Last week, I invited three gracious octogenarian ladies – Mavis Bullwinkle of Spitalfields, Henrietta Keeper of Bethnal Green and Joan Rose of Arnold Circus – along to the Bishopsgate Institute for a chit chat. Although they all lived within a mile of each other in the East End during World War II, they had not met before. Sarah Ainslie took their portraits, and I publish some excerpts of the chat here to give a flavour of what proved to be a lively evening.
Joan Rose – To reach eighty-six years of age and to sit here and look and see everybody smiling, it’s wonderful and I’m feeling very important at the moment. Who am I? I’m just a little girl who was born on the Boundary Street Estate in Shoreditch in 1926 from a family of costermongers, a cockney. One day, I thought “I’m sick and tired of going to Oxford Street and the department stores, I’ll go back to where I was born. I’ll go to the Boundary Estate.” And I strolled down Calvert Avenue and it was very emotional because it was at the top of the avenue that my grandparents – and I’m going back to 1874 – had a business. And I stood and I was trying to visualise my grandparents’ shop, which was a fruiterers and green grocers, when I noticed a little cafe on the right and I went in and met Leila McAlister. She has reopened my grandparents’ grocery shop and, from there, I have met such lovely people and I’ve been made Honorary Patron of the Friends of Arnold Circus.
Mavis Bullwinkle – I’m the youngest one here, I’m eighty in May. I’ve lived in this little area – Spitalfields – all my life, except for when I was evacuated to Aylesbury with the school. We were away for six years – which was very sad, to be away from your mother and your father. All things come to an end and, when I was thirteen, we came back home, which we’d been looking forward to. Every night we used to pray, “Please God, let the war be over tomorrow.” For six years we prayed and one day it was, and of course we had won, so it was marvellous, God had answered. Otherwise, I’ve lived all my life here, I’ve not married – I lived with my parents until they died. When I was a baby, I’m talking about 1932, my mother used to take me, in the afternoon, for a walk down Whitechapel Rd which was very lovely, you’d get the sun down there. It was the most beautiful road, Whitechapel Rd, very wide with trees – and you didn’t used to have so many stalls then. They had very nice shops and right at the top there was this big department store, Wickhams, and it was a lovely place to walk down.
Henrietta Keeper – I was evacuated when I was twelve and I was away for three years and came back to the doodlebugs – when the war was still on. My Dad didn’t think it was safe enough to be in the Anderson shelter – so we went up to an arch in the Bethnal Green Road and underneath it there were bunk beds. My friend, Doris said, “Me Mum’s worried about me, she’s down the tube, because the warning’s gone. Will you come with me down the tube?” So I linked my arm in my Mum’s and said, “No, I love my Mum and I want to stay here,” but she said “Oh come on.” She kept on and on, and I got fed up with it. All of a sudden, I thought, “All right, OK.” I was really going to go with her. I took two steps, and then I went back and put my arm into my Mum’s, and I said, “No, I don’t want to go. You go down there.” Everyone was racing to the tube, the police were all around, the traffic had stopped and big red buses were all lined up the length of the Bethnal Green Rd. So Doris went and there was a tube accident, one hundred and seventy-three people died, they all fell downstairs on top of each other and got suffocated – and I was saved, and I’m so glad I didn’t go.
When I was married, my husband done night work down at Smithfield Meat Market and because I was on my own in the evenings I used to write poetry. I always have to be doing something! I can’t go through life without doing anything. When I was a little girl, I used to hear my dad singing, he had the most beautiful voice and I sang in harmony with him and with my sisters – me, Marie, Kathy –we used to sing like the Andrews Sisters. I joined Tate &Lyle’s factory down at Silvertown as part of the entertainment and I was in their works concert party for thirty years, until everyone else died. We’d go every Tuesday and I’d sing. I’ve sung as far away as Ilford. I loved it, I loved every minute of it. My husband didn’t mind me doing it because they always came and picked us up, took us to the venue and brought us right back to our door, so we was safe. If they hadn’t have done that my husband probably wouldn’t have let me done it. I’m a cockney, always been a cockney but when I sing I don’t sing cockney.
