Labour and Wait Field Trip 1 – R. Russell, Brush Makers
Today it is my pleasure to begin a new series in collaboration with Labour and Wait, visiting the manufacturers who make the traditional hardware sold in their shop in Redchurch St. For more than ten years, Labour and Wait have championed small British makers and for this first field trip, it was my delight to visit R.Russell, brush makers.
Robert & Alan Russell, sixth generation brush makers
Take the Metropolitan Line from Liverpool St St Station all the the way to Buckinghamshire and after a ten minute walk through the small market town of Chesham you will arrive at the tiny factory of R.Russell – Brush Makers since 1840 – secreted in a hidden yard. Here you will find brothers Robert & Alan Russell, sixth generation brush makers, working alongside their eight employees making beautiful brushes by hand, the last of their kind in a town once devoted to the trade. Surrounded by beech woods, Chesham had a woodenware industry since the sixteenth century and brush manufacture began two hundred years ago as a means to utilise the offcuts from the making of wooden shovels for use in brewing.
The workshop at R.Russell is on the first floor looking down onto a garden with a tall pollarded tree and an old camellia in flower. Two large battered worktables fill the centre of the room where batches of brushes are lined up in different stages of manufacture. There are stacks of brushes with garish plastic bristles and racks of sweeping brushes with natural brown bristles. Over by the window is Alan’s work bench, overlooking the garden. And it was here that I joined him as he placed the bristles into the former to make a broom, speaking as he worked with breathtaking dexterity, occasionally pausing for thought and gazing out onto the garden below, yet without ceasing from his task.
“My father was Robert, his father was Stanley, before him was Robert, his father was George and then there was Charles. The origins are lost in the mists of time, but we know that in 1840 Charles Russell had a pub by the name of The Plough in Chesham, and he used to make a few brushes at the back of the pub and sold them to the customers. His son George was the first member of the family down in the records as a brush maker.
I’ve been making brushes since I was sixteen and I’ve been here forty years, After you’ve been doing it as long as I’ve been doing it, it’s quite relaxing. I’d much rather be making brushes than sat behind a desk doing office work, your mind goes off wherever you please.
My grandparents lived in the house at the front and the factory was a shed in their back garden. I came down here with my father at the age of six and he showed me how to make brushes. I used to make brushes with the waste off the floor, because the bristles were too valuable to spoil, but if you can make a proper brush with the waste then you really know how to make a brush! By the time I left school, I had a good training in brush making because I worked here every holiday and after school. My father never pushed me or my brother into it, but it was a natural progression because we got on well with Dad. I was made a partner at eighteen and my brother who’s older than me was already a partner.
When I started, we produced mainly paper-hanging brushes and dusting brushes for painters. We sold them to the kings of the market – the paintbrush makers – and they sold them to decorators. But they are all finished now the paintbrushes are made in China, so we lost our trade. We have gone back to how we were before, we make specialist brushes to order. It’s a niche market because there’s so few of us left. We are a handmade specialist brush maker. We are flexible and we have a lot of experience and we can turn our hands to anything. We made a brush for the National Trust recently, based on an original in a sixteenth century painting. It’s much more interesting although we are not making the money we used to make. We peaked just before the turn of the century, when the Chinese started selling their paint brushes here, and we’ve managed our decline since then. But I feel more confident now than for a long time. People are looking for something different and business is looking up. Meanwhile prices are rising in China and the quality is not always there, and people are prepared to pay for a better brush and they’re the people we’re supplying.
I don’t want to do anything else, as long as I can make enough to live on by doing this. I can’t imagine working for someone else, even though we work long hours here. My wife will tell you, I’d rather be here than spend a day at home decorating. I’m a brush maker. On my father’s grave we put “brush maker” not “brush manufacturer” because that’s what he was, a skilled man.”
Next door, in the office where the brothers prefer to spend the minimum amount of time, Robert, the elder brother, showed me the photographs of his forebears who worked here in the same trade before him. He confided that he and his brother never take a holiday at the same time and while one is away they speak on the phone every day.
