Nicholas Borden, Artist
I came across Nicholas Borden standing with his easel in the cold, painting on the corner of Three Colts Lane before Christmas and, even at first glance, I was captivated by his work. But I was unable to speak with him since he was already getting his ear bent by a passing cyclist. Instead, Nicholas handed me one of his cards in gracious response to the brief compliment I was able to interject.
The afternoon light was fading fast as I continued on my way, considering the frustration of the landscape painter on the street, subject to constant distraction from idle passersby. Yet when I visited his studio recently, Nicholas admitted that he enjoys the interruptions.“It’s good to be in the open air and interacting with people.” he enthused, “They see what you are doing and they come and start talking to you – people are very flattering.”
He showed me the series of bold panoramic paintings he has been working on which, in their unusual broad proportion, evoke those early renaissance pictures created to adorn marriage chests by artists such as Uccello and Botticelli. Employing vibrant colours and dynamic compositions, Nicholas’ paintings manifest the spontaneous life of the East End streets with painterly ease, delighting in the quirky geometry and the curious divergent perspectives of familiar locations.
“Since I left college, I think I was lost for a couple of years but now I feel I am at a very creative stage – part of this has come from working on location,” he declared in excitement, as he showed me the works he has created in the past eighteen months, “I’ve got several easels and I carry my backpack and portfolio. I’m quite hardy so I can withstand most weather, I’m an outdoors person.”
Originally from the West Country, Nicholas came to London to study Graphics at St Martins College of Art and then Communications at the Royal College of Art, and he recalls the first time he visited the East End. “I remember coming to a party on Brick Lane, it was quite an eye-opener to a boy from Devon – certainly different and exciting, I suppose.” he confided, “And this has been the area of London I have always come back to.” After graduation Nicholas returned to Devon and he took jobs in factories and warehouses, without making any art for several years. “I gave it up,” he confessed with frown of regret, withdrawing into himself, “Then I had my car stolen and the people who took it broke into my flat when I was there, that was a real low point for me.”
Coming back to live with his brother in the East End, Nicholas started making pictures again. “I returned to the kind of work I did as a teenager, doing line drawings,” he explained modestly, revealing how he liberated himself from the problematic experience of his college education and regained emotional possession of his artistic endeavours by picking up a personal thread.
Of course, there is a sophisticated technique that belies itself in these elegant pictures, but more significantly there is a joy in the medium that grants them an immediate appeal. “This is a re-invention, I feel I have completely transformed myself,” Nicholas assured me, surprised at his own words.
Even though he has not yet shown any of these pictures or had an exhibition, I know you will be seeing more of the work of Nicholas Borden. But in the meantime, if you spot him on a street corner in the East End, you are licensed to go up and say, “hello.”
Three Colts Lane (click to enlarge)
Middleton Rd, Dalston (click to enlarge)
Blackfriars (click to enlarge)
Wick Rd, Hackney
Regent’s Canal next to Victoria Park
Dalston Junction
Victoria Park
Cavendish Mansions, Clerkenwell Rd
Regent’s Canal at Mare St
Earnshaw St, High Holborn
Whitechapel from the roof of the Idea Store
Images copyright © Nicholas Borden
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Ten)
Contributing Photographer John Claridge and I were back at the first London Ex-Boxers Association gathering of the New Year to add to John’s mighty roster of heroic pugilists which now stands at well over one hundred portraits. We have encountered so many redoubtable characters and made so many new friends, and here you see the results of John’s most recent encounters with these dignified gentlemen of the boxing fraternity.
Paul Watford (First fight 1966 – Last Fight 1973)
Joe Somerville (111 fights between 1955 – 1969)
Harold Alderman MBE (LEBA Boxing Historian & Schoolboy Boxer)
Tom Ballinger (First fight 1952 – Last fight 1961)
Harry Scott (First fight 1960 – Last fight 1973)
Robbie Davis (First fight 1950 – Last fight 1961)
Alex Dunning (First fight 1953 – Last fight 1960, Royal Navy Champion 1956)
Reg Baker (First fight 1944 – Last fight 1945)
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
Take a look at
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)
John Claridge’s Boxers (Round Nine)
and these other 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
The Forgotten Corners of Old London
Who knows what you might find lurking in the forgotten corners of old London? Like this lonely old waxwork of Charles II who once adorned a side aisle of Westminster Abbey, peering out through a haze of graffiti engraved upon his pane by mischievous tourists with diamond rings.