Joan Rose – Everybody sings with an American accent now – do you sing with an English accent?
Henrietta Keeper -I tell you what, I talk really cockney don’t I? I mean you can hear me, but when I sing I sing the Queen’s English. I don’t know where I got it from. I’m eighty-five and I’ve had a lovely life, really.
Mavis Bullwinkle – I can’t tell you, after the war, how much the place changed because so many people moved away. My mother and father were here during the blitz, until he went into the air force. My sister and I, it didn’t cross our minds that they might get killed. We were too young to realise the danger, and my mother would make jokes about it when she came to visit us, so we didn’t dream she could be killed. We lived near Vallance Road in Deal St and the last but one V2 fell on a big block of flats in Vallance Road, Hughes Mansions – it was so close – at seven o’clock in the morning. My mother was filling up her kettle to make a morning cup of tea. All she saw was a flash, there wasn’t a sound, and she found herself surrounded with glass from the window. There’d been this terrible tragedy but she was alright. I really feel I can never complain. If I complain, I have to pull myself up and say, “Look, your mother wasn’t killed.’ But a lot of other people had been killed – and I tell myself, “You’ve got to live your life to make up for them.”
I thank God for regeneration. We prayed for years for somebody to help us because after the war, the sixties and seventies, they were hellish times here. Nobody cared about us, the people who stayed here. They did all this building because there’d been so much bombing – but the housing was only for people with children and once you got married there was no chance of staying in the area, even if your parents, grandparents had all lived there, if you didn’t have any children. And the area lost all these wonderful people who could have been useful. In our block where my parents lived, where my mother had lived since the age of four, we had two bedrooms, we didn’t have a bathroom. But my parents and us two children, both girls, although they’d lived there all their lives, there was no chance of us being re-housed. No chance of ever getting a bathroom. If they’d had a boy and a girl that might’ve been different – but because there were two girls there were just two bedrooms. The new estates were only for larger families, so you had this dead area here in Spitalfields – it was absolutely dead. We eventually got re-housed, when I was nearly fifty and my mother was nearly eighty, because the buildings got pulled down! Before that we had no bathroom.
I worked at the Royal London Hospital for forty years. People say to me, “Oh, you still live there?” and I say, “Why shouldn’t I still live there?” People ask, “Where do you come from? And you say ‘Whitechapel’ and they say ‘Oh, Jack The Ripper!’” My niece lives in Yorkshire and when I go up there, I don’t say “Can you show me the streets where the Yorkshire Ripper killed all those poor women?” I think there’s something peculiar about people who want to see where those women were killed. Here in the East End, we’ve always had a bad name. But you see how beautifully we’re all dressed? We’re real! We’re real Tower Hamlets people! Brought up in Tower Hamlets.
Question from the audience – Can you tell us about your first jobs?
Joan Rose – I worked at De La Rue’s, they used to print money in the City. I only worked there for two days because I didn’t like it, I didn’t even pick up my two days’ pay. My next job was as a machinist on the Bethnal Green Rd, in the building which is now Shoreditch House. I was fourteen and my mother said, “You have to find yourself a job, darling.” So I worked making khaki trousers for the army, but an air raid happened and I ran home because my mother was a very nervous person and I knew she was on her own. That was another week’s wages I never picked up, because I never went back. It was piece work then and at the end of the first week, I’d be lucky if I made eighteen shillings or a pound. Whatever I earned, I’d give it to my mother and she’d give me sixpence to go to the cinema. This was 1940 and – fortunately – my father, who had gone through the First World War, said he couldn’t go through another one, so he took us and we all went to live in Blackpool for ten years. I ended up being a teacher in a college, so I didn’t do too bad.