Both brothers wore identical white short sleeve shirts with black trousers and white aprons, which were – I realised – the uniform of the brush maker, not so different from their predecessors photographed in the 1930s. After six generations, this pair have become as absorbed as anyone could be in this most unusual of occupations, a life devoted to brushes. And I could not resist asking Alan which brush he would be, if he were a brush, because I knew he would have a ready answer.
At once he came back with this reply -“If I was a brush, I’d be a Badger Softener because it’s something that’s looked after. It does something very special. It’s for marbling, to create the soft texture beneath the veins. It just softens the edges. It doesn’t do much ,but you can’t do anything without it. It’s the sort of brush you’d buy once in a lifetime.”
Alan Russell tucks the bristles into the former – “I’d much rather be making brushes than sat behind a desk doing office work, your mind goes off wherever you please.”
Chess Vale Bowling Club, Chesham c.1910 – Old Bob Russell sits second from right in middle row with the watch chain while his son Stanley reclines in front.
Alan Russell uses his “flapper” to level off the bristles.
Robert & Alan’s grandfather Stanley Russell in the 1920s.
Ann Brett brushes out loose bristles. –“It’s nice to see something with the “Made in England” label on it.”
Robert & Alan’s great-grandfather Old Bob Russell in the 1930s.
Alan Russell checks the bristles are in alignment.
Bob & Stan Russell & a fellow brush maker in the 1930s.
Robert & Alan Russell – “people are prepared to pay for a better brush and they’re the people we’re supplying…”
The factory in the 1960s.
My souvenir, a beautiful handmade brush from R.Russell.
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Christopher Brown’s Alphabet of London
Cockney Sparrow
Christopher Brown – the master of the linocut – has created a new Alphabet of London, taking a fresh look at the iconography that characterises our metropolis, yet with one eye upon the venerable precedents too. And it is my pleasure to publish an East London selection of images from the book today. “The pictorial alphabet has always been a great love – it can be anything and everything, ask questions and solve them.” Christopher confessed to me, and his witty, charismatic book of prints will set many puzzling because he has only labelled each one with the first letter of the image depicted. The vibrant contrast of black and white in these splendid cuts recalls the spontaneity of early chapbooks, while the use of flat blocks of colour is reminiscent of the work of the Beggarstaff Brothers in the Edwardian period, and the pervading suave humour is a quality Christopher shares with his former teacher Edward Bawden. Complemented by a memoir of his childhood growing up in London in the sixties, Christopher Brown’s book is a worthy twenty-first century successor to all the gazetteers, panoramas and alphabets of our city that precede it.
Y is for …?
H is for …?
R is for …?
M is for …?
L is for …?
W is for …?
F is for …?
T is for …?
M is for …?
K is for …?
T is for …?
U is for …?
C is for …?
G is for …?
Pictures copyright © Christopher Brown
The Alphabet of London by Christopher Brown published by Merrell is available from all good bookshops
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The London Alphabet
Although this Alphabet of London that I found at the Bishopsgate Institute dates from more than one hundred and fifty years ago, it is remarkable how many of the landmarks illustrated are still with us. The facade of newly-opened “Northern Station” which will be uncovered again after renovations in 2013 – at the terminus we know as King’s Cross – reveals that this alphabet was produced in the eighteen fifties. The Houses of Parliament which were begun in 1840 and took thirty years to complete were still under construction then, and, consequently, Big Ben is represented by an undersized artist’s impression of how it was expected to look. Naturally, I was especially intrigued by – “O’s the market for Oranges, eastward a long way. If you first ask for Houndsditch you won’t take the wrong way.” I wonder what East London market this could refer to?
Pictures courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
A Bun Moment at the St John Hotel
Riccardo Ilbello serves the buns at St John
If you were to make my mistake of going up to the West End to buy a pillowcase and, as a consequence, have the entire grief of the world descend upon you in Oxford St, then I can recommend no better antidote than a trip to the St John Hotel in Leicester Sq where from 3pm each day you can enjoy a bun moment. It was a welcome relief from the madness of the crowds, just taking refuge in the calm of this gleaming white hotel which opened a year ago as the Chinatown outpost of the familiar St John restaurants situated in Smithfield and Spitalfields.
