Joseph Markovitch Of Hoxton
Joseph Markovitch
A few years ago, Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Martin Usborne created a beautiful booklet of pictures of his friend Joseph Markovitch entitled I’VE LIVED IN HOXTON FOR EIGHTY-ONE & A HALF YEARS, accompanied by eloquent quotes from Joseph. Celebrating the publication of an expanded and updated hardback edition, now titled I’VE LIVED IN EAST LONDON FOR EIGHTY-FIVE & A HALF YEARS, I am revisiting these excerpts which create a vivid portrait of the remarkable Mr Markovitch.
“We used to have cabinet makers and tailors and music halls. Now we have a big Olympic stadium. I’m not sure about it. There’s a man I know and his son helped build the Olympics. Now the son is redundant. They make people redundant when they don’t want them no more. Once something’s done, it’s done. What’s going to happen after the races are finished?”
“This is where I was born, right by Old St roundabout on January 1st, 1927. In those days it wasn’t called a hospital, it was just called a door number, number four or maybe number three. The place where I was born, it was a charity you see. Things were a bit different back then.”
“When I get trouble with my chest I have to stand still. Last Saturday, a woman come up to me and said “Are you OK?” and I said, “Why?” She said, “Because you are standing still.” I said, “Oh.” She said she comes from Italy and she is Scots-Canadian, and do you know what? She wanted to help me. Then I dropped a twenty pound note on the bus. A foreign man – I think he was Dutch or French – said, “Mate, you’ve dropped a twenty pound note.” English people don’t do that because they have got betting habits. They take your twenty pounds and go and put it on the horses. It’s good to have all sorts of foreigners here.”
“I worked two years as a cabinet maker in Hemsworth St, just off Hoxton Market. But when my sinuses got bad I went to Hackney Rd, putting rivets on luggage cases. For about twenty years I did that job. My foreman was a bastard. I got paid a pittance. He tried to sack me but his father said, “You can’t throw Joe out of the firm, he is too good.” I used to shout at the foreman. The job was alright apart from that. If I was clever, very clever, I mean very very clever, then I would like to have been an accountant. It’s a very good job. If I was less heavy, you know what I’d like to be? My dream job, I’d like to be a ballet dancer. Or maybe a clown. But I know what I definitely do not want to be is a funeral director. What a terrible job! Or what about those people that study the stars? That’s a very good job. I’m interested in the universe. In how things began and what’s out there on other planets and lumps of energy that are millions of miles away. It’s more interesting than rivets. Hey, if a meteor landed in Hoxton Square, you think anyone could survive?”
“If I try to imagine the future. It’s like watching a film. Pavements will move, nurses will be robots and cars will grow wings…
…you’ve just got to wait. There won’t be any cinemas, just computers in people’s homes. They will make photographs that talk. You will look at a picture of me and you will hear, “Hello, I’m Joseph Markovitch.” and then it will be me telling you about things. Imagine that!”
“My mother was a good cook. She made bread pudding. It was the best bread pudding you could have. She was called Janie and I lived with her until she died. I wasn’t going to let her into a home. Your mother is your best friend, you see. If she went to the butcher, even if she went early on a Friday, I left work early so I could go with her to the butcher. Your mother should be your best friend.”
“I like to go to the library on Monday, Tuesday and … Well, I can’t always promise what days I go. I like to read about all the places in the world. I also go to the section on the cinema and I read a book called “The life of the stars.” But I only spend thirty per cent of my time reading. The rest of the time, I like to sit on the sofa and sit quite a long way back so I am almost flat. Did you know that Paul Newman’s father was German-Jewish and that his mother was Hungarian-Catholic? You know Nicholas Cage? He is half-German and half-Italian. What about Joe Pesce? Where are his parents from? I should look it up.”
“A lot of young kids do graffiti around Hoxton. It’s nice. It adds a bit of colour, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never had a girlfriend. I think it’s better that way. I have always had very bad catarrh, so it wasn’t possible. That’s the thing, my health. And I had to look after my mother all my life. Anyway, if I was married, I might be dead by now. I probably would be, if you think about it. I would have been domineered all my life by a girl and that ain’t good for nobody’s health. I’m too old for that now. I would like to have had a girlfriend but it’s OK. You know what? I’ve had a happy life, I never starved. That’s the main thing, it’s been a good life.”