Mavis Bullwinkle – The Sir John Cass School Foundation used to pay for two girls to go to Pitmans’ College and I was a lucky one. At first, I worked as a shorthand typist in the City for five years but then I worked at the Royal London Hospital in the social work department for forty years. When I went for the interview, they said, “How much are you getting in the City?” I was only twenty-one and I was getting four pounds a week. They said, “Well, you won’t get that here – you’ll get three pounds and ten shillings,” and I had longer hours and worked Saturday mornings. But I was quite happy to do it. That’s the difference between hospitals then and now. Everybody – not just doctors and nurses, even the secretaries and the cleaners – they were all prepared to work for less money in a hospital because they wanted to do something useful. It was a totally different world. I didn’t think twice, it was what I wanted to do.
Henrietta Keeper – I was a machinist for thirty years in ladies’ tailoring. I was on the top machine and I ended up being a sample maker. They got their work, the guvnors, by taking my samples up the Richards Shop in the West End. They’d come back smiling, saying, “We’ve got work! We’ve got work!” Then we were alright for a few weeks. While everyone else was earning fifteen pound, I was earning between twenty-six and thirty pounds. I got my first job on Mare St in a firm making army denims. I’d just come home from evacuation and because I’d been away, I’d become a bit countrified so when they said “What’s your name, love?” I didn’t like saying ‘Henrietta’ – so I said the first name off the top of me head, ‘Joan!’ (to Joan Rose) I’m sorry about that, Joan. And I’ve been ‘Joan’ to me mother-in-law and all me neighbours, they all know me as ‘Joan’. I’ve got a lot of aliases. I’ve got a nickname, I had it when I was a baby. Shall I tell it to you? ‘Minxie!’
(The evening concluded with Henrietta singing an old cockney song that her father taught her.)
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may also like to read my pen portraits
Adam Dant’s Map of the Journey to the Heart of the East End
Click to enlarge
The Museum of London commissioned cartographer extraordinaire Adam Dant to explore the question“Where is the East End today?” And, with characteristic ingenuity, Adam contrived an elaborate ruse, in the form of an epic quest to discover the heart of East London, resulting in the map you see above which records both the details of the journey and its unexpected outcome.
Daniel Langton served as Adam’s scout, making a reconnaissance by asking people on the street for the whereabouts of the heart of the East End and following their directions to the letter, however whimsical or strange. Some of the people “Scout Langton” encountered had never visited the territory before while others had lived here for generations, but all the directions they gave him led inexorably to the same location. Once the heart of the East End had been discovered, Adam designed his map around it, organising the postcodes of East London in a similar fashion to the map of central Paris which is structured around a spiral of the arrondissements in ascending numerical order. Thus his map charts the East End of popular conception and lore rather than the East End of conventional topography.
Those of us who are disappointed to learn that the consensus on the street is that a bin in Westfield Shopping Centre is perceived to be the heart of the East End, let us consider Odysseus. We may recall that while Ithaca was the purpose of his twenty-year voyage, Odysseus understood that Ithaca had given him a wonderful journey in itself. Let us contemplate Adam Dant’s map of the journey to the heart of the East End in the same spirit and take our consolation in the widely-held belief that “travelling is more important than arriving.”
According to Adam Dant’s researches on behalf of the Museum of London, this waste bin in the Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford marks the Heart of the East End.
Map reproduced courtesy of Museum of London
Images copyright © Adam Dant
You may like to take a look at some of Adam Dant’s other maps
Map of the History of Shoreditch
Map of Shoreditch in the Year 3000
Map of Shoreditch as the Globe
Map of the History of Clerkenwell
Click here to buy a copy of The Map of Spitalfields Life drawn by Adam Dant with descriptions by The Gentle Author
Sotez Choudhury, Community Organiser
Twenty-two year old Sotez Choudhury was beaten up and stabbed in the street, yet what shocked him was not being on the receiving end of the violence but the reaction of his contemporaries who said, “Let’s go find him and beat him up,” and the disdain of a man on a bike who cycled right past when Sotez was alone and bleeding and asking for help.
Of the desire for revenge, Sotez says categorically, “I don’t know what the answer is but I know that’s not the answer,” while the indifference of the passerby still still puzzles him. “I don’t know the man who attacked me,” Sotez admits, reflecting on the implacable nature of the incident ,“I was a random person. He was carrying a knife and he started hitting me without saying anything.”