At first, I descended to the kitchen in the basement to meet Therese Gustasfsson, Head Pastry Chef, who carries the mighty responsibility of preparing the buns daily. I discovered her ruthlessly torching a custard tart in preparation for lunch and once it was dispatched, she turned her complete attention to the business of buns. “We worked on them quite a while before we all agreed,” she informed me, referring to the collective process that involved consultations with Fergus Henderson and Justin Piers Gellatly to arrive at an ultimate configuration of buns, served as the St John version of afternoon tea. Each of the three buns has a different filling, offering contrasted yet complimentary flavours ranging from the savoury to the sweet. “We make them every day before lunch and cook them around twelve so they have time to cool down,” Therese explained, “and then we steam bake for nine minutes to order, to make them really soft like Chinese buns.”
As Therese set to work caramelising sugar in a pan and then adding Verona chocolate and cream to make a ganache, she took extra care to darken the caramel first. “Fergus always wants ‘more, more intensity of flavour,'” she confided,“and the dark caramel emphasises the rich bitterness of the chocolate.” Next, as she set about the more routine task of cutting up the proved dough into small pieces and rolling them into perfect round buns, arranged neatly on grease proof paper ready for egg glazing and baking, Therese talked of future plans for breakfast buns including a bap using bacon which they cure themselves. And it was revealed that all the chefs love pork buns from a nearby outlet in Chinatown, an influence readily acknowledged in the conception of the St John buns.
At 3pm, I had the luxury of the quiet upper barroom at the St John Hotel to myself, looking down on the noisy roadworks below through the double glazed panes. Then barman Riccardo Ilbello came striding up with three buns upon a tiered stand, presenting them with a subtle flourish and leaving me to my private pleasure. This was the moment I had been waiting for, and it was my bun moment.
Starting at the top, I reached for the anchovy bun, biting through the pleasantly spongy dough to reach the characteristic salty tang of the anchovy paste. Just one bite and half my bun had gone, giving me pause, lest the fleeting moment vanish before I had fully savoured it, so – leaping ahead – I reached for the second bun which was filled with prunes that had been soaked in Earl Grey for months, providing a fruity contrast to the fishy paste. Returning to the anchovy bun and the taking another bite of the prune bun, I found that two out of my three buns had gone – and, even as I sat enjoying the rich aftertaste, my moment was flying away.
Thankfully Riccardo arrived, like a spirit to still the passage of time, bearing a glass of orangey – a scotch with an essence of Nabilo oranges from Ceylon. It was, he suggested, the perfect complement to the chocolate bun. Yet I decided the give the bun a chance to perform solo first, reaching out and biting into it, and thereby releasing an inordinate amount of the ganache with its deep deep chocolate creaminess and tangy bitter aftertaste of caramel. Now I took a sip of the orangey, which picked up all the flavour of chocolate in my mouth to delicious effect.
And then the moment was over. As evidence, the cake stand was bare and I drank my tea afresh, the lightness of its taste renewed by contrast with what came before. Everyone has their moment, I have been told. But the beauty of the bun moment at St John is that – in exception to the common experience of life – you can go back and enjoy this moment as often as you please.
Therese Gustafsson with her pan of chocolate ganache.
Therese divides up the dough into bun-sized pieces.
After rolling, Therese places the perfectly shaped buns on a baking tray.
The buns are ready for the oven.
Your bun moment awaits.
Anchovy paste bun sprinkled with paprika.
Prune bun with egg glaze.
Chocolate ganache bun sprinkled with chocolate powder.
St John Hotel is on the corner of Lisle St, between Chinatown and Leicester Sq.
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Leon Silver, Nelson St Synagogue
When Leon Silver opened the golden shutter of the ark at the East London Central Synagogue in Nelson St for me, a stash of Torah scrolls were revealed shrouded in ancient velvet with embroidered texts in silver thread gleaming through the gloom, caught by last rays of afternoon sunlight.