“Some things make me laugh. To see a dog talking makes me laugh. I like to see monkeys throwing coconuts on men’s heads, that’s funny. When you see a man going on a desert island, and he is stranded, the monkeys are always friendly. You think the monkeys are throwing things at your head but really he is throwing the coconuts for you to eat.”
“There’s no point crying about things, is there? People don’t see you when you are sad. Best to keep going, keep walking.”
Photographs copyright © Martin Usborne
Copies of I’VE LIVED IN EAST LONDON FOR EIGHTY-FIVE & A HALF YEARS BY Joseph Markovitch & Martin Usborne are available by clicking here
Be sure to follow Martin’s blog A YEAR TO HELP
Sylvester Mittee, Welterweight Champion
It is my pleasure to publish this interview with Sylvester Mittee that I contributed to BOXERS, Photographs of Boxing in London by Alex Sturrock , a large format colour book recently published by Ally Capellino. A few copies signed by 1976 Montreal Olympic veteran Sylvester Mittee and by 1948 London Olympic veteran Ron Cooper are available by clicking here.
Sylvester Mittee
I shall never forget my visit to Sylvester Mittee, unquestionably one of the most charismatic and generous of interviewees. We met in his multicoloured flat in Hackney where Sylvester keeps his collection of hats that he waterproofs by painting with the excess gloss paint left over from decorating his walls. During the course of our interview I began to go blind due to a migraine, yet Sylvester cured me by pummelling my back as a form of massage. Thanks to Sylvester’s therapy, I was bruised for weeks afterwards but my migraine was dispelled, and I came away with this remarkable interview.
“666 is my birth number, and my mother got scared until a priest told her that 666 is God’s number. I was called “spirit” back then. My mother, she went to the marketplace a few months before I arrived. She told people she could already feel me kicking and they said, “I think it’s the devil you got in there!”
My father was born in 1906, he was a very sober man and he liked to give beatings. He especially liked to beat me and I learnt to take it. He came to Britain from St Lucia in 1961, he’s passed away now. My mother still lives in St Lucia, she was born in 1926, she’s a tough old girl.
1966, 1976 and 1986 were important years for me, and at school nobody got more sixes than I did. Six is the number of truth and love and enlightenment. The only time I believed six was unlucky was when I was ill and life wasn’t happening for me.
I’ve been fighting for my life since I stepped off that banana boat at Southampton in 1962. Does a banana boat sound primitive? Ours had air-conditioning and a swimming pool.
My dad worked his bollocks off, doing everything he could to keep us alive. At first, he had a place in Hackney, then he rented a little run-down one bedroom flat in Bethnal Green, with my parents in one room and eight kids in the other, two girls and six boys. We had to live very close in them days. I came from St Lucia with my mum and dad in 1962 and my four sisters came in 1964 and my remaining four brothers in 1966.
When I came to England racism was bare. The kids in the playground ganged up on me and outnumbered me and they attacked me. Nobody did anything about it, parents, teachers, nobody. There was etiquette in fighting back home, but there was none of that in England. I was taught that you let people get up and you don’t hit people when they are down. But, if somebody hits you, you hit them back – that’s how I was brought up. I had to learn to fight. And I had to be good at it to survive. I had no choice. I fought to live and boxing became my life.
Before I knew how to reason, boxing was a short cut. The demons that you have inside, they control you unless you can think in a philosophical way. Boxing becomes a microcosm of the world when you are exposed to the extreme highs and lows of this life.
The experiences that boxing gave me have allowed me to grow. I’m like a tree and the punches I throw are the leaves I drop, so boxing is like photosynthesis for me. I fulfill my immediate needs, but I can also recognise my greater needs, and it is a chance to grow stronger.
Boxing is an opportunity to profess your philosophy through your actions and discover who you truly are. We are born into a part in life and expected to play our part bravely, and I am playing my part as good as I can. Boxing taught me how to grasp life. But the achievement is not in the winning, the enterprise will only hurt you if you seek perfection. I was European Welterweight Champion, but I say boxing just helped me get my bearings in life.
The boys in the playground who beat me, they were the ones who bought tickets to see me fight and they were cheering me on, supporting me. It gave me heart. I like to think it changed them, made them better people. I am a youth worker now in Hackney, and I also go to old people’s homes to do fitness classes and mobility exercises. Those kids that fought me in the playground and beat me, they live around me still. Now they are grown up and I work with some of their kids, and they come to me and tell me their parents remember me from school.”