This was an experience that inspired Sotez to think deeply about the kind of society he wishes to live in. It is a question that he confronts daily in his work for Shoreditch Citizens as a Community Organiser in the common interest, assisting people to work collectively to address social problems – in a role similar to that once undertaken by two of his role models and inspirations, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama. But when Sotez told me his story, I realised that his brave passion to work and engage with people to improve the world around him is the result of a collection of personal influences, more profound in their import than this single isolated incident.
“My dad was a political leader in Bangladesh’s war of Independence. In 1952, they were taught they were Pakistanis not Bangladeshis and the official language was Urdu not Bengali. The name Choudhury is common in my country because the word means “landlord.” It stems from when the British appointed certain people to collect rents and wield power as they pleased, as long as they delivered the money. My father grew up under this and he rejected it, he stopped being a civil servant and became involved in the socialist movement, and he received death threats under the conservative government between 1971 and 1991.
In the late eighties, he came to Britain to work. He saw how many of his friends and family had suffered in the political regime in Bangladesh. Yet – on purpose – he kept his Bangladeshi passport because he only intended to stay a few years, but he met and got married to my mum, who had been born here, and he took a job as a journalist on “Deshpatria,” a newspaper based in Brick Lane. Then he fell ill in 1996 and became housebound when I was still quite young, and eventually he couldn’t walk or even speak, but he continued reading. He had done an MA in literature and he liked to read absolutely everything.
My mum’s family had been in this country since the nineteen thirties and they were among the first Bengalis to buy their own property here, in Princelet St, and they sold it in the sixties for four thousand pounds. With the money, my grandfather took the family to Wales to start a new life in Cardiff. My mum and dad, they always had the policy that you should work where you live. They didn’t want to move to Redbridge and work in Tower Hamlets, so I grew up in Kingwood House, Hanbury St, Spitalfields, and none of my family wants to leave this place now, even to return to the land we come from, because we love it too much. The reason I love it is the same reason I hate it, there’s so much I want to change and so much I don’t want to change, and that’s why I will always stay here.
My mother, she’s the matriarch, she’s always kept everything together. She had three full-time jobs while I was growing up, taking care of my dad, bringing us up and going to work each day too. “You can do everything, when everything falls upon you,” she says, meaning – the more you do, the more you can do. Everything ran like clockwork in our house. My mum got up early and took care of my dad before she saw us off to school. Then carers would come to visit him during the day. After school, I would pick up the little ones and when she got back from work, she would tend to the family, cook dinner and check that we had done our homework. She only slept four hours a night, and then she got up and did it again. This went on for more than five years, until my dad passed away when I was in my mid-teens. She’s always been there to help me and she helps other family members, and her job is helping people out, she’s a therapist counsellor at Mile End Hospital. She used to say to me, “You always worry about things you are not supposed to worry about.”
At school, I was told I had learning difficulties, and they took me out of my class and moved me down two sets. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I was told they had put me down to help the others. I was confident of my ability, so I set myself a target that I’d get into the top group because what they did looked much more interesting. I did get labelled as a boffin but I did achieve it, because I have always loved learning. Secondary school bored me because I was more interested in all the things my dad was reading about – the history of ancient civilisations, Egypt and Greece. It fired my imagination. I suppose because we were responsible for my dad, I never had much of the conventional childhood things, like kicking a ball around – though I wouldn’t change it. Now I’m older, it’s very enjoyable to discuss, but when I was younger no-one was interested in the same things as me.
When I was sixteen, I went to college in North London rather Tower Hamlets because I wanted to go somewhere different with a different mix of people. I thought it would be really good if I didn’t stay in my comfort zone. At this time, my father passed away and I wasn’t permitted to sit my exams, so I didn’t get into university but ended up doing Social Sciences at Westminster studying Psychology. At that time I was volunteering and I did a placement at the Financial Standards Authority. At eighteen, I realised it was not for me, so I got involved in youth charities instead.
