John Claridge at the Salvation Army
At Booth House, Whitechapel, 1967
William Booth, an ex-pawnbroker, founded the Salvation Army by preaching in a tent upon Whitechapel Waste in July 1865 and, although his mission has spread around the world since then, the East End remains the heartland of this endeavour which began simply as The East London Christian Mission.
Published today for the first time, John Claridge‘s bold, clear-eyed and compassionate photographs were taken while visiting the Salvation Army at Booth House in the Whitechapel Rd between 1959 and 1982, as the result of his long-term interest in their work among the dispossessed. “As a kid, I remember sitting outside the pub with a cream soda and seeing them coming round selling copies of the War Cry,” John told me, “I think the Salvation Army is an essential part of the East End.”
“The early pictures were taken when I used to go wandering around and talking to the guys on the street, and they told me they were going to the Salvation Army, so I followed them.” he recalled, “The later ones were done by invitation as charity work to raise money, and I wanted to document what they were doing because I think they do a fantastic job. Over twenty years, the facilities were updated but the people didn’t seem to change. I met people from all across the social spectrum who were in need of help, most were East Enders without families who couldn’t take care of themselves.
The Salvation Army offer a welcome to lost souls sleeping rough on the street, and they give people some faith in themselves when everything’s going down the drain. Anyone could end up like that, some who I met were well educated, people like you and me. And, as a photographer, I found that if you showed a little respect, they showed you their pain.”
Yet there is a generous humanity in John’s Salvation Army pictures, recording resilience as much as pain, and emphasising strength of character, self-possession and dignity in faces of East Enders riven by the trials of life.
Waiting for the hostel to open in the morning, 1965.
Entering Victoria Home, 1959.
Waiting for the hostel to open, 1960.
On the way to the hostel, Whitechapel Rd, 1959.
At Victoria Home, 1982.
At Booth House, 1982.
In the canteen at Victoria Home, 1982.
At the childcare centre for working mothers in Hoxton, 1982.
At Victoria Home, 1982.
Recipient of home delivery meals, Whitechapel, 1982. “I went with one of the ladies, taking him lunch, and that’s how I got this picture.”
At Victoria Home, 1982.
At a prayer meeting, Booth House, 1982.
Blind pianist at the Hoxton day centre, 1982
At a prayer meeting, Booth House, 1982.
Resident of Hopetown women’s hostel, 1982
At Hopetown, Old Montague St, 1982
Caretaker at Victoria Home, 1982.
Dormitory at Victoria Home, 1982.
Showers at Victoria Home, 1982
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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Along the Thames with John Claridge
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The Dosshouses of Spitalfields
The Second Coming in Spitalfields
At Pattern Textiles
Nicola McShane & Ruth Ward-Jackson of Pattern Textiles, showing off their design samples.
In a former clothing factory in Bethnal Green, where once machinists sweated sewing endless identical garments for low wages, a group of astute young women have set up their own business designing patterns for textiles and – in just six years – achieved considerable success in a fiercely competitive industry, selling their designs to the big players in the High St and internationally.
After writing so many stories of the long history of textiles in the East End, it was my pleasure to visit Pattern Textiles and realise that I was meeting those who carry the future of this endeavour. Stepping in from the gloomy weather of a disappointing late spring day, and climbing up the second floor, I entered the large studio teeming with life and colour. Here, patterns were being drawn on paper. Here, patterns were being rendered digitally on screens. Here, with superlative efficiency and speed, patterns were emerging from a vast industrial-sized digital printer. And here, patterns were being printed with a traditional silk screen too. A harmonious atmosphere prevailed, as if everyone knew what to do, and they were getting on with it. As if everyone in the team understood their place in the larger pattern.
Yet the greatest wonder came when Nicola McShane, who began Pattern Textiles in partnership with Ruth Jackson-Ward and Stephanie Neal, threw open a huge suitcase crammed with hundreds of pieces of silk chiffon and, like a conjurer’s assistant, began to pull them out with a flourish, one-by-one, for me to see. Each piece was a unique textile design sewn into the shape of the front of a dress, and she held them up to demonstrate how an experienced buyer could envisage each one as a potential garment. When a design is sold to a maufacturer, the customer keeps the sample and it is taken out of the case. Here in this single well-travelled suitcase was the entire stock in trade of Pattern Textiles – florals and geometrics and leopard skin and stripes, and everything else you care to imagine, designs for women of different ages and to suit different needs, at work, at home, and dressing up for occasions. The versatility of the range is crucial to sales, but the common factor here was a vibrant use of colour, and a positive graphic sense of pattern and texture, imbuing all the designs with a sensuous appeal.