Leon told me that no-one any longer knows the origin of all these scrolls, which were acquired as synagogues closed or amalgamated with the departure of Jewish people from the East End since World War II. Many scrolls were brought over in the nineteenth century from all across Eastern Europe, and some are of the eighteenth century or earlier, originating from communities that no longer exist and places that vanished from the map generations ago.
Yet the scrolls are safe in Nelson St under the remarkable stewardship of Leon Silver, President, Senior Warden & Treasurer, who has selflessly devoted himself to keeping this beautiful synagogue open for the small yet devoted congregation – mostly in their eighties and nineties – for whom it fulfils a vital function. An earlier world still glimmers here in this beautiful synagogue that may not have seen a coat of new paint in a while, but is well tended by Leon and kept perfectly clean with freshly hoovered carpet and polished wood by a diligent cleaner of ninety years old.
As the sunlight faded, Leon and I sat at the long table at the back of the lofty synagogue where refreshments are enjoyed after the service, and Leon’s cool grey eyes sparkled as he spoke of this synagogue that means so much to him, and of its place in the lives of his congregation.
“I grew up in the East End, in Albert Gardens, half a mile from here. I first came to the synagogue as a little boy of four years old and I’ve been coming here all my life. Three generations of my family have been involved here, my maternal grandfather was the vice-president and my late uncle’s mother’s brother was the last president, he was still taking sacrament at ninety-five. My father used to come here to every service in the days when it was twice daily. And when I was twenty-nine, I came here to recite the mourner’s prayer after my father died. I remember when it was so crowded on the Sabbath, we had to put benches in front of the bimmah to accommodate everyone, now it is a much smaller congregation but we always get the ten you need to hold a service.
I’m a professional actor, so it gives me plenty of free time. I was asked to be the Honorary Treasurer and told that it entailed no responsibility – which was entirely untrue – and I’ve done it ever since. As people have died or moved away, I have taken on more responsibility. It means a lot to me. There was talk of closing us down or moving to smaller premises, but I’ve fought battles and we are still here. I spend quite a lot of hours at the end of the week. We have refreshments after the service, cake, crisps and whisky. I do the shopping and put out the drinks. The majority here are quite elderly and they are very friendly, everyone gets on well, especially when they have had a few drinks. In the main, they are East Enders. We don’t ask how they come because strictly speaking you shouldn’t ride the bus on the Sabbath. Now, even if young Jewish people wanted to come to return to the East End there are no facilities for them. No kosher butcher or baker, just the kosher counter at Sainsburys.
My father’s family came here at the end of the nineteenth century, and my maternal grandfather Lewis (who I’m named after) came at the outbreak of the First World War. As a resident alien, he had to report to Leman St Police Station every day. He came from part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he came on an Austrian passport, but when my mother came in 1920, she came on a Polish passport. Then in 1940, my grandfather and his brothers were arrested and my grandmother was put in Holloway Prison, before they were all interned on the Isle of Man. Then my uncle joined the British army and was told on his way to the camp that his parents had been released. My grandparents’ families on both sides died in the Holocaust. My mother once tried to write a list of all the names but she gave up after fifty because it was too upsetting. And this story is true for most of the congregation at the synagogue. One man of ninety from Alsace, he won’t talk about it. A lot of them won’t talk about it. These people carry a lot of history and that’s why it’s important for them to come together.
When Jewish people first came here, they took comfort from being with their compatriots who spoke the same style of Yiddish, the same style of pronunciation, the same style of worship. It was their security in a strange new world, a self-help society to help with unemployment and funeral expenses.”
Thanks to Leon, I understood the imperative for this shul to exist as a sacred meeting place for these first generation immigrants – now in their senior years – who share a common need to be among others with comparable experiences. Polite and softly spoken yet resolute in his purpose, Leon Silver is custodian of a synagogue that is a secure home for ancient scrolls and a safe harbour for those whose lives are shaped by their shared histories.
