile End. I came back from America for two weeks holiday but I never went back. It was love at first sight.
The reason we started the stall is because its hard to buy good quality fruit & veg. We buy everything fresh everyday. We don’t have a warehouse. Narve spends four hours buying produce at the Spitalfields Wholesale Market and then comes back to Bethnal Green to set up. It’s very physical and it’s very hard work, and there are winter mornings when you don’t want to get up, but it’s not so bad in the summer. I go to bed at eight or nine o’clock. Narve gets up at midnight and I get up at five to do the cleaning, then I get our son Sean up – he’s twenty-three – and I take the dog for a walk before being down at the stall at six or seven to set up.
We take pride in what we do and we only sell what we eat.”
Michaela Cucchi
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
John Claridge’s Clowns (Act One)
I invited Contributing Photographer John Claridge along to the 67th Annual Grimaldi Service at Holy Trinity Church in Dalston last weekend to take a set of clown portraits, as a complement to his fine series of boxers. We were guests of Clowns International, the world’s oldest clown club founded in 1947, and John set up a studio in a quiet corner where we spent a memorable afternoon, entertained by a procession of cheery funsters sufficient to brighten the grimmest February day.
Jolly Jack – Clowning for thirty-six years.
Joe Sammy – Third generation clown, grandson of Mickell the Clown.
Uncle Colin – Clowning for thirty-six years. In partnership with Mr Woo as The Custard Clowns.
Glory B & Bernie (short for Bernadette) – Performing for twenty-five years.
Rainbow – Clowning for seventeen years.
Slapstick – Clowning for twenty-four years, since the age of thirteen.
Tuppy – From Adelaide on a visit.
Tofu the Zany – Clowning for more than twenty-five years.
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
You might like to read my account
At the 65th Annual Grimaldi Service
or read these other Grimaldi stories
and take a look at more pictures by John Claridge
Along the Thames with John Claridge
At the Salvation Army with John Claridge
A Few Diversions by John Claridge
Signs, Posters, Typography & Graphics
Views from a Dinghy by John Claridge
In Another World with John Claridge
A Few Pints with John Claridge
Some East End Portraits by John Claridge
Sunday Morning Stroll with John Claridge
Just Another Day With John Claridge
At the Salvation Army in Eighties
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round One)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Two)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Three)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Four)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Five)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Six)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Seven)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Eight)
The Gentle Author’s Diary 2
On a winter’s night in Spitalfields
It was two years ago, when someone asked me if I had been standing next to a bonfire, that I discovered my clothes reeked of wood smoke like an old tramp who slept by the campfire each night. It was the result of my pitiful attempt to cut the gas bill by burning wooden palettes scavenged in the street. Yet every surface in my home had acquired a coating of soot and I realised I could not continue.
It took a year of collecting old tiles, one at a time, to gather sufficient to line my fireplace and another year to find the money to fit a stove. Through last winter, I sat in bed with a hot water bottle to keep warm and the cat curled up on the cover, while I wrote my stories. Then, last summer, Jim Howett of the Spitalfield Trust supervised the repair of the hearth and Daniel Costea tiled it. And this winter – after a year without a fire – I have barely spent an evening away from my stove, inhabiting its benign realm of warmth and mesmerised by its fiery glow.
A wooden fire surround would complete the project and Jim Howett designed a modest one which suits the era of the building, but then we discovered that the intense heat of the stove might warp it and a stone insert is necessary. Yet this can wait until the summer because, during the years it has taken to get this fireplace working, I have accepted that I do not need to live in a house that is “finished.” I prefer its slow evolution around me, as my resources permit.
In October, prior to installation of the stove.
You may like to read more about the tiles
The Drypoint Etchings of Peta Bridle
Illustrator Peta Bridle sent me these beautiful drypoint etchings of some of my favourite people and places in the East End, which she has been working on over the winter. I love all the detail, and the depth of tone and richness of hatching this ancient technique offers, romancing these familiar locations into myth.