After my degree, I had planned to apply to LSE to study Politics but I wanted to do something practical, and I heard of a Masters in Community Organising and part of it was a five month placement as a Community Organiser. So I learnt about the long history of community organisation in the East End and then I undertook the placement. This way you don’t study to be an organiser, you learn to be an organiser by doing it. The programme is about giving power to communities to change things in the interests of the community. By doing the placement, I learnt this is what I wanted to do and, after six months, I was given the job of community organiser for Shoreditch. It’s an area with one the highest crime rates, 43% child poverty and 40% unemployment. I did a listening campaign, including both churches and mosques, to find common interests. We are looking at large problems like crime and prostitution, but also at smaller issues such as solving damp in housing blocks.
My job is not to do the campaign but to be developing and supporting people to achieve what they want to achieve. A lot of people see you as an expert, but you’re not there with an agenda, the job is not to be a leader but to develop leaders. I didn’t know I was going to be doing this when I was twenty – I have discovered that it is politics that interests me, but definitely politics with a small “p.”
“My family in 1996 – my father Showkat H. Chowdhury and my mother Rowshanara B. Chowdhury with me at the front, Soroubh, the baby, and Shayok, my younger brother.”
Sotez Choudhury
A Big Send-Off For Charlie Burns
Every seat in St Matthew’s Bethnal Green was filled by East Enders who had come to give Charlie Burns a big send-off, while overhead, the clouds gathered in equally dark attire as the coffin of the grand old man was carried into the church. Born as one of thirteen children in Butler’s Buildings off Brick Lane, Charlie was carried from the house at one day old to escape a bomb dropped by a Zeppelin in 1915. And between these two events – the carrying-in and the carrying-out – he was a living presence in Bacon St for ninety-six years.
The exceptional nature of Charlie’s longevity was indicative of the strength of the life force in one who at the age of six was put in a halter by his father, to pull a barrow as they went around the City collecting waste paper. Yet the halter never held him back, it served to steel Charlie’s determination to make his way in life. “We went broke, but we still carried on because it was what we did.” he confided to me once, speaking of the grind he endured to make a success of the waste paper business started by his grandfather John Burns in Bacon St in 1864.
Through perseverance, Charlie came out of the poverty and the struggle of the Dickensian East End to achieve glamorous success and universal respect as the patriarch of the Burns family, celebrated for their endeavours in boxing. “All of the notorious people used to come to our shows at the York Hall. We had the Kray brothers and Judy Garland and Liberace. I remember the first time I met Tom Mix, the famous cowboy from the silent films. We met all the top people because this was the place to be. I had a private audience with the Pope and he gave me a gold medal because of all the work we did for charity.” Charlie told me, “We were young people and we were business people and we had money to burn.”
In spite of Charlie’s declaration that money was his religion, the man had a quality that transcended the material and, as we all stood in silence in the church, brought together by our connection to this remarkable figure, his presence was tangible. His children were there, his grandchildren were there and his great-grandchildren were there. His employees and customers were there, his neighbours and relations were there, his boxers were there, his friends were there and maybe his enemies were there too. The audacity of Charlie’s ripe age filled us all with humility and encouraged modest reflection on how we had spent our meagre years. By living so long, Charlie became the last representative of a distant world and through the depth of his perspective in time, recalling his parents and grandparents, he was our living link to the nineteenth century.
At the culmination of the short service, the heavens opened and the dark clouds let their tears fall in a heavy shower upon St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, as Charlie Burns’ coffin was carried from the church into the waiting hearse from W. English & Sons. “Goodbye Charlie!” called one of a cluster of women lingering outside in the rain, speaking in a plaintive tone as if she expected to be heard by him. The congregation reached the church door and stood there prevented from leaving by the shower, waiting and looking ahead to where Charlie had gone before. They paused and gazed skyward and frowned and recognised the solidarity of the bereaved, isolated together in the moment of loss.