Sylvester Mittee, European Welterweight Champion 1985.
Sylvester in his living room.
Sylvester on the cover of Boxing New 1985.
A few copies of BOXERS, PHOTOGRAPHS OF BOXING IN LONDON signed by 1948 London Olympic veteran Ron Cooper and by 1976 Montreal Olympic veteran Sylvester Mittee are available here
Photographs copyright © Alex Sturrock
You may also like to read my interviews with
Ron Cooper, Lightweight Champion Boxer
and
Around East End Pound Shops
Bargain World in Bethnal Green stocks between four to five thousand discount items
If any readers are susceptible to shopping upon impulse, I suggest you avoid Bond St and make the acquaintance of our East End pound shops, where you can indulge your consumerist tendencies freely without emptying your wallet. Thus, seeking the innocent pleasure of browsing in these discount stores, Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I could allow ourselves to be seduced by the magnificent array of things we never knew we wanted, with relative impunity.
– Like the jumbo bags of elastic bands in assorted colours, the back scratchers, the traditional whisks, the modelling balloons, the bamboo canes, the decorative paper plates, the packs of safety pins in different sizes, the tin harmonicas, the carved domino sets, the plastic sewing kits, the USB cables, the gluetraps for flies, not to mention all the everyday stuff, the bins and the brooms and the bowls. Divorced from the order imposed by more conventional shops, in pound stores everything gets jumbled together – toys and kitchen equipment, confetti and tools, stationery and bathroom accessories – and the plenitude of random items conjures a heady fairground atmosphere of gleeful anarchy.
In Whitechapel, next to the tube station, in the handsome building that was once the Working Lads’ Institute with a gymnasium, swimming pool and lecture theatre, we had the honour to visit “Poundbusters, the original Pound Shop” and meet Balbir Singh. Mr Singh was the visionary retailer who first brought pound shops to this country, opening up Poundbusters here fifteen years ago with instant success. Previously, Mr Singh ran the shop as a budget hardware outlet for five years, but on a trip to Chicago he was captivated by the dollar and 99 cents stores he found there, and decided to return and reinvent his business as Britain’s first pound shop. Anyone that loves discount shopping should make the pilgrimage to this temple at 279-281 Whitechapel Rd, which Mr Singh describes affectionately as “the mother of all poundshops.”
Yet Mr Singh confided to me that poundshops may prove to be a short-lived phenomenon. His rent has increased from £20,000 to £60, 000 while he has been in business here and the current 20% rate of VAT means he only receives 80p from every pound spent. Meanwhile goods from China, which is the origin of most of the stock for pound shops, are going up in price. During the boom years, Mr Singh had six stores and now he only has this one. I left him there, a lonely figure, sitting discreetly in the shadows just inside the door and observing the flow of people through his shop.
Remarkably, there is another pound shop almost next door to Poundbusters and in Bethnal Green we found a run of half a dozen pound shops nestling together, allowing enthusiasts like myself to go from one to the next, whiling away time, drawn in by the infinite variety of human ingenuity on display. At first, I could not understand how these shops could possibly operate in competition with each other, but then I concluded that this cluster in Bethnal Green comprises a destination in its own right. The best in the Bethnal Green Rd is undoubtedly Bargain World – for the friendliness of the staff, led by manager Khaled Mostar, and the astonishing range of four to five thousand items on sale. This is one of six shops run by Mr Chopra for the past ten years and the customers here were keen to offer their endorsements, including a doting mother who had magnanimously just bought her son a bumper pack of five hundred water bombs “to keep him out of trouble.”
Poundshops are the successors to the penny arcades of yesteryear and they feed the appetite for budget hardware and trinkets left by the closure of Woolworths. And, such is the nature of their vast ever-changing stock, that I can never walk past one without popping inside on the off-chance of a useful discovery like a bargain harmonica or a new whisk.
Poundbusters, next to Whitechapel tube, the original pound store.
Balbir Singh, the man who brought pound shops to Britain, pictured with his son Avtar.
Nasrun behind the cash register at Poundbusters in Whitechapel.
Tony from E. Pellicci pops on to buy some extra glass tumblers at Bargain World.