As one with a pathological devotion to walking through London’s sidestreets and byways, seeking to avoid the main roads wherever possible, these glass slides of the forgotten corners of London – used long ago by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute – hold a special appeal for me. I have elaborate routes across the city which permit me to walk from one side to the other exclusively by way of the back streets and I discover all manner of delights neglected by those who solely inhabit the broad thoroughfares.
And so it is with many of these extraordinary pictures that show us the things which usually nobody bothers to photograph. There are a lot of glass slides of the exterior of Buckingham Palace in the collection but, personally, I am much more interested in the roof space above Richard III’s palace of Crosby Hall that once stood in Bishopsgate, and in the unlikely paraphernalia which accumulated in the crypt of the Carmelite Monastery or the Cow Shed at the Tower of London, a hundred years ago. These pictures satisfy my perverse curiosity to visit the spaces closed off to visitors at historic buildings, in preference to seeing the public rooms.
Within these forgotten corners, there are always further mysteries to be explored. I wonder who pitched a teepee in the undergrowth next to the moat at Fulham Palace in 192o. I wonder if that is a cannon or a chimney pot abandoned in the crypt at the Carmelite monastery. I wonder why that man had a bucket, a piece of string and a plank inside the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. I wonder what those fat books were next to the stove in the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries’ shop. I wonder who was pulling that girl out of the photograph in Woolwich Gardens. I wonder who put that dish in the roof of Crosby Hall. I wonder why Charles II had no legs. The pictures set me wondering.
It is what we cannot know that endows these photographs with such poignancy. Like errant pieces from lost jigsaws, they inspire us to imagine the full picture that we shall never be party to.
Tiltyard Gate, Eltham Palace, c. 1930
Refuse collecting at London Zoo, c. 1910
Passage in Highgate, c. 1910
Westminster Dust Carts, c. 1910
The Jewel Tower, Westminster, 1921
Fifteenth century brickwork at Charterhouse Wash House, c1910
Middle Temple Lane, c. 1910
Carmelite monastery crypt, c. 1910
The Moat at Fulham Palace, c. 1920
Clifford’s Inn, c. 1910
Top of inner dome at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1920
Apothecaries’ Hall Quadrangle, c. 1920
Worshipful Company of Apothecaries’ Shop, c.1920
Unidentified destroyed building near St Paul’s, c. 1940
Merchant Taylors’ Hall, c. 1920
Crouch End Old Baptist Chapel, c. 1900
Woolwich Gardens, c. 1910
The roof of Crosby Hall, Richard III’s palace in Bishopsgate , c. 1910
Refreshment stall in St James’ Park, c. 1910
River Wandle at Wandsworth, c. 1920
Corridor at Battersea Rise House, c. 1900
Tram emerging from the Kingsway Tunnel, c. 1920
Between the interior and exterior domes at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1920
Fossilised tree trunk on Tooting Common, c. 1920
St Dunstan-in-the-East, 1911
Cow shed at the Queen’s House, Tower of London, c. 1910
Boundary marks for St Benet Gracechurch, St Andrew Hubbard and St Dionis Backchurch in Talbot Court, c. 1910
Lincoln’s Inn gateway seen from Old Hall, c. 1910
St Bride’s Fleet St, c. 1920
Glass slides copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at
The High Days & Holidays of Old London
Elwin Hawthorne, Artist
David Buckman author of From Bow To Biennale: Artists of the East London Group recalls the forgotten name of Elwin Hawthorne, a prominent talent in the Group and an integral part of the lost history of one of the major artistic movements to come out of the East End in the last century.
Elwin Hawthorne with his painting of the Bryant & May Factory, 1929
In November 2008, when Sotheby’s auctioned pictures assembled by Sir David and Lady Scott, there was keen bidding for oils by Elwin Hawthorne. Sir David acquired a taste for the artist’s work in the early nineteen thirties when Hawthorne was a star exhibitor at Alex Reid & Lefevre’s galleries of work by the emerging East London Group.