“The three of us used to work in another studio – that’s how we met – and we decided we could set up a studio of our own.” explained Ruth. “It was tough. We built up a collection of our own before we went out to sell it.” continued Nicola, “Ruth specialised in embroidery and embellishment, whereas I had worked as a textile designer for four different companies and Stephanie was very skilled at screen-printing. But in fact, we mixed it up and we all did everything. We gathered together people we thought were good and we recruited from friends. That was six years ago. We started in Hackney Wick because the rent was low, and our first studio was a tiny room where we did screenprinting, dying, sewing, embroidery and calling for appointments to sell our designs. And we got a friend to come in really early on as a saleswoman, because we realised that it wasn’t enough just to design.”
These days, Nicola and her partners fly to New York and Los Angeles once a month, they go to Australia every three months, and take regular day trips around Europe to sell their work, as well as visiting the British retailers such as Marks & Spencer and Top Shop that are major clients for their designs. “The buyers know what they want,” Ruth assured me with wry smile, as she illustrated the routine that permits the customer to choose, holding up an armful of samples and letting them drop one-by-one in the manner of Bob Dylan and his cue cards in “Don’t Look Back.”
As quickly as patterns get sold, the case must be filled up again with new ones, and this is the endless task that preoccupies everyone at Pattern Textiles. “The crux of what we do is to keep the collection fresh. So we have to be constantly looking at new ideas.” admitted Ruth.“We look at what’s on the catwalk to understand the trends, and it’s very enjoyable working with all the designers here and seeing what they produce,” said Nicola, extending Ruth’s thought, “but we also go down Brick Lane to the vintage shops for inspiration too.”
Around a dozen women work at Pattern Textiles and – as I spoke with Ruth and Nicola – elsewhere in the room, sales staff were discussing feedback from buyers, while all around us the business of producing more patterns continued. One woman in a bold print dress, working at designing animal skin prints, confessed to me that she never wore patterns until she came to work here, while her neighbour showed me a range of new Ikat designs she had just created, convincing as if they had always existed. In the midst of all this industry and shrewd thinking to conjure the designs that will draw an emotional response, capturing women’s imaginations and selling clothes, I succumbed to the intangible magic of patterns myself. Mostly abstract, this is an subtle art whose practitioners are barely acknowledged, as if patterns came out of nowhere. Yet patterns are omnipresent and memorable, shaping our experience and perceptions of each other, creating the texture of life and lifting our spirits through their universal language of delight.
Nicola McShane
Silkscreening a sample of a pattern onto a t-shirt.
Charlie Nelson, one of the pattern designers at Pattern Textiles, with some Ikat designs she created.
The team at Pattern Textiles show off examples of their handiwork.
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and Spitalfields’ most famous textile designer, Anna Maria Garthwaite, in
Election Scenes by William Hogarth
An Election Entertainment
Telegraph, 30th April. “Police open probe into alleged voter fraud in East London.”
Canvassing for Votes
Independent, 3rd May. “They knock on the door and ask us to give them our ballot papers.”
The Polling
Evening Standard, 2nd May. “Voters forgot how they signed registration forms.”
Chairing the Member
Independent, 3rd May. “Electoral Commission boss fights for job after claims of fraud.”
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The Trade Cards of Old London
Is your purse or wallet like mine, bulging with old trade cards? Do you always take a card from people handing them out in the street, just to be friendly? Do you pick up interesting cards in idle moments, intending to look at them later, and find them months afterwards in your pocket and wonder how they got there? So it has been for over three hundred years in London, since the beginning of the seventeenth century when trade cards began to be produced as the first advertising. Here is a selection of cards you might find, rummaging through a drawer in the eighteenth century.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Along the Thames with John Claridge
In Silvertown, 1964
These atmospheric photographs of the Thames by John Claridge – published here for the first time – offer a poignant vision of the working river that was once a defining element of the East End. Within living memory, the busiest port in the world was here yet today barely a trace of it remains. And John’s pictures, mostly taken when he was a mere kid photographer, capture the last glimmers of the living docks.“My dad’s friends were saying that the docks were going down, so I was aware of that and I just wanted to grab hold of it,” John told me.
“As a child, from my bedroom in Plaistow, I could see the lights of the docks at night and I used to go to sleep listening to the sound of the horns on the Thames whenever there was fog, which was quite often. You could smell the river if the wind was blowing in the right direction. A lot of the men in my family worked down the docks. My father took me down to the dock gate when he worked for the New Zealand Shipping Company – and I used to go out with my camera at weekends, or any spare time I had, to take pictures. I went out to see what was going on, I reacted to what was there and, if I saw something, I photographed it. It was instinctive, I never thought I was documenting. I had a need to take pictures, it was as natural as breathing.”
John’s photographs convey the epic nature of the docks where once thousands worked to unload vast ships bringing cargos from distant continents, a collective endeavour upon a grand scale. Yet these are personal pictures and, for this reason John has included few people, even if their presence is always tangible. “You can put yourself and your emotions into the photograph if there’s nobody in it,” he confided to me, “These pictures were for myself. I was interested in the quality of the light which was magnificent. Because of the bends of the river, you got it coming in all directions and in each place it was different.”