Photographs 2 & 3 © Mike Tsang
Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Mike Tsang is researching the Jewish East End, taking portraits and recording stories. If you would like to participate personally or by suggesting someone contact info@miketsangphotography.com
At the Halal Restaurant
It is just before midday at the Halal Restaurant, the East End’s oldest Indian restaurant, and Mahaboob Narangali braces himself for the daily rush of curry hounds that have been filling his dining room every lunchtime since 1939. On the corner of Alie St and St Mark’s Place, occupying a house at the end of an eighteenth century terrace, the Halal Restaurant has plain canteen-style decor and an unpretentious menu, yet most importantly it has a distinctive personality that is warm and welcoming.
For the City workers who come here between midday and three each day – nipping across the border into the East End – the Halal Restaurant is a place of retreat, and the long-serving staff are equally comfortable at this establishment that opens seven days a week for lunch and dinner but only get busy at lunchtime on weekdays. Stepping in by the modest side door of the Halal Restaurant, it is apparent that the small dining room to your right was the original front room of the old house while the larger room to your left is an extension added more recently. The atmosphere is domestic and peaceful, a haven from the nearby traffic thundering along Aldgate High St and down Leman St.
Even though midday was approaching, Mahaboob was happy to talk to me about his beloved restaurant and I was fascinated to listen, because I realised that what I was hearing was not simply the story of the Halal Restaurant but of the origin of all the curry restaurants for which the East End is celebrated today.
“Usman, my father, started working here in 1969. He came to Britain in the merchant navy and at first he worked in this restaurant, but then he became very friendly with the owner Mr Chandru and soon he was managing all three restaurants they had at that time. The other two were in Collum St in the City and in Ludgate Circus. Mr Chandru was the second owner, before that was Mr Jaffer who started the Halal Restaurant in 1939. Originally, this place was the mess of the hostel for Indian merchant seamen, with rooms up above. They cooked for themselves and then friends came round to eat, and it became a restaurant. At first it was just three kinds of curry – meat, meatball or mince curry. Then Vindaloos came along, that was more spicy – and now we sell more Vindaloos than any other dish. In the early nineties, Tandoori started to come in and that’s still popular.
My father worked hard and was very successful and, in 1981, he bought the restaurant from Mr Chandru. At twenty-one years old, I came to work here. It was just on and off at first because I was studying and my father didn’t want me to join the business, he wanted me to complete my studies and do something else, but I always had my eye on it. I thought, ‘Why should I work for someone else, when I could have this?’ And in 1988, I started running the restaurant. The leases of the other restaurants ran out, but we own the freehold here and I enjoy this work. I’ve only been here twenty-five years while many of our customers having been coming for forty years and one gentleman, Mr Maurice, he has been coming sixty-five years – since 1946! He told me he started coming here when was twelve.”
Intrigued to meet this curry enthusiast of sixty-five years standing, I said my farewells to the Halal Restaurant and walked over from Aldgate to Stepney to find Mr Maurice Courtnell of the Mansell St Garage in Cannon St Row. I discovered him underneath a car and he was a little curious of my mission at first, but once I mentioned the name of the Halal Restaurant he grew eager to speak to me, describing himself proudly as “a true East Ender from Limehouse, born within the sound of Bow Bells.” A little shy to reveal his age by confirming that he had been going to the Halal Restaurant for sixty-five year from the age of twelve, yet Maurice became unreservedly enthusiastic in his praise of this best-loved culinary insitution. “My father and my uncles, we all started going round there just after the Second World War.” he recalled with pleasure, “Without a doubt it is the best restaurant of any kind that I know – the place is A1, beautiful people and lovely food. I remember Mr Jaffer that started it, I remember holding Mahaboob in my arms when he was a new-born baby. Every Christmas we go round there for our Christmas party. It is the only restaurant I recommend, and I’ve fifteen restaurateurs as regular customers at my garage. When Leman St Police Station was open, all the police officers used to be in there. It is always always full.”