‘I have drawn the shopkeepers in their places of work as I find them a good subject and I am supportive of independent shops.’ Peta admitted to me, ‘The town where I live is full of supermarkets competing against each other, a few poundshops and little else, so I like to read about all the different shops you describe in the East End.’ We look forward to more drypoint etchings from Peta Bridle.
Liverpool St Station
E.Pellicci, Bethnal Green Rd. “Nevio Pellicci kindly allowed me to make a couple of visits to take pictures as reference to create this etching. It was at Christmas time and after they closed for the afternoon. Daisy my daughter is sitting in the corner.”
Paul Gardner at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, Commercial St. “I did buy a few bags off Paul whilst I was there!”
Tanya Peixoto at bookartbookshop, Pitfield St. “I am friends with Tanya who runs this shop and she has stocked my homemade books in the past.”
Des at Des & Lorraine’s Junk Shop, Bacon St. “An amazing place that I want to re-visit since I never got to look round it properly …”
Prints copyright © Peta Bridle
Fire Attack at The Freedom Press
“a copy of William Blake burnt by fascists”
Last Friday at 5:30am, CCTV at the Whitechapel Gallery recorded two men break the metal shutter next door at The Freedom Press in Angel Alley and pour a flammable liquid inside, before setting it alight and leaving in a waiting car. Although the attack was premeditated, it came out of the blue and at present there is no confirmation of who was responsible. Yet the target is one with a powerful resonance as Britain’s oldest radical bookshop and the historic focus for free thought in the East End.
The Freedom Press was founded in 1886 by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian revolutionary, and Charlotte Wilson, the well-to-do British anarchist who resigned from the Fabian Society when she and William Morris were dissatisfied with the direction it was taking.
Freedom, the anarchist newspaper first published by Kropotkin and Wilson, is still produced from Whitechapel with every issue containing this policy statement, “Anarchists work towards a society of mutual aid and voluntary co-operation. We reject all government and economic repression. This newspaper, published continuously since 1936, exists to explain anarchism more widely and show that only in an anarchist society can human freedom thrive.” Hardly the provocation to such violence as was enacted last week.
Curious to see the damage for myself and discover the outcome of the attack, I walked down Brick Lane to visit Angel Alley. Entering the blackened bookshop where the bitter smell of the smoke prevailed, I climbed up to the first floor and discovered Max Reeves of The Freedom Press opening charred archive boxes. “Once the embers had died down, we put out a call to have a clear-up on Sunday and well over a hundred people from the local community turned up,” he explained to me,“We carried the books out and cleaned up the shop.”
Max believes the attack came from members of a far-right minority. “It’s not the first time we have been targeted by fascists, in 1993 a neo-Nazi group fire-bombed the shop,” he revealed, “It might be disheartening, if it were not for the flood of well-wishing and offers of help we have received from all over the world. Disparate groups in the radical hinterland have laid aside their differences and come together in solidarity.”
Nobody was injured in the attack and, although smoke permeated everywhere, only a portion of the building was damaged. Salvaged books have been stacked on the top floor while the burnt ones were piled out in Angel Alley as rubbish, where people quickly began to collect them as souvenirs. “It’s symbolic, it’s a proper Nazi book burning and each of the damaged books has now become a cherished artifact.” Max asserted, holding up a blackened paperback with a flourish, “This is a copy of William Blake burnt by fascists.”
“If the intention was to further divide people, this attack failed because it has achieved the opposite.” he assured me with unassailable confidence. The Freedom Press bookshop reopens for business today.
Photographs copyright © Max Reeves
The Freedom Press is appealing for donations of books to sell in aid of repairs to the fire damage. If you have some books to contribute contact shop@freedompress.org.uk
You might also like to read about
Cries Of London Snap Cards
It has been a while since I added to my collection of Cries of London down the ages, so I was delighted to acquire these beautiful cards recently for a mere couple of pounds. For me, their patina after more than century of use in games of Snap only enhances the appeal of these characterful portraits of industrious Londoners of the eighteen-nineties.