Yet by the time of that Sotheby’s sale, Hawthorne was a forgotten name to all but a tiny group of enthusiasts who, like Scott, had been seduced by his melancholy, rather surreal views of London suburbs. The artist died in 1954, unremarked apart from family and friends, when he ought have been in his prime as a creative artist. Instead, disheartened by the lack of opportunities to exhibit, he had lost heart in his work.
While researching my book From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group, I was lucky to meet Elwin Hawthorne’s widow, Lilian, then living in Vicarage Lane, East Ham. She had also exhibited with the Group, and provided invaluable memories of the triumphs and disappointments of her late husband’s career. Finally, when Lilian died in 1996, so unregarded was Elwin’s output that rescue work had to be carried out to save several pictures – two of these are among his paintings in my book.
Elwin and Lilian moved into a newly-built block of flats in September 1953, only thirteen months before he died. Since the coal bunker had no shelf, Elwin used one of his fine oil paintings on board “Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd,” shown at Lefevre in 1935. After Elwin died, Lilian rescued it, filling in two screw holes with wood filler and painting over the damage. A canvas entitled “Ilfracombe” was also discovered in the coal bunker, rolled up and flattened like an old rag under a pile of rubbish – this has recently been professionally de-creased and mounted on a panel.
By the time of his death, Hawthorne had become a versatile artist, competent in oils, watercolour and printmaking, though his career as a painter in oils, his main achievement, was concentrated in just fifteen years, 1925-40.
Born in the Bromley sub-district of Poplar in 1905, to a father who was house painter and decorator, his background was not auspicious for what he wanted to do. Elwin, his parents, five brothers and a sister and a basket-maker uncle, Henry Silk ( another member of the East London Group), lived hugger-mugger in a small, crowded two-storey building.
When Elwin left elementary school at fourteen with no qualifications, he became an errand boy. While unemployed he developed an interest in painting which led to classes at the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute and then the Bow & Bromley Evening Institute where the teacher was the inspirational John Cooper who was trained at the Slade School of Art.
Although he originally showed under his correctly spelled surname of “Hawthorn,” when his work was chosen for the 1928 Whitechapel Art Gallery East London Art Club exhibition, the forerunner of the East London Group Lefevre series at in the West End in the nineteen thirties, he was catalogued as “Hawthorne” and urged to retain that spelling.
He became a prolific exhibitor at Lefevre Galleries’ annual exhibitions and elsewhere, and attracted widespread press attention. When the first East London Group show was held late in 1929, R R Tatlock, writing in the Daily Telegraph, devoted three paragraphs of a large review to Hawthorne, praising the subdued palette that would become an abiding characteristic of his work. At the second Lefevre exhibition in 1930, The Times judged Hawthorne, “the most original artist of the group, producing pictures of East London which are the English equivalents – though more matter of fact – of what Utrillo is doing for Paris.” In fact, Hawthorne was compared to Utrillo several times .
In 1930, Lefevre signed a contract with Hawthorne to pay him a modest salary of eight pounds monthly in return for a first-refusal option on his work, with financial adjustments to be made as pictures sold. At this time. Elwin was about two years into a three-year period as assistant to Walter Sickert, who had lectured to Cooper’s Bow classes and exhibited with the East London Group for a short period. Sickert had taken an interest in Hawthorne, who supported the veteran artist on several important works.
Hawthorne was a full-time artist of great professionalism and some of his meticulous work sheets survive, including details such as each painting’s title and size, descriptions of the subjects, prices and whether sold or returned, or – in a few cases – destroyed when they did not fulfil his high standards. In the case of one work, there is the inscription, “Returned to me, now in the possession of Steggles, by exchange.” His fellow in the East London Group, Walter Steggles, thought highly of Elwin, commenting to me, “It is my opinion that Elwin was the best painter of London in the Twentieth Century. I am not alone in this view as a number of important collectors have expressed similar opinions to me.”