Soon enough, the rain eased off, tempered by April sunshine and the crowd surged forward in collective relief, greeting each other and appreciating the brief conviviality of the moment before they climbed into the cars decked with elaborate wreaths, spelling out “CHARLIE” and “GRANDAD.” Then the procession set off as the clouds broke up to reveal the sky, and the cortege entered Bacon St with the priest and the mourner walking in front. They passed the building where Charlie grew up. They crossed Brick Lane, and they came into the part of Bacon St where C.E. Burns & Sons is located.
Here, where for years and years, he sat every day in the car, observing all those coming and going from his premises, Charlie had taken possession of the place. The hearse with Charlie’s coffin slowed down at the spot where he used to sit at the kerb each day, where recently a street artist painted his portrait upon the wall. For a moment it seemed as if the hearse might park – in strange re-enactment of the daily ritual – allowing Charlie to occupy the position in death that he had occupied in life. But then the hearse pulled away, leading the line of cars onwards to the City of London Cemetery where Charlie was to be interred alongside his wife Sarah. And finally, after ninety-six years, Charlie Burns left Bacon St forever.
Carol Burns
After ninety-six years, Charlie Burns’ farewell to Bacon St as he is driven through in the hearse.
Apple blossom in Bacon St.
You may also like to read my portrait of Charlie
Colin O’Brien’s Kids on the Street
Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien has been photographing children playing on the street since 1948 when, at eight years old, he snapped his pals in the markets of Hatton Garden and the bombsites of Clerkenwell that served as their playground. And now Colin has searched back through his archives, documenting the changing patterns of juvenile street life over more than sixty years, to create this exuberant selection of images for a new exhibition at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green.
For Colin in his childhood – as for many others – the bombed-out ruins of London proved the largest adventure playground in the world and the streets of the city and its markets offered as much drama, distraction and delight that any child could wish for. These pictures show how children once inhabited the city and made it their own, exploring and discovering the world that they would inherit, learning to respect it dangers and savour its pleasures. Colin was especially fascinated by the age-old pastimes such as hopscotch and skipping games, and the ingenuity that children displayed in making their own amusement, turning any space into a playground.
Little did Colin know he was photographing the end of a certain street culture, as the age in which children could run freely passed away, and the television and then the computer encouraged them indoors. In the current climate of anxiety over perceived threats, today’s children have lost the freedom of previous generations and consequently are denied the opportunity to become streetwise at an early age. Yet Colin’s superlative photographs exist to remind us that the city belongs to children, as much as to everyone else, and removing their right to the streets sacrifices an important part of the urban experience of childhood.
Colin’s photograph of his pals, taken in 1948 at the age of eight in Hatton Garden.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
Playing In or Out? the exhibition featuring Colin O’Brien’s photographs runs at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green until November 4th 2012.
Take a look at more pictures by Colin O’Brien
Travellers’ Children in London Fields
Henrietta Keeper’s Collection
Henrietta Keeper, Singer
Henrietta Keeper (widely known as “Joan”), the vivacious octogenarian ballad singer who commonly performs at E.Pellicci in the Bethnal Green Rd on Fridays, invited me to round to her tiny flat yesterday to show me her remarkable collection of photographs and meet her daughter Lesley who is custodian of the family album. And it is my pleasure to publish some favourites here today.
These pictures show Henrietta’s life as it existed within a small corner of the East End on the boundary of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green in the nineteen fifties. On one side of Vallance Rd was Cranberry St where Henrietta’s mother-in-law Selina lived and took care of her daughters while the family waited for a house of their own. On the other side of Vallance Rd was Selby St where Henrietta’s husband Joe and his brother Jim ran Keeper & Co, making coal deliveries. And at the end of Vallance Rd was New Rd where Henrietta worked as a machinist at Bartman & Co making coats and jackets.
Having grown up in Bethnal Green during the war and brought her own family up though the austerity that followed, Henrietta is a woman of indefatigable spirit. Most remarkable of all, she sang throughout these years, winning innumerable singing competitions and giving free concerts – and she is still singing today.
Henrietta with fellow machinist Izzie. “When I was nineteen I started here and I became the top machinist,” she explained, “I think my hair looks a bit like Barbara Windsor’s in this picture.”
Henrietta with Mr Bartman at Bartman & Co.