Held in the affections of East Enders and City Gents alike, the Halal Restaurant is an important landmark in our culinary history, still busy and still serving the same dishes to an enthusiastic clientele after more than seventy years. Of the renowned Halal Restaurant, it may truly be said, it is the daddy of all the curry restaurants in the East End.
Asab Miah, Head Chef at the Halal Restaurant, has been cooking for forty-two years. Originally at the Clifton Restaurant in Brick Lane, he has been at the Halal Restaurant for the last nineteen years.
Quayum, Moshahid Ali, Ayas Miah, Mahadoob Narangoli, Asab Miah and Sayed.
At 12:01pm, the first City gent of the day arrives for curry at the Halal Restaurant.
Abdul Wahab, Mohammed Muayeed Khan and J.A. Masum.
At 12:02pm, the second City gent of the day arrives for curry at the Halal Restaurant.
Maurice Courtnell, owner of the Mansell St Garage and the Halal Restaurant’s biggest advocate, has been going round for curry for sixty-five years. – “The place is A1, beautiful people and lovely food. I remember Mr Jaffer that started it, I remember holding Mahaboob in my arms when he was a new-born baby.”
Mahaboob Narangoli, owner of the East End’s oldest Indian restaurant.
Dioramas of Spitalfields at The Bell
As soon as Glyn Roberts, landlord of The Bell in Petticoat Lane, wrote to say he had discovered some neglected old models of Spitalfields in the cellar, I hurried over to take a look. Once upon a time, these beautiful dioramas enjoyed pride of place in the barroom but when Glyn bought the pub three years ago they had been consigned to oblivion.
Although hefty and dusty and in need of a little repair, nevertheless these models are skilfully made and full of intriguing detail, and deserve to be seen. And Glyn wishes to give them to a new home, yet he cannot find a museum or public collection that will accept them, so he asked me to pass the word around in case anyone knows of somewhere that can take the Spitalfields dioramas.
I am always curious to learn more of this corner of Spitalfields closest to the City that gives up its history less readily than some other parts, but where the market dates from the twelfth century – much older than that on the northern side of the parish which was not granted its charter until the seventeenth century. The Bell, topped off by a grotesque brick relief of a bell with a human face and newly adorned with panels of six thousand bottle tops made by Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops, has always fascinated me. Once the only pub in Petticoat Lane, it can be dated back to 1842 and may be much earlier since a Black Bell Alley stood upon this site in the eighteenth century.
In the cellar of The Bell, Glyn dragged the dioramas out for me to examine, one by one, starting with the largest. There are four models – three square boxes and one long box, depicting Petticoat Lane Market and The Bell around a hundred years ago. In the market diorama, stalls line up along Middlesex St selling books and rolls of cloth and provisions, while a priest and a policemen lecture a group of children outside the pub. In total, more than thirty individually modelled and painted clay figures are strategically arranged to convey the human drama of the market. By contrast, the square boxes are less panoramic in ambition, one portrays the barroom of The Bell, one the cellar of The Bell and another shows a drayman with his wagon outside the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, with a steam train crossing the railway bridge in the background.
A discreet plate on each diorama reveals the maker as Howard Kerslake’s model studio of Southend, a professional model maker’s pedigree that explains the sophisticated false perspectives and clever details such as the elaborate lamp outside The Bell – and the stuffed fish, the jar of pickled onions and the lettered mirror in the barroom – and the easy accomplishment of ambitious subjects such as the drayman’s cart with two horses in Brick Lane.
So here they are, four Spitalfields dioramas for your delight! Who can give them a home?
Click this picture to enlarge the diorama of Petticoat Lane
At the Truman Brewery Brick Lane, looking north.
The barroom of The Bell
The cellar of The Bell.
Glyn Roberts, landlord of The Bell.
The Bell in the 1930s.
You may like to read these other Petticoat Lane stories
Dennis Anthony’s Photographs of Petticoat Lane
Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
Irene & Ivan Kingsley, Market Traders of Petticoat Lane
and see Robson Cezar’s bottle top pictures on the exterior of The Bell.