Notable collectors of Elwin’s work were abundant. In 1938, as well as Sir David Scott and his Foreign Office colleague Montague Shearman, Hawthorne was able to list among his buyers the “Contemporary Art Society, Earl of Sandwich, Viscount D’Abernon, Earl of Radnor, Earl of Rutland, Sir Edward Marsh, Gerald Kelly RA, J B Priestley, Charles Laughton, James Agate and numerous others.” Today, eight public collections in Britain hold Hawthorne paintings.
After signed the contract with Hawthorne which would continue for most of the nineteen thirties, Lefevre realised they had a star whose pictures were not restricted to the annual East London Group exhibitions. He was included in mixed shows both in Britain and overseas, and was given two Lefevre solo exhibitions.
His first was in 1934, coinciding with one by Vanessa Bell of the Bloomsbury Group, with her work accompanied by a foreword by Virginia Woolf in the catalogue. Hawthorne’s was well received, The Times critic commenting on his “discovery of artistic meaning in the commonplace.” Meanwhile, the Sunday Referee’s writer, who contended that “Mrs. Woolf’s mystical flutings on the theme of her sister’s paintings simply bewilder” yet found Bell’s work, “essentially commonplace.” The critic judged Hawthorne “an outstanding, possibly great artist in the making” and praised his display as “easily the best one-man show in town.”
In 1938, a second solo exhibition followed, but this time in tandem with one by Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore. Leading critics covered it, including T W Earp, Jan Gordon and Eric Newton. Again, Hawthorne’s work was generally favoured, with the critic of The Scotsman – who had liked his first solo show – seeing in his small pictures, “an impression of complete sincerity that is rare and inspiring.”
By this time, Hawthorne’s figure painting was developing yet even in one of his early works from 1929 – the picture of the Bryant & May Match Factory which proved a favoured subject for East London Group artists – the handling of the figures is assured. For his fellow East London Group member Cecil Osborne, the absence of figures in Hawthorne’s work, gave them “a ‘Sunday Morning look” with the sparsely populated streets contributing to their surreal quality. John Cooper was keen that his students visited exhibitions and it is possible that Hawthorne may have viewed the controversial 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, although a surreal atmosphere had already permeated Hawthorne’s work years earlier.
Hawthorne had other preoccupations in 1936. Along with Walter Steggles, he had a painting chosen for the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with a contribution entitled “Una Via Di Londra.” It was a great accomplishment for a former errand boy to have his work shown alongside professional artists such as Sir Alfred Gilbert, Duncan Grant, Dame Barbara Hepworth and Philip Wilson Steer. Also in 1936, The Artist included a lengthy, illustrated profile of him as the twelfth in its “Artists of Note” series, beginning by extending “our special gratitude” to John Cooper, since “it is the East London Group that has given us Elwin Hawthorne”.
Although the final East London Group exhibition at Lefevre was in 1936, the gallery continued to promote individual artists’ works until World War II brought disarray to the art market. The hostilities effectively ended Hawthorne’s exhibiting career. After Army service, for which he was temperamentally unsuited, he returned to Lefevre, but they had nothing for him and suggested he take a job. He handled wages for radio and electronics firm Plessey, teaching art in schools part-time. Then, in 1954, he was taken ill on a bus to Woodberry Down School and died soon after in hospital. Elwin Hawthorne was only forty-nine, and he left a widow and two children – and he created a body of atmospheric paintings that survive to be acknowledged and appreciated now for their distinctive vision.
Cumberland Market, 1931 (Private collection)
Grove Park Rd W4, 1935 (Private collection)
Whipps Cross, 1933 (Gabriel Summers)
The Mitford Castle, 1931 (Private collection)
Bow Rd, 1931
Victoria Memorial Buckingham Palace, 1938 (Private collection)
Demolition of Bow Brewery, 1931 (Private collection)
The Guardian Angels, 1931 (Louise Kosman, Edinburgh
Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd, 1935 (Private collection) – rescued from use as a shelf in a coal bunker.
Ilfracombe, c.1931 (Private collection) – discovered rolled up in the coal bunker.