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Passmore Edwards in the East End
At the time of cuts to libraries and other vital social resources, Dean Evans author of Funding The Ladder – The Passmore Edwards Legacy takes a timely look at the forgotten benefactor who shaped the culture of the East End through his enlightened philanthropy.
“It is a distinguished privilege, lightening the lot of our fellow East End citizens.” wrote John Passmore Edwards in 1892, in response to a request from Canon Barnett for a contribution towards a free library he was building in Whitechapel.
Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta moved to St Jude’s Parish, Whitechapel, in the eighteen seventies when it was an over-crowded area of appalling poverty and poor housing, mostly endured by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Barnetts set about to improve the conditions of their parishioners with missionary zeal, believing that “the social problem is at root an educational one” and that Free Libraries were the best means of education. Barnet had recently showed Edwards the half-finished library for which there was a shortfall in funding and was surprised to receive such a quick and welcoming response – since included with Edwards’ agreement to help was a cheque for £6,454 to cover the total construction cost and an offer of one thousand books to populate the shelves.
When the Whitechapel Library was formally opened in October 1892, there were already more than two and a half thousand people making use of the reading room on a daily basis and one thousand on Sundays. It had taken Barnett fourteen years to see his dream materialise of the first rate-supported library in the East End. For Passmore Edwards it was the beginning of a relationship with the East End that was to last until the end of his days and result in more than a dozen public buildings, libraries, hospitals, technical institutes, art galleries, boys clubs and a home for foreign sailors, all freely given to help those less fortunate.
John Passmore Edwards had been born in Blackwater, a small mining village near Truro, Cornwall, in 1823. Educated at the local dame school at a cost of tuppence a week, he had developed an ambition to be useful, an ambition that was to stay with him for all of his eighty-eight years. Asquith said that Edwards had done “more than any single Englishman to help the people to equip and educate themselves for civic and social duty.” Edwards simply said that if he could fund the ladder, the poor would climb.
As a young boy, he helped his father both in the family brewery attached to the cottage in which they lived and also in the market garden that was cultivated around the cottage, tending and picking fruit to be sold in the local markets. Saving up the few pennies he earned, he walked the seven miles into Truro to buy a single second-hand book, reading anything and everything he could lay his hands upon. After sending for leaflets on the work of the Anti-Corn Law League, he was persuaded to help deliver these throughout West Cornwall – to the chagrin of the Mayor of Penzance, a magistrate, who threatened him with prison for sedition. But Passmore Edwards’ zeal was not to be deflected, not then, nor at any time over the next seventy years.
After working briefly as a solicitor’s clerk in Truro, he travelled, first to Manchester as representative of the radical newspaper, The Sentinel, and then to London, arriving in Holborn in 1845. There he learnt a trade as a publisher’s clerk, but earned his living through freelance writing and lecturing, and found time to continue his education at the Mechanics Institute, while becoming actively involved in many of the social and political reform groups of the time. He was a member of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, The Political and Financial Reform Association, The Society for the Abolition of Tax on Knowledge, The Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, The Peace Society, and many more.
In 1850, then twenty-seven years old and with fifty pounds in savings, he launched a small publication of his own, The Public Good, obtaining paper and printing on credit and living and working in a single room in Paternoster Row, where he became editor, publisher, advertising clerk, as well as packing and sending off orders. But with a low cover price in order to be affordable to the working classes, neither this nor subsequent publications were profitable and, after a serious illness, he was declared bankrupt. Yet, though legally cleared of his remaining debts, he determined to pay back what he owed and did so a decade later. By hard work and frugal living, he clawed his way to success – obtaining first The Building News, then The English Mechanic magazine and in 1876, the London Echo.
Now a wealthy and influential man, Edwards turned his thoughts to Parliament and served for a short but disappointing spell as Liberal Member for Salisbury, before finding he could more better satisfy his ambitions outside Westminster. From 1890 to his death in 1911, he funded the construction of seventy-one public buildings. Twenty-one were in his home county of Cornwall, but the majority were to serve the inhabitants of London. His philanthropy was unique in that while his work was spread over diverse areas of social improvement – libraries, education, the arts, hospitals, convalescent homes, orphans and the disabled – he maintained a long-term relationship with all the organisations and institutions that he helped.