Khaled Mostaq at Bargain World, Bethnal Green’s friendliest discount store.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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The Chicken Shops of Spitalfields
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Viscountess Boudica’s Domestic Appliances
Viscountess Boudica and her Berry Magnetic heater from 1940
When Viscountess Boudica invited me over to Bethnal Green to admire her domestic appliances, I was not quite sure what I might discover. Yet my expectations were surpassed by her magnificent array of vintage gadgets, gleaming in the half-light of her tiny ground floor flat, overshadowed by tall trees and sequestered behind discreet net curtains.
Like a high-priestess at a shrine, Viscountess Boudica presides over her treasured relics with gracious authority. These are the devices that freed women from the drudgery of housework in the twentieth century and Boudica tends her sacred collection, keeping each one sparkling clean and using them regularly, for cooking, washing and in all her daily chores – turning even the most ordinary domestic task into a ritual of religious intensity. Within the sepulchral gloom, Boudica’s colourful appliances line her kitchen with the irresistible glowing allure of pinball machines in a lost gaming arcade.
There is an intriguing mystery here, for Boudica is no literal-minded collector, ticking off her finds on a list. Instead, Boudica is on a spiritual quest, and each of her domestic appliances is a trophy leading her towards her ultimate goal – the Tricity 643 Cooker. This is the magic appliance that could transport her back to her own childhood and cure her fear of frying, as Boudica explained when she revealed to me the strange story of how it all began.
“It started with my search for the Tricity 643 Cooker. My mother had one. After she disappeared, my aunt was supposed to take me to school but when she came round one morning to the bungalow to collect me, Suzie her niece – that spoilt brat – she played up and my aunt had to take her out. “Here’s your eggs for breakfast,” my aunt said and she put them on the stove in a pan to cook, “All you’ve got to do is take the eggs from the pan and eat them.” I was only four and a half years old, and the eggs were spitting in the pan, so I had to stand on the blue library chair because the knobs were up high. They were push and turn. I managed to switch them off and move the pan onto the cold ring, but then my chair slipped and I fell onto the cardinal red floor. I had an ache for days. And of course, I always remembered that day and it gave me a fear of frying. So when I was older I thought, “I’ll see if I can buy one and go back to that day.”
I remember going out from the bungalow and walking down the lane to get the bus to the little villagey school a couple of miles away. When I saw my aunt later, little Suzie had a new outfit. My aunt said, “It’s your own fault, but now you’ve learned to switch it off you can make all the cakes up at the farm.” I was not even five years old, yet she said, “If you want to eat you’ll have to learn to cook, or you’ll starve, otherwise have a fag” – and that’s how I began to smoke. After that I started cooking, and my mother had a new man and I got pushed around to another of her boyfriends’ mothers. I used to cry and ask, “Where’s my mummy?” That’s how my life was, being moved from one to another, and I often ran away from home as well. They made me sleep with Greville, the lodger, and one night, when there was a terrible thunderstorm, I went up to my aunt’s side of the house and stood outside her bedroom door, where I heard her say to my mother that no man would want a woman that was a single mum.
For years, I tried to buy a Tricity 643, so I could go back in time to that moment and release myself, but I haven’t been able to because I can’t get the cooker. The dealers always sold me other appliances, they told me, “Buy this and we’ll get you a Tricity 643 next month.” I spent thousands of pounds on appliances without getting what I want, so I thought, “Oh well, I’ll collect them.” I’ve learnt to repair them all as well and, when I was at school, I even made my own working cooker with two rings. I sent away to Tricity to get the knobs.
Modern domestic appliances are rubbish. We are bombarded with foreign appliances when we used to manufacture these things ourselves here in Britain. They were made to last but instead we get these non-environmentally friendly appliances with a disposable life. I have begun to draw my own fantasy appliances now, because I thought it would be nice to have individual cookers instead of the boring mass-produced ones.”
Viscountess Boudica has rewired all her domestic appliances herself. She taught herself to do it, seeking spare parts from specialist suppliers and restoring broken old machines to perfect working order. Her fridge is more than sixty years old and she has cookers that are over eighty years old. When Boudica wants to cook her dinner she is spoilt for choices to suit her mood. All are as good as new and every one has a story to tell.