“This is Selina Keeper, my mother-in-law at her house in Cranberry St. She was real Victorian lady. She used to whip the cup of tea off the table before you had finished it!” said Henrietta. And Lesley added, “She had a best front room that she kept under lock and key, and only once – when she unlocked it – did I go in, but she said ‘Get out!’ You couldn’t touch anything. It had to be kept perfect.”
“My husband Joe took this picture of his two best friends George Bastick and Leslie Herbert in Nelson Gardens next to St Peter’s Church, Bethnal Green. What a pity he isn’t in it?”
Coronation Day, 1953, celebrated at Hemming St, Bethnal Green. Lesley is in the blazer on the right hand side of the front row and Henrietta can be distinguished by her blonde hair beneath the Union Jack, peering round the lady in front of her.
“This is Jim Keeper, my brother-in-law, with his horse Trigger. My husband, Joe, worked with him and he had the biggest coal round in the East End – Keeper & Co. Joe was so strong he could carry a two hundredweight sack of coal on his back up the stairs of the buildings with ease. The brothers used to go home to lunch with their mum in Cranberry St and take Trigger with them. She always collected the horse manure for her roses while they were there and when the Queen Mother visited the East End, she leaned over the fence and said ‘This one should win best garden.'”
“Taken in 1947 at Southend, when I was twenty, this is Cathy Tyler, my sister Marie and me – I was known as Minxie at the time and we all sang together like the Andrews sisters. I was a bit shocked when I saw it because you can see I am pregnant. I thought, ‘Is that me?'”
Henrietta (far right) photographed with her workmates by a street photographer around Brick Lane during a lunch break in the fifties.
This is Henrietta’s daughter Lesley visiting Petticoat Lane with her grandfather James Keeper in 1953. “He was a delivery man with a horse and cart, they called it a ‘carman,'” Henrietta remembered, “he was also a cabinet-maker and he brought me beautiful polished wooden boxes that he made.”
Henrietta and her husband Joe with their daughter Lesley on a trip to Columbia Rd.
The two children on the right are Lesley and Linda Keeper playing at Cowboys and Indians with their friends in the nineteen fifties in Cranberry St while they lived with their grandmother. Lesley remembers Mrs Dexter across the road who called out “Play nicely on the debris!” to the children and you can see the bomb site where they played in the back of the photograph. Today Cranberry St no longer exists, just the stub of road beside Rinkoff’s bakery in Vallance Rd indicates where it once was.
Henrietta singing at a Holiday Camp at Selsey Bill in the nineteen sixties.
Henrietta singing at Pelliccis last week.
Henrietta Keeper, also known as “Joan”
You may like to read my original portrait
Dick Turpin, Highwayman
Dick Turpin upon Black Bess
There is a story that Dick Turpin was apprenticed as a butcher in Whitechapel, and – whatever the truth of it – he returned consistently to this area of East London, and there are further stories connecting him to the Red Lion in Whitechapel and the Nag’s Head in the Hackney Rd. Yet as one who led an elusive transitory criminal existence and who achieved fame only after his death, the actuality of Dick Turpin’s life remains uncertain, overshadowed by the vivid fictions that were contrived later.
Richard Bayes, landlord of the Green Man in Leytonstone, was author of one of the earliest accounts, published in 1739 shortly after Turpin’s execution in York.“He was placed apprentice to a Butcher in White-chaple, where he served his Time, he was frequently guilty of Misdemeanours, and behaved in a loose disorderly Manner…” wrote Bayes, emphasising the authenticity of his narrative by taking a role himself. After a horse theft near Waltham Forest in 1736, Bayes tracked the stolen animal to the Red Lion Inn in Whitechapel and attempted to retrieve it from Turpin’s accomplice Tom King when Turpin himself appeared in Red Lion St, a thoroughfare later subsumed into Commercial St.