His gift of the Whitechapel Library in 1892 was followed in 1893 by the Haggerston Branch Library, a Cottage Hospital in Willesdon, a Lecture Hall for the new South London Art Gallery, and a hundred acre farm at Chalfont St Peters as the base for what was to become the National Society for Epilepsy. 1894 saw the opening of a Convalescent Home at Pegwell Bay, the following year a new wing at the West Ham Hospital, a Cottage Hospital at Wood Green, and the creation of a Printers’ Library at St Bride’s – while in 1896, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, no less than ten opening ceremonies took place.
After laying the foundation stone at the Pitsfield St Library, Shoreditch, he went on to open an extension to the Haggerston Library and after opening the Shepherds Bush Library he walked to Hamersmith Broadway to unveil a drinking fountain, dedicated to the memory of his brother Richard who had been a vestryman there. Remaining a successful newspaper owner and publisher, he was as economical with his time as he was with his money, combining the laying of the foundation stones of the Limehouse Library and the Roman Road Library in a single day, and later similarly opening them on the same day. In 1895, he travelled down to Cornwall to lay foundation stones or open five of his buildings in a single week, only to return to London on the Friday, to open another library.
His wife, Eleanor, was also closely involved with his philanthropic work, helping to raise funds as a member of the Ladies’ Guild of the Charing Cross Hospital and arranging the furnishings for the Falmouth Cottage Hospital and the Perranporth Convalescent Home among others. She organised outings to Epping Forrest for children from the East End. Two hundred at a time would be taken there by train and treated to a tea and organised games, all funded by The Echo.
It was the gift of the Perranporth Convalescent Home that persuaded the Truro City Council to grant Edwards the Honorary Freedom of the Borough, which was followed by the Freedom of the Boroughs of Falmouth and Liskeard. In London he was equally honoured, by the Boroughs of both East and West Ham, yet he refused a Knighthood offered by both Queen Victoria and later, King Edwards VII, preferring, he said, to remain as he was.
Over the years the perceived need for convalescent homes has diminished, hospitals have become larger, orphanages have closed, and many of the Passmore Edwards buildings are no longer used for the original purpose. It was a German bomb that destroyed the St George-in-the-East Library, but the Limehouse Library has been left empty and decaying ever since it shut in 2004. Many others of his buildings have been fortunate to acquire other uses. The Whitechapel Library is now a splendidly restored annexe to the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The Borough Rd Library, the West Ham Museum, and the Camberwell School of Arts are all now used by London universities. The Haggerston Library, Canning Town Boys Club and Sailors Palace at Limehouse, built for the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society, are converted into housing. Of the London hospitals, only the Willesdon and East Ham buildings remain in use and of the London Libraries, only those at Plaistow, Nunhead, Dulwich and Acton remain open. With the current threat to library provision, the future of even these must be uncertain.
In 1850, Edwards campaigned with William Ewart for the Free Libraries Act but the progress with provision of libraries, even in London, was slow mainly due to resistance of the ratepayers – at the time only the more wealthy and better educated – to paying a penny rate to support them. Yet by then Edwards’ belief in the need for libraries was widely evident from his name over so many doors and upon foundation stones across London, and his offer of one thousand books to any new library opening in London.
Bernard Kops, East End poet and playwright, famously wrote of the Whitechapel Library that “the door of the library, was the door into me.” The name over that door was Passmore Edwards.
Plashet Library
Haggerston Library
Bow Library
Limehouse Library
Stratford Museum
Sailors’ Palace, East India Dock Rd
Plaistow Library
Hoxton Library
John Passmore Edwards (1823-1911)
FUNDING THE LADDER – The Passmore Edwards Legacy by Dean Evans can be ordered direct from the publisher Francis Boutle and copies are on sale in bookshops including Brick Lane Bookshop, Broadway Books, Newham Bookshop, Stoke Newington Bookshop and London Review Bookshop.