As a youngster, John was able to get everywhere, creeping through side alleys, climbing over walls, even setting out in a tiny inflatable dinghy on the river, but sometimes, he would just walk right in through the main entrance.“I’d go through the dock gate,” he confessed, “It was much more of an innocent time – I should have got a pass, but I’d just say, ‘I’m doing photographs’ and they’d say, ‘On you go.’ As a kid you could get anywhere.” If you observe the shifting point of view in these pictures, you can see that some are taken from the Thames beach, some from John’s dinghy at water level while others are taken looking down from walls and bridges, where he had climbed up.
The majestic image above was taken in the dawn light in Silvertown in 1964, when John climbed onto the dock wall to photograph the huge cargo ship that had just arrived, and waited for the sun to rise before he took his picture. As a consequence, the vessel filling the background looks like a phantom fading in the first light of day. There is an equally fascinating distinction between the foreground and background in the photograph below, also taken over the dock wall in Silvertown in 1964. The ships in the background appear ethereal as if they were a mirage too, about to vanish. In John’s vision, the docks are haunted by their own disappearance, and the incandescent dreamlike ambiance of his pictures – often taken through fog or mist rising from the river – places them in a pictorial tradition of the Thames which includes Whistler and Turner.
Yet beyond their breathtaking quality as photography, John Claridge’s elegiac photographs of the Thames are special because they are taken by one who grew up with the river and knew the culture of the docks intimately. As he admitted to me, speaking of the river and his relationship with it, “It’s not something you discover, it’s always been there – it’s part of you who you are.”
“I climbed over the dock wall to take this picture in New Canning Town. You never expect it to go and then all of a sudden it’s gone.” 1964
Old warehouses in Silvertown, 1982.
Dock wall, Isle of Dogs, 1982.
In Poplar, at the very end of the docks, 1982. “You can see how quiet it is.”
1962, a crane driver takes a break for a fag in Silvertown.
From the river, 1962
Inside the docks in Canning Town, 1968.“As soon as the containers moved down to Tilbury, you saw it winding down.”
Near Stratford, from road bridge with the canal in the foregound, 1960.
Limehouse, 1972.
At water level, Wapping, 1964.
A lighter in Wapping, 1963
Warehouses in Wapping, 1965
In a tributary at Canning Town, 1962
Near St Katherine Dock, 1960. “It was all open then, you could walk around.”
Chemical works near Bow, 1965.
Looking into the dock from a bridge, Silvertown, 1982. “There may have been some manufacturing left but the dockland was dead.”
Winter light downriver, 1982
Near Silvertown, with one of the bridges across the dock in the background, 1966.
A lighter in Wapping, 1961.
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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“Old Bob” Prentice, Waterman & Lighterman
More of Paul Bommer’s Delft Tiles
For those who missed Paul Bommer‘s exhibition in Wilkes St last weekend, it my pleasure to publish more of his faux delft tiles, many of which were inspired by stories here in the pages of Spitafields Life.
At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen.
Meet the market traders of Hare Marsh, off Cheshire St.
Cockney rhyming slang.
The Whitechapel Bell Foundry includes part of the building of the former Artichoke coaching inn.
Barry the Barber does haircuts in Bedell Coram, Andrew Coram’s antique shop in Commercial St.
Daniel Mendoza, the legendary East End boxer.
Richard Humphries, the Gentleman Boxer.
Donald Parsnips, author of Donald Parsnips’ Daily Journal and alter-ego of Adam Dant.
The Duke of Uke, Britain’s only ukulele shop, in Cheshire St.
Bishopsgate follows the line of Ermine St, the Roman road north from the City of London.
Sandra Esqualant, Queen of Spitalfields, landlady of the Golden Heart in Commercial St.
Cockney rhyming slang.
Helmet Row, off Old St, was originally part of the ironmongers’ district.
Angela Flanders, perfumer of Columbia Rd.
The Nags Head in the Hackney Rd, a former coaching inn once frequented by Dick Turpin.
Jeanette Winterson, author of “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit” and “Sexing the Cherry.”
Andrew McCaldon, writer and editor of the popular Dogs of Spitalfields series.
The Phoenix Claw from The Signs of Old London.
Nicholas Culpeper wrote “The Complete Herbal” while living in Red Lion St, Spitalfields.
The Sun in Splendour, symbol of the Bishopsgate Institute, home to archivist Stefan Dickers.
The Jolly Sailor, a former pub in Ratcliffe.
Andy Willoughby, Gardener at Arnold Circus.
This is the full line of “The Snows Have Fled” (Diffugere Nives) by Horace, from which the phrase “Umbra Sumus” upon the sundial in Fournier St comes. It translates as –“We are but dust and shadow.”
Images copyright © Paul Bommer
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