Proving to be an unlikely source of pleasure, knowledge and inspiration, Boudica’s beloved appliances have transcended the mundane. Today, Viscountess Boudica is proud to keep her secret temple in Bethnal Green to the lost glories of domestic appliances and, even after all this time, she has not given up hope of discovering a Tricity 643.
1960s Belling Classic Cooker
The fabled Tricity 643, drawn from memory – note the control knobs placed out of reach of a child.
1973 Hoover Constellation Vacuum Cleaner in pink
1930s Electric Cooker by E.E.Bond
Prescott Refrigerator, manufactured in Cowley, Oxford, late 1940s
1950s Baby Burco Washer-Boiler
1950s Parnell Tumble Drier
1950s Morphy Richards Iron
Wee Baby Belling Oven, Number 51
Goblin Teasmade 1940
1970s Black & White Valve Television by Ferguson
GEC Magnet Cooker 1930s
Drawings copyright © Viscountess Boudica
Be sure to follow Viscountess Boudica’s blog There’s More To Life Than Heaven & Earth
Read my original profile of Mark Petty, Trendsetter
and take a look at Mark Petty’s Multicoloured Coats,
In Another World With John Claridge
INTO THE NIGHT, E3 1987
“Sometimes, I speak with my mates and they say, ‘We’ve come from another world,'” John Claridge admitted to me in astonishment, recalling his origins in the post-war East End and introducing this latest set of pictures, published here for the first time. To create the series, John has been revisiting his old negatives, printing photographs that he took decades ago and surprising himself by the renewed acquaintance with lost visions of that other world, unseen since the moment the shutter fell. Yet even in his youth, John was drawn to the otherness that existed in his familiar landscape, transformed through his lens into a strange environment of dark brooding beauty – inflected by his passion for surrealism, the writing of Franz Kafka and film noir.
“It’s difficult for me to explain why I am attracted to things.” John confessed, “I was off doing other work, producing commercial photography and making films, but I never stopped taking pictures of the East End. Some of these images have never been printed before, and it’s strange when I see the prints now because I have a good memory of taking them, even though I had forgotten how much I had done.”
Always alert to the dramatic potential of the cityscape, John recognised that the magnificence of a gasometer could be best appreciated when photographed by moonlight – in John’s mind’s eye, every location proposed a scenario of imaginative possibility. The images you see here are those that burned themselves onto his consciousness, stills from his photographic dreaming, and when we look at them we can share his reverie and construct our own fictions. His titles read like the titles of grand narratives, firing the poetic imagination to enter another, dystopian, world where industrial buildings become prisons and monumental landscapes are ravaged by unexplained derelection.
John knew the East End when it was still scarred from the bombing of World War II and then he witnessed the slum clearances, the closure of the docks, the end of manufacturing and the tide of redevelopment that overtook it all. His soulful urban landscapes record decisive moments within decades of epic transformation that altered the appearance of the territory forever. “Some things needed changing, though not all the demolition that happened was necessary,” John informed me. Then, regretful of the loss of that other world yet mindful of the resilience of the psyche, he continued his thought, adding – “but people have a spirit and you can’t break that.”
IT TOLLS FOR THEE, Whitechapel Bell Foundry 1982.
SILVER TOWERS, E16 1982.
DE CHIRICO ARCHES, E16 1982.
IN THE SHADOW, E3 1961.
GRAVEYARD, E16 1975.
WATCHTOWER, Spitalfields 1982. “If you look at from where I was standing, you might expect to see someone trying to escape and a guard firing a machine gun from the watchtower.”
THE HOOK, Whitechapel Bell Foundry 1982.
UNLOADED, E16 1962.
DETOUR, E16 1964.
LABYRINTH, E16 1982.
NO ENTRANCE, E13 1962.
BEYOND THE BRIDGE, E16 1978.
THE WINDOW, E16 1982.
DARK CORNER, E16 1987.
BLIND SPOT, E16 1987.
CAPTIVE CITY, E3 1959.
PIER D, E16 1982.
THE CASTLE, E16 1987 – “It has a mocking face!”
THE LONG WALK, E16 1982.
