Sandy & Candy at This Shop Rocks
Sandy
Candy
Vintage clothes shops come and go on Brick Lane, with one opening as quickly as another closes, so that I can barely keep track of them all. Yet, in the here-today-gone-tomorrow world of recycled fashions, This Shop Rocks distinguishes itself with a more eclectic stock than its competitors. Those who know about these thing have whispered to me that it is the best. In other words, the phrase “This Shop Rocks” upon the facia is no hyperbole.
Anyone that has been inside will recognise Sandy, the hatmaker, famous for his white ponytail and louche repartee, and Candy, queen of vintage, carelessly flaunting her raven locks and razor wit. Sandy & Candy Sanderson preside like royalty from the corner booth in this snazzy emporium of glad rags, running the family business with their son Timothy – the prince in waiting – who regularly hosts sparkling nights in Dalston where customers can swan around in their swanky frocks.
Eager to discover what makes This Shop Rock, I asked Sandy how he came to be here on Brick Lane, which caused him to roll his eyes in droll amusement. ” There are so many considerations,” he informed me in wonder, adopting a quizzical smile and placing a hand upon his chin in dreamy contemplation, as he sought to compose a conscientious answer.
“When our kids grew up and left home, Candy & I bought an old minibus and travelled all over Europe and North Africa. We came back when one of our sons got married and intended to go travelling again, but instead we got sidetracked into opening this shop in Brick Lane. We’re old-fashioned antique dealers, we’ve always bought and sold everybody else’s old tat. Like everybody else, we had to make the school fees. We’ve done a lot of things because we’ve been around a long time.
I was at art school in Taunton when I met Candy in a coffee bar in Weston Super Mare fifty-one years ago. We got married pretty much at once. Just after both of us finished art school, we started a studio pottery and we were very good at throwing pots but no good at flogging them. Then we became weavers and we got thrown out of the Quantocks Weavers’ Guild because we used silk in our weft. So – we were living on the front in Burnham on Sea at the time – we opened up one of the front rooms as a public aquarium, until we got reported to the RSPCA for cruelty to fish and the council closed us down. Just after that we bought a forty five foot yawl, and we left Somerset and moved to Tollesbury in Essex.
Both of us were peace campaigners and we were on the Aldermaston marches. It was a lot of fun. I don’t want to claim the moral high ground – to us, it just seemed sensible. We joined CND and were very active in the Peace Movement. We still retain the same views but we feel there isn’t any point in it now. When you are young you feel you can change things for the better, but once you get rid of one bastard, there is another one waiting to take his or her place. You can’t really win.
I became an art teacher in a brand new comprehensive in Chelmsford, I started dealing in antiques in my spare time. Candy went to Colchester one day and bought a nice old pine cupboard, but she had to buy a lot of things that came with it at the auction. So we put a list in the window of our cottage and we sold the lot. And that inspired us to start, we caught the bug and went to local auctions and bought a whole lot. We opened up an antiques shop in our house, and I gave up teaching and went into the antiques trade.
We moved from there to Suffolk where we bought an old farmhouse with barns and stables and rode about a bit – Candy ran a riding school. When we needed to make money, we started to sell antiques again and I did restoration, but we got excited about paintings. The same thing happened, we bought one we wanted and a lot came with it. So we became art dealers, we dealt from home with exhibitions in the barn and did art fairs. We opened an antiquarian shop in Coggeshall because Candy knows a lot about books. We were second-hand book dealers, and we sold antiquarian maps and early prints.
When our kids grew up, we sold the farm and bought an old Mercedes truck on its last legs and a mahogany horse box. For five or six years, we made our way around Europe. We made a bob or two by drawing people’s homes, cafes, restaurants, and scenic stuff – anything we could try to sell and the public would buy. We were able to keep ourselves doing that, we enjoyed ourselves immensely and we met a lot of hippies. It was the weirdos that made places interesting. We were in Gibraltar at the time of the millennium, and we went as far north as Denmark and as far South as the Sahara.
We decided to come to Brick Lane because it had a reputation for selling vintage things and I make hats so it seemed a logical place to be. Five years ago, we came here and we love it. Sometimes somebody tries something on and their face lights up and it’s sheer pleasure. It’s a natural state of things for young people to do this – put on the clothes of their forebears – at this age I was wearing a lot of stuff from the twenties, and the Edwardians were very fashionable then too. We flog anything from Victorian right through to seventies gear. Candy & Tim do the clothes, and I buy and make hats. Hats are interesting in that it’s an excuse to make a piece of sculpture that someone can wear. I quite enjoy it really.
We are open seven days a week and I do five, but I am here more than I need to be because I get bored quite easily. I must be doing something, not just sitting at home with Candy. She can’t be doing with just sitting either. We’re survivors, that’s what we do, we survive. One of these days we’re going to get back in that truck and set off again…”
Of the many journeys people have travelled to reach Brick Lane, Sandy & Candy’s must be one of the most circuitous. But it explained completely why they are proprietors of the most interesting vintage clothes shop, because along the way they have learnt so much about culture that they thoroughly understand the meaning of their clothes. This is the secret of why This Shop Rocks.