Walter and Harold Steggles, Lilian and Elwin Hawthorne (right), c.1937 (Walter Steggles Bequest)
You may like to read David Buckman’s feature about the East London Group
From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group by David Buckman 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.
At The Cemetery With Barn The Spoon
Barn the Spoon, the spoon carver, asked me to meet him at Bow Cemetery last week. With characteristic generosity of spirit, he wanted to make me a “special eating spoon” and the purpose of our meeting at the cemetery was to find the necessary bent branch from which to manufacture the spoon.
Within minutes of my arrival on that misty morning, Barn came striding from the undergrowth, clutching an armful of tools, and beckoned me to follow him into the tall trees that have overtaken this vast disused graveyard where countless thousands lie buried. These days, the forest is managed as a nature reserve and necessary thinning of the trees provides a constant source of the green wood that is perfect for Barn’s purpose. In other words, the East Enders of the nineteenth century are coming back to us now as spoons.
“What I am famous for is making straight spoons from straight branches, but what I am best at is making bent spoons from bent branches,” Barn declared when we reached a clearing, casting his eyes around critically at the felled trees, cut down to give light and space for new growth. Then he began rummaging through a pile of logs, tossing each aside in disdain as he searched for the ideal one. “It’s surprisingly difficult to find a bent branch!” he complained with cheerful irony, literally unable to see the wood for the trees.
“The beauty of making a bent spoon from a bent branch is that the grain of the wood runs into the bowl and makes it a lot stronger than a straight spoon from a straight branch,” Barn explained, once he had selected his ideal specimen and lopped off a twelve-inch portion. Squatting down and placing the sycamore branch onto a round block cut from a large tree trunk, Barn used his axe as a chisel, striking the top of it with another stub of a branch to split the log down the grain. “The hours I’ve spent kneeling in mud…” he exclaimed with a chuckle of satisfaction as the bent log split neatly, revealing the gleaming naked wood riven by the parallel lines of the grain.
Employing his sharp axe, Barn began shaping the blank of the bent spoon quickly with intense concentration. This is called “axing out.” “I’m thinking what shape the bowl is going to be and it’s decided by the bend,” he informed me, without taking his eyes off the task in hand. While Barn was absorbed in his work, I stood and looked around at the gravestones surrounding us and the trees ascending all around to the forest canopy above. There was a stillness punctuated solely by the echo of Barn’s axe. “We’ve been lucky with our bits of wood,” he assured me, as we surveyed the line of blanks laid upon a log at the end of the morning.
A couple of days later, I paid a visit to Barn’s shop in the Hackney Rd. Making a bent spoon takes several hours, considerably longer than a straight one, and so I had to wait to see my completed spoon. “It’s a folk tradition because it’s much slower than making a straight spoon, so typically it was made for loved ones rather than just for sale.” Barn admitted as he showed me a picture of an old Welsh spoon that had been his inspiration for the special eating spoon he had made me. I understood that a bent spoon requires a greater degree of skill than a straight one and is a spoon carver’s tour de force.
When I held my spoon up for the first time, I was astonished how light it was. Yet it was as strong as it was delicate, and subtly translucent like the bone of a small animal. Instinctively, I picked it up between my thumb and forefinger, and it sat there naturally. It was quick with its own life.
I was fascinated by the geometry of the planes meeting at the neck, reminiscent of medieval stone vaulting, and by the balance between the flat stem and the curvaceous bowl, all framed with neat sharp edges. I loved the detail of the gleaming knot in the wood, perfectly positioned at the end of the handle, and I was curious by the subtle asymmetry at the end of the bowl. Barn explained that this was because wooden eating spoons always wear on one side through scraping the bottom of the dish and so, over time, spoon makers carved them that way, adopting the shape into the design.
My bent spoon was so modest and yet so fine. It was a perfect piece of work. A quiet masterpiece of spoon carving by Barn the Spoon.
“It’s surprisingly difficult to find a bent branch!”
“The hours I’ve spent kneeling in mud…”
“I’m thinking what shape the bowl is going to be and it’s decided by the bend.”
“That’s going to be a nice one.”
“We’ve been lucky with our bits of wood.”