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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Signs, Posters, Typography & Graphics
Graduation Day At The Circus School
Tim Roberts, Higher Education Courses Director at Circus Space
Most graduates expect to jump through metaphorical hoops when leaving education and seeking employment in the greater world, but at Circus Space in Hoxton those graduating from the three year course in circus arts have to leap between actual pillars of fire. They call it “the passage through into real life” and it is the climax of the annual leavers’ ceremony overseen by Courses Director Tim Roberts, wearing a black academic gown with an outsize pair of clown shoes, sporting a pointy hat with a red curly wig, and brandishing a flaming wand.
Some might question the wisdom of studying circus arts in preference to a more conventional career option, yet when so many of those in top jobs regularly make clowns of themselves while trying to be taken seriously, learning how to be a professional fool becomes a less unorthodox choice. One would hope that making people laugh should become a growth industry in the recession, and certainly Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Martin Usborne and I were eager to cheer on the latest recruits to this essential work, when we joined the audience of family and friends on graduation day.
The gathering took place in the former combustion chamber of the cavernous red brick building that was originally constructed as the Shoreditch Electric Light Station in 1896 but is now Britain’s largest circus school. First and second year students opened the proceedings with performances, making fun of their seniors, offering some exuberant stunts and demonstrating the distinctive nature of circus art which exists somewhere between comedy, dance and gymnastics. Juggling hats, spinning hoops, and assuming a diverse variety of outrageous personas, the self-satirising students disarmed us by their apparent incompetence before delighting us with their breathtaking skills. And, throughout this performance, I sensed a collective elation that escalated to fill the room with high spirits.
Then, as is customary at a graduation ceremony, the final year students paraded in wearing mortar-boards – but here at the circus school the students had made their own comic hats, drawing woops and cheers from the crowd. Once the soon-to-be-graduates were seated, the audience grew hushed as Tim Roberts lit his wand, only to emit a chorus of “whoo” when he ignited the pillars of fire on either side of the hurdle that the graduates would leap between to land upon the mats placed on the other side, cushioning their landing in the real world.
Some took it at a run, some were measured, some went head-first, some went feet-first, some did nose-dives, some did somersaults, some landed on their faces, some landed on their feet. No two were alike, everyone found their own way to enact the rite of passage. Yet as each arrived on the other side and collected their diplomas, all were surprised to discover they were in another place, somewhere as yet unspecified. The magic of the ritual was that the metaphor of the pillars of flame became real. Exultant now, it was time for the students to share congratulations and take souvenir photographs. It was time for communal celebrations at the completion of three years training, counterbalancing the sadness of farewells prior to separation and the dawning of the future.
You might expect that students facing the current world and burdened with debt from their studies might lack confidence or show trepidation, but I saw none. Several Circus Space students even carried off awards from banks for their personal business plans. I found the graduates of 2012 were as excited and filled with brave anticipation as anyone could be. Leaping through flames had only tempered their resolve.
Augustus Dakeris
Lydia Harper
Beren D’Amico
Jean Danel Brousse
Tom Ball
Kate Parry
Paula Quintos
Louis Gift
Gemma Creasey
Tom Ball
Holly Johnstone
Beren D’Amico
Jonathan Finch
Heidi Hickling-Moore
Korri Singh
Tim Roberts
Photographs copyright © Martin Usborne
You may like to take a look at Martin Usborne’s new blog A Year To Help
or read these other circus stories
At the 65th Annual Grimaldi Service
Gary Aspey, Wheel Truer
These pictures are by Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien who will be talking about his work today the crypt of Christ Church Spitalfields at 2pm. Commonplace, his exhibition of photographs runs there until 26th August. Throughout this past week, I have been revisiting stories I have done in collaboration with Colin, accompanied by his photos that span an extraordinary career extending from 1948 until the present day.
Gary shows off his £45 spanner
One Sunday at Gina’s Restaurant, while I was getting a cup of tea after my weekly visit to the fly-pitchers in the Bethnal Green Rd, Gary Aspey sidled up to Colin O’Brien who was with me and asked to have his picture taken. Naturally, Colin was delighted to oblige and while he was snapping, Gary told me his life story, revealing a fiercely independent spirit. A skinny guy, streamlined for speed in his close-fitting clothes – experience has taught Gary to be circumspect yet he has learnt the art of survival, earning his living by repairing bikes and today he freewheels through existence on the Raleigh Carlton he restored himself.