“Turpin, who was waiting not far off on Horſeback, hearing a Skirmiſh came up, when King cried out, Dick, ſhoot him, or we are taken by G—d; at which Inſtant Turpin fir’d his Piſtol, and it miſt Mr. Bayes, and ſhot King in two Places, who cried out, Dick, you have kill’d me; which Turpin hearing, he rode away as hard as he could. King fell at the Shot, though he liv’d a Week after, and gave Turpin the Character of a Coward…”
Yet it was primarily due to Harrison Ainsworth and his illustrator George Cruikshank in the novel “Rookwood” of 1834 that the story of the butcher-turned-brutal-petty-thief from Essex was transformed into the myth of Dick Turpin – the swashbuckling highwayman who stole from the rich and gave to the poor while charming the ladies with his valour and flamboyant style. A century after Turpin’s death, highway robbery ceased to be a threat in this country, permitting the possibility of a romantic fiction upon the subject. In constructing the myth we recognise today, Ainsworth invented the notion of the death-defying ride to York upon Black Bess to establish an alibi. He ignored the banal fact that Turpin had been operating in Yorkshire for over a year before he was arrested under the name of John Palmer for shooting a “tame fowl,” and his true identity discovered after his arrest only when a letter he signed was recognised in the mail.
Born in Essex in 1705, Richard Turpin set up his own butchery business in Waltham and when trade was slow, he took to poaching venison in Epping Forest and became drawn into robbery as a member of the Gregory Brother’ Essex Gang – one of many criminal gangs that existed on the margins of large cities when times were hard and law enforcement ineffectual. Far from being the “gentleman” as that Ainsworth characterised him, Turpin was capable of savage violence to achieve his desired ends, which this account from Read’s Weekly Journal of February 1735 reveals – “On Saturday night last, about seven o’clock, five rogues entered the house of the Widow Shelley at Loughton in Essex, having pistols &c. and threatened to murder the old lady, if she would not tell them where her money lay, which she obstinately refusing for some time, they threatened to lay her across the fire, if she did not instantly tell them, which she would not do. But her son being in the room, and threatened to be murdered, cried out, he would tell them, if they would not murder his mother, and did, whereupon they went upstairs, and took near £100, a silver tankard, and other plate, and all manner of household goods.”
After the killing of Tom King, Turpin took refuge in Epping Forest where he shot one of the Forest-Keepers who tried to capture him, and the offer of a reward for his arrest for murder published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in June 1737 gives the only contemporary description – “Turpin was born at Thackſted in Eſſex, is about Thirty, by Trade a Butcher, about five Feet nine Inches high, brown Complexion, very much mark’d with the Small Pox, his Cheek-bones broad, his Face thinner towards the Bottom, his Viſage ſhort, pretty upright, and broad about the Shoulders.”
This account of the pock-marked broad-shoulder butcher does not quite match the devilishly handsome highwayman of popular lore, yet Turpin is recorded as meeting his death with remarkable courage. Sir George Cooke, Sheriff of Yorkshire, recalled that, “he behav’d himself with amazing assurance” at the execution and “bow’d to the spectators as he passed.” When it came to the moment and his head was in the noose,“he threw himself off the ladder and expired directly.” As the life of Dick Turpin ended, the legend of Dick Turpin was born.
Dick Turpin’s accomplice Tom King – shot in Commercial St.
Rescue of Lady Rookwood by Dick Turpin.
Dick Turpin & Tom King in the Arbour at Kiburn.
Dick Turpin’s flight through Edmonton.
Dick Turpin leaps the Hornsey Gate.
“I’ll let ’em see what I think of ’em!”
The death of Black Bess at the end of the ride to York.
Cover of a pamphlet published in York after Turpin’s execution.
Plates from “The Life of Richard Turpin” by Richard Bayes.
Title page of the life of Dick Turpin written by Richard Bayes, landlord of the Green Man in Leytonstone.
The opening page of Richard Bayes’account, placing Turpin as an apprentice butcher in Whitechapel.
Richard Bayes’ account of his skirmish with Dick Turpin at the Red Lion in Whitechapel.
The former Nag’s Head opposite Hackney City Farm in the Hackney Rd. Dick Turpin was reputed to frequent an earlier coaching inn known as The Nag’s Head upon this site.
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