“I’m working from beneath the bowl which will define how I take off the rest.”
“What I am famous for is making straight spoons from straight branches, but what I am best at is making bent spoons from bent branches.”
Visit Barn the Spoon at 260 Hackney Rd, E2 7SJ. Friday – Tuesday, 10am – 5pm.
You may also like to read my original pen portrait
and these other cemetery stories
Find out more at www.towerhamletscemetery.org
So Long, Marge Hewson
Marge Hewson died yesterday, and today I am republishing my pen portrait of her as tribute to a woman who lived her life on Brick Lane and was loved by generations of pupils at Christ Church School, where she was Nursery Nurse for over forty years.
Marge Hewson, Chicksand House, Spitalfields, 1959
On any school morning in Spitalfields, you may always rely upon spotting Marge Hewson between eight thirty and nine o’clock – traversing the streets from Greatorex St to the Chicksand Estate – trudging around in all weathers, ringing doorbells and collecting up her beloved charges until she has acquired a crocodile of as many as twenty small children, that she ushers safely to Christ Church School in Brick Lane where she has been Nursery Nurse for forty years.
As a consequence, she is one of the most popular people you could ever meet, cherished by generations of local people for whom Marge’s benign presence is an integral part of their childhood landscape. “As big as they are, they’ll still stop me and ask for a hug in the street, even teenagers.” she revealed with a proud blush, as a significant indicator of the outcome of a life lived at the very centre of her community.
“I must admit I have never got away from here, but I am not unhappy with it,” confided Marge upon quiet consideration, when I dropped by to visit her at the school yesterday after four o’ clock, once it had emptied out of pupils and peace reigned. “You can’t really put into words what it was like,” said Marge to me, with characteristically shrewd reserve and a self-effacing smile, before proceeding to evoke her Brick Lane childhood with lyrical ease.
“I was brought up in Flower & Dean St just off Brick Lane – the “Flowerie” we called it. Just a few small shops and tenements, all pulled down now. You knew everybody and everybody knew you, and nobody had any money. You learnt to stand on your own two feet, I think I had a very happy childhood.
Children don’t have freedom now. When I was ten, me and my friend would take a picnic and go to Victoria Park and spend the whole day there. We were often out on the street until ten o’clock at night. There was a policeman on the beat and we used to stand around the lamppost until he came at nine thirty, and he’d say “It’s time you went home.” So we’d stay until he came back on his round again later and then we’d all run home to bed.
We weren’t allowed to go up Brick Lane beyond Princelet St because of the Maltese cafes with prostitutes standing outside. We used to try to bunk into the Mayfair cinema across the road if we could get in the back door. At the bottom of Osborn St was a bomb site called the Chimney Debris where we played, and we went to Woolworths to buy bamboos, and make bows and arrows, and played Robin Hood there. There was no TV, so I went to the library every day. I used to go swimming every day too, at the Goulston St Baths and I balanced my little brother with his bottle where I could see him in the changing rooms, so I could keep an eye on him while I swam lengths. Then we’d buy stale cakes from the bakery on the corner afterwards.
Every Saturday we played Bagatelle, or Newmarket with the four kings, and we had a jar of pennies and my mother would turn them out, and as a family we’d all sit down together. I’d see all the boys come on leave from National Service on Saturday night to visit their girls. They’d all go up Whitechapel Waste to Paul’s Record Shop, where I was too young to go – the boys in their suits and the girls all dressed up. And on Sunday mornings, there was always an escapologist in chains who escaped from a sack on the corner of Wentworth St, it was lovely to go and watch him.”
Christ Church School is a hundred yards from Flower & Dean St where Marge grew up and – while her contemporaries have moved out of the neighbourhood – apart from a foray to the Isle of Dogs, Marge has chosen to live within walking distance of her old territory and she finds it suits her very well. In her time, the East End has transformed through slum clearance and rebuilding, and the movement of peoples in and out of the neighbourhood. And although she would never claim it, Marge through her emotional presence at the school over four decades has become part of the consistent identity of this place as a magnanimous harbour to newcomers, carrying forward the best of the old into the new East End.