“It’s a skill within a skill,” Gary explained with authorative intent, when I asked about being a wheel truer, and he showed me the cherished set of keys he carries around slung on his little finger, which allow him to adjust the tension of individual spokes with rare skill, thereby restoring the true form to a damaged or twisted wheel. And it was impossible not to appreciate Gary’s chosen identity as integral to his straight-talking manner and open-hearted nature. Being a qualified bicycle repair technician and frame builder, there is little Gary does not know about bikes, and I discovered there is a lot more to it than you might imagine.
“I’ve seen everything in life in this market. One Sunday, a woman got stabbed in front of me and I saved her life by holding her stomach together. They were stealing a bike and she got in the way, they cut her right across. There used to be so many stolen bikes down here, one time. I’ve seen people going round with boltcutters cutting through bike locks in broad daylight. I’ve been stabbed a few times. I’ve been robbed, gangs of three and four come up to you from behind and if you don’t give your money they knife you. I walked through Old St this morning and they were all coming out of the clubs and throwing bottles at each other. It affronts everyone in this country.
I was born in Bermondsey, but we can get by. My mother hit me, my dad hit me, it was the drugs and alcohol. I didn’t get on. When I was seven, I got hit and I thought, “I want a better life,” so I left. I lived with an old lady, Nelly – her husband was a cabbie. I was running through the back of Bermondsey one day, my cheek was swollen with a bruise out to here and I had a black eye. She said, ‘I’ve seen you, I know your dad. Did he do that to you?’ She took me in.
Back in the seventies when I was a child, I cycled up here to the street that was all bicycle dealers. I worked for George in the market and then at his shop, Angel Cycles. My dad used to do bikes, but he was out of it before I met George. His dad had two stalls here before him, one selling bicycle parts and another selling army surplus, that’s how George made his money, and in 1950 he took the shop in St John St. That man taught me everything I know, he showed me how to straighten a wheel using a true key and wheel jib, – and I never looked back. With my true key, I straightened out the buckled front wheel of a bike for a woman and she gave me twelve pounds.
Nowadays I do the repairs for Camden Cycles in the Grays Inn Rd and in the evenings I build frames in my house. You’ve got to be interested in the culture and technicalities of bikes to be a frame restorer. I will strip them down by hand, it takes five to seven hours to remove the paint. Then I build up the layers again and bake it in a special oven. I’m qualified and I do it legally and responsibly, that’s the only way to do it. I’m always so busy. I never stop. When I first worked in the market I never had fourpence, but I didn’t rob anybody, I used my hands and my skills. If you want to get on in this world you’ve got to believe in yourself.
If you look at me very closely, I’m a dabbling boy. I do what’s around. At quarter past five we put the stall out. For me, it’s like a walk in the park. I’ve been married, I’ve been a carer and I’ve adopted a girl of ten.I’m strong at being strong.”
Once Gary had told his story, he was eager to get on his bike, so Colin and I went round the corner to meet George and his assistant, a senior gentleman by the name of “Young George” who goes to buy the tea and sandwiches. George turned out to be a placid gentleman in his seventies who has been coming to the market for over sixty years. With a helpless smile, he confided to me that he had to close his repair shop because he was unable to overcome his habit of undercharging. Recalling how his father put him on the corner of Brick Lane at thirteen years old to sell three tins of boot polish for a tanner, George was amused to admit that this paternal attempt to encourage a commercial instinct failed miserably. Even today, driving up from Kent to sell a few spare parts is primarily a social exercise. A chance for him and Young George to have a day out and catch up with their regular customers that are now old friends.
To a lonely child cycling the city, like Gary, the culture of street cycle repair offered companionship and a means of earning a living too. Over forty years, the velocipede has now come to incarnate a state of being for Gary Aspey. As he put it to me succinctly – “On a bicycle, people have freedom of movement and freedom of mind.”
“It’s a skill within a skill.”
“I was born in Bermondsey, but we can get by”
Gary and his Raleigh Carlton – “On a bicycle, people have freedom of movement and freedom of mind.”
“That man taught me everything I know”
George has been dealing in bicycle spares in the market for sixty years.
George’s assistant, “Young George.”
Photographs © Colin O’Brien
Commonplace, Photographs by Colin O’Brien 1948-2012, runs at the Crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields from today, 28th July until 26th August. Open Tuesdays, Saturdays & Sundays 1-6pm. Colin O’Brien will be talking about his work today, Sunday 29th July, at 2pm.