Candy & Sandy at Weston Super Mare in the nineteen sixties.
Candy in Cornwall in the nineteen fifties.
Sandy with his son in the nineteen sixties in Wiltshire.
Candy on the road in Northern Spain in the nineteen nineties.
Candy in Suffolk with a grandchild in the nineteen nineties.
“a snazzy emporium of glad rags”
The men’s department.
Harry Harris, Lighterman
Workers on the Silent Highway
Inspired by my day among the lightermen this week, I sought out these excerpts from the account by Harry Harris entitled Under Oars, Reminiscences of a Thames Lighterman 1894-1909, written in a ledger which was passed on to his son Bob Harris and published by Stepney Books in 1978.
“At the age of thirteen, I was asked, ‘What do you want to be?’ The answer was obvious. Aunt Louie wondered whether Harry boy would like to become a missionary? I said, ‘A lighterman or perhaps go to sea?’ I was then warned of the dangers of these two jobs. The true story was related about a ship-wrecked crew eating the boy. Rather cheekily, she was reminded that missionaries had met the same fate.
Father was then a foreman for W. Pells & Son and had an opportunity of having me with him to get some experience, or perhaps a warning, before the actual apprenticeship. In June, 1894, I saw the opening of Tower Bridge by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, who was aboard the leading vessel. A large number of guests were invited to view the scene from one of Pells’ barges moored below London Bridge, and refreshments were provided. I was the boat boy and busy with the passengers to and fro. Pocket money was scarce in those days for me, but I was not allowed to accept any money or tips. I can still feel the itch in my hand to pick up sixpences and coppers.
On the 14th August, 1894, I was apprenticed to my father. A brother foreman wanted a handy boy, so arrangements were made for me to commence at twelve shillings a week, but after two weeks work – the governor having seen me – he decided that my size of boy was only worth ten shillings. My father was indignant, so he took me into his firm at twelve shillings a week.
The following Winter was the coldest for years, the river becoming unnavigable owing to the ice. Heavy snow having fallen in the London district, the City Council dumped the snow into the river. Every bridge and embankment saw this dumping going on day after day, it quickly froze together forming ice floes. The ice adhered to barges, and many broke adrift and were to be seen floating up or down river. But looking back on that time, the remaining impression is they were light-hearted days. We found fun all the time, hours were long, work was strenuous, yet I cannot remember any dissatisfaction with my sphere in life. Summertime always compensated for Winter.
I must wander from this journey to mention the fog. The river then becomes a black area, if one was suddenly caught. One would never start in a dense fog but, if caught in one, might carry on and be lucky to finish the job. The ears became eyes, and all senses alert to get a bearing, yelling out to anchored craft, ‘Where are you?’ Fog is the worst enemy of river work. Signs of fog can be observed but indications of its clearing other than a breeze are very few.
We young lightermen were rather clannish and somewhat despised the ‘landsman.‘ Our chief topic of conversation was the river or life on the river. This had a language of its own, so I presume that our shore friends were often fed up by attempting to listen to an account of an incident in the day’s work given in the vernacular. You either ‘fetched’ or ‘went by,’ ‘saved tide’ or ‘lost tide.’ Arches were called ‘bridge holes.’ Flood tide work was ‘bound up along,’ ebb the reverse. The point was the ‘pint.’ The Quay man would be bound to ‘K dock,’ or ‘the German,’ or ‘the Batty,’ ‘down the Vic and dock her’ or perhaps ‘Jack’s Hole.’ The creek was always ‘crick.’ Back-slang was often used, cabin becoming ‘nibac’ and so on.
A large number of lightermen went by nicknames, all very apt, either featuring physical or psychological defects or assets, such as Tubby, Podge, Narrow, Rasher, Dabtoe, Winkle-eye, Hoppy, Humpy and Wiggy. Little Biggie was a tiny man of that name. Man Green was the smallest ever. Titty Mummy was about six foot two and big in proportion. Happy Wright, Bosco Dean, Whisper Rivers, Moaner, Doctor Brooks, Mad Brady, Bonsor Corps, Knocker, Knacker, Knicker, Sancho, Pongo, Walloper, Curly, Gingers, Coppers and Snowies. Robinsons were Cockies, Blythes were Nellies, Hopkins and Perkins, Pollys. Mashers, Starchers, Stiffies and Rum and Rags. Fireworks, Redhot, Burn’em, Never Sweat, Dozey, Slowman, Squibs, Gentle Annie, Soft Roe, and Pretty.