“I began here at the school in 1979 before East Pakistan became Bangladesh, there wasn’t too many Bengali children here then but as others left and more arrived it became 100% Bengali. Now I see another change, we have more children of different races, including Colombians and Eastern Europeans which makes it a truly multicultural school. When the Bangladeshis first came there wasn’t much English spoken, they used to turn up at all times of the day and with layers and layers of clothing against the cold.
At first we had only one big classroom and fifty children with just me and one teacher. A lot didn’t speak English and sometimes I would take a child home but the mother wouldn’t answer the door because she didn’t understand the language, so then I’d have to grab a passerby to translate. Conditions were hard for Bengalis, with families living in one room in tenements, and we worked as a team to help with their problems, taking them to hospital or the doctor if they didn’t speak English.”
I realised Marge Hewson was reluctant to talk about all the work she did, because she chooses discretion when speaking of the past disadvantage of those who are her community today. Instead she wanted to confess how much it means to have this role at the school which has given her such profound emotional reward and sense of belonging.
“I came here for six months and I stayed forty years, and there are children here now – I knew their parents when they were little. I like this school, I know all the people and I know this area back to front. I’ve got a lot of affection for the families round here. If I lost my purse, or I needed anything, I could knock on any door and they would help me, I know. I love my life in Brick Lane.”
Chicksand House 1959 – Marge on the right, with Sandra her sister-in-law and Mary her mother-in-law.
Marge at Chicksand House with her first child, 1961.
Marge enjoys a knees up at a wedding in the sixties.
With a class at Christ Church School, 1977.
In the school playground with her husband Philip, a cab driver, in the nineteen seventies.
Marge Hewson, Nursery Nurse
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Chaplin in Spitalfields & Whitechapel
Somehow, it came as no surprise to discover that he had been here – because I always thought of Charlie Chaplin as the one who carried a certain culture of the penniless, the ragged and the downtrodden from Europe across the Atlantic, translating it with such superlative success into an infinite capacity for hope, humour and resourcefulness in America. For centuries, Spitalfields has offered a refuge to the homeless and the dispossessed, so it makes sense that the most famous tramp of all time should have known this place.
Last year, Vivian Betts who grew up in The Primrose in Bishopsgate gave me handful of playbills that had been in the pub as long as she remembered and which she took with her when they left in 1974 before the building was demolished. These bills were for the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in Commercial St. Opening in 1864, this vast two thousand seater theatre with a bar capacity of another thousand must have once presented a dramatic counterpoint to the church on the other side of the Spitalfields Market. Yet in the nineteenth century, it was one among many theatres in the immediate vicinity, in the days when the East End could match the West End for theatre and night life.
The ten-year-old Chaplin performed here as one of The Eight Lancashire Lads, a juvenile clog dance troupe, on Tuesday 24th October 1899 as part of the First Anniversary Benefit Performance, celebrating the reopening of the theatre a year earlier, after a fire that had destroyed it in 1896.
Before he died, Chaplin’s alcoholic father signed up his son at the age of eight, in November 1898, with his friend William Jackson who managed The Eight Lancashire Lads, in return for the boy’s board and lodgings and a payment of half a crown a week to Chaplin’s mother Hannah. The engagement took Chaplin away from his pitiful London childhood and from his mother who had struggled to support him and his elder brother Sydney on her own, existing at the edge of mental illness while moving the family in and out of a succession of rented rooms until her younger son ended up in the workhouse at seven.
“After practising for eight weeks, I was eligible to dance with the troupe. But now that I was past eight years old, I had lost my assurance and confronting the audience for the first time gave me stage fright. I could hardly move my legs. It was weeks before I could do a solo dance as the rest of them did.” Chaplin wrote of joining The Eight Lancashire Lads with whom he made his debut in Babes in the Wood, on Boxing Day 1898 at the Theatre Royal, Manchester.“My memory of this period goes in and out of focus,” he admitted later, “The outstanding impression was of a quagmire of miserable circumstances.”
Yet Chaplin’s experience touring Britain when Music Hall was at its peak of popularity proved both a great adventure and an unparalleled schooling in the method, technique and discipline that every performer requires to hold an audience. “Audiences like The Eight Lancashire Lads because, as Mr Jackson said, we were so unlike theatrical children. It was his boast that we never wore grease paint and our rosy cheeks were natural. If some of us looked a little pale before going on, he would tell us to pinch our cheeks,” Chaplin recalled,“But in London, after working two or three Music Halls a night, we would occasionally forget and look a little weary and bored as we stood on the stage, until we caught sight of Mr Jackson in the wings, grinning emphatically and pointing to his face, which had an electrifying effect of making us break into sparkling grins.”
The handbills that Vivian Betts gave me for the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties date from 1900 and, significantly, one contains the announcement of Edisonograph Animated Pictures as part of the programme, advertising the new medium in which Chaplin was to become pre-eminent and that would eventually eclipse Music Hall itself.
As soon as he had mastered the dance act, Chaplin was impatient to move on to solo comedy. “I was not particularly enamoured with being just a clog dancer in a troupe of eight lads. Like the rest of them I was ambitious to do a single act, not only because it meant more money but because I instinctively felt it would be more gratifying than just dancing,” he wrote later of his precocious ten-year-old self, “I would like to have been a boy comedian – but that would have required nerve, to stand on the stage alone.”
It was in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1907 that the seventeen-year-old Chaplin made his solo comedy debut, at a Music Hall in the Cambridge Heath Rd. “I had obtained a trial week without pay at the Foresters’ Music Hall situated off the Mile End Rd in the centre of the Jewish quarter. My hopes and dreams depended on that trial week,” he declared. Yet the young Chaplin made a spectacular misjudgement. “At the time, Jewish comedians were all the rage in London, so I thought I would hide my youth under whiskers. I invested in musical arrangements for songs and funny dialogue taken from an American joke book, Madison’s Budget.” Chaplin was foolishly unaware that a Jewish satire might not play in the East End in front of a Jewish audience. “Although I was innocent of it, my comedy was most anti-Semitic and my jokes were not only old ones but very poor, like my Jewish accident.”
The disastrous consequences of Chaplin’s error in Whitechapel were to haunt him for the rest of his career. “After the first couple of jokes, the audience started throwing coins and orange peel and stamping their feet and booing. At first, I was not conscious of what was going on. Then the horror of it filtered into my mind. When I came off stage, I went straight to my dressing room, took off my make-up, left the theatre and never returned. I did my best to erase the night’s horror from my mind, but it left an indelible mark on my confidence.” he concluded in hindsight, conceding, “The ghastly experience taught me to see myself in a truer light.”
In 1908, Chaplin signed with Fred Karno’s comedy company in which he quickly became a rising star and, touring to America in 1913, he was talent spotted by the Keystone Film Studios and offered a contract at twenty-four years old for $150 a week. “What had happened? It seemed the world had suddenly changed, had taken me into its fond embrace and adopted me.” he wrote in astonishment and relief at his change of fortune in a life that had previously comprised only struggle.
Now I shall always think of the ten-year-old Chaplin when I walk down Commercial St, on his way to the Cambridge Theatre of Varieties, pinching his sallow cheeks to make a show of good cheer and with his whole life in motion pictures awaiting him.
At the northern end of Commercial St is the site of The Theatre, the first purpose-built theatre, where William Shakespeare performed and his early plays were staged. At the southern end of Commercial St is the site of the Goodman’s Fields Theatre, where David Garrick made his debut in Richard III and initiated the Shakespeare revival. And in middle was the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties, where Charlie Chaplin played. Most that pass down it may be unaware, yet the line of Commercial St traces a major trajectory through our culture.
Charlie Chaplin performed with The Eight Yorkshire Lads at the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in Commercial St on Tuesday 24th October 1899.
The extension of the Godfrey & Phillips cigarette factory replaced the demolished Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in 1936.
The entrance of the Godfrey & Phillips building echoes the entrance of the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties.
Foresters Music Hall, 95 Cambridge Heath Rd – where Charlie Chaplin gave his disastrous first solo comedy performance in 1907 – demolished in 1965.
My grateful thanks to David Robinson, Chaplin’s biographer, for his assistance with this article.
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