‘A full roadun’ was a week’s work including Sunday and nights. A ‘thgin’ (tidgeon) was an easy night. Tarpaulins were ‘cloths,’ extra rope a ‘warp,’ oars ‘paddles’ and a pump was the ‘organ.‘ Tugs were ‘toshers,’ the space aft of the cabin bench was ‘Yarmouth Roads.‘ Anchor the ‘killick.’ If a lighterman had a ‘waxer’ (cheap drink) for a friend, he would be told that ‘there was one behind the pump.’ The dock official whose duties were to enforce charges on craft when incurred was and still is the ‘Bogie Man.’ The ‘ditch’ is the river, ‘fell in the ditch’ is falling overboard. ‘Gutsers,’ ‘sidewinders,’ ‘chimers,’ ‘stern butt’ (always a more vulgar word is used) and ‘glancing blow’ were terms describing blows to craft by collision with other craft.
When reporting damage, a man would often say ‘ just a glancing blow,’ especially if he was responsible. These were viewed suspiciously by the foreman. I worked under a foreman to whom this term was a ‘red rag.’ Lightermen were ever optimistic!”
Harry Harris, Lighterman, photographed in 1947.
Photographs copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
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At Blustons
If you are considering a new gown for Autumn, then you might like to take a hop, skip and a jump over to Blustons in Kentish Town, where Michael Albert will be waiting eagerly to welcome you to the family business founded by his grandparents Samuel & Jane Bluston. Pictured here in the changing room at the rear of his immaculately preserved eau-de-nil store – standing between portraits of the progenitors of this legend in ladies’ clothing – Michael is the proud custodian of the shrine to the Blustons, whose romance blossomed over sewing machines in an East End clothing factory a century ago.
Outside, upon the art deco facade, the heroic name of Blustons is proclaimed to the world in three-dimensional block capitals, flanked by the words “coats” and “gowns,” paying court like flunkeys. A marble checkboarded entrance leads you between gleaming windows filled with a magnificent array of clothing, some on mannequins and some suspended upon lines as if floating like kites on the breeze. You seize the chrome handle and pull, and you are transported into a Shangri-La of green paint and old lino, where the dress styles have remained eternally unchanged. In the fickle and capricious world of fashion, this is the strange magic of Blustons.
Michael Albert and his colleague Barbara Smith run the shop with the effortless aplomb of a vaudeville conjurer and his assistant. You select your desired gown, Barbara lifts it from the rails with a flourish, sweeps aside the curtain of the cubicle with practised ease, and invites you to step inside. Yet, even though I was a perverse customer who had come not to seek a gown but to discover the story of Blustons, Michael was gracious enough to indulge my fancy.
“My grandparents started the store in the nineteen twenties, they had four shops including one on Oxford St and they had four daughters – Minnie, Sophie, Anne and Esther – who were each given a shop to look after, but two weren’t interested, so my mother and her sister had to run them all.
My grandparents were originally sent here from Russia by their parents towards the end of the nineteenth century to get away from the White Russians – Jewish people were restricted in what they could do, banking and commerce were closed to them, so really the only trade open to them was tailoring or being seamstresses. They came to live with relatives in the East End and ended up working on sewing machines in the same workshop, one behind the other – that’s how they met – and they got talking. They discovered they shared an uncle, and because they were closely related, they had to get a special dispensation to get married.
My mother, Minnie, had this shop when she got married and my aunt Sophie ran the shop in Dalston, where they started. My grandfather had a workshop over the shop there and he specialised in tailoring suits for ladies. When I was sixteen, my father had a heart attack and I came here to help my mother while my father was in hospital. I never intended to go into the shop, yet when my father eventually came back, I stayed on and I have been here ever since. It gives me great satisfaction, going out buying goods, displaying them and selling them. I do the entire window display every season, perhaps four times a year. I don’t do it quite as often as I did, I’m getting lazy.
It hasn’t really changed the whole time I have been here. When I started, we sold a lot of bridal gowns and mourning wear. Nowadays we do a lot of separates, blouses and skirts, and twenty years ago we didn’t sell any trousers, whereas now we sell more trousers than skirts. Over time, the age group of our customers has gone up and up. On average, our customers are eighty to one hundred years old. We have people who buy clothes here for for their mothers who are 104 and 105, in two cases. A lot of our older customers moved out to live in new towns such as Basildon and Basingstoke, but they come in when they visit relatives nearby. One woman came from Australia to see us.
We are open five and a half days a week, we close on Thursday and I go down the East End in the afternoon to do a bit of buying. Most of our clothes are made there by suppliers we have always worked with, I try to buy British made where possible. We do get youngsters in for fifties and sixties styles now, they like our shirt-waisted dresses. We sell classic ladies wear.”
And then, to illustrate the cyclical nature of fashion, Michael produced the current edition of Vogue, leafing through with pride to reveal a photo of a model standing in the entrance of Blustons in a Dior suit, not so different from those on sale. Both he and Barbara exchanged smiles, glowing with pleasure at such an authoritative confirmation of their shared belief that the clothing they sell transcends mere trend. And as I knew my story would not be complete without a word from Barbara, I took this opportunity to ask how she came to be there.
“First of all, I came as a cleaner for Albert’s mother, Minnie, when my youngest daughter was ten months old and, once she went to primary school, Minnie asked me to work in the shop – and that was forty-two years ago. She was a darling, a lovely lady. She made such a fuss of my little girl. I used to bring her in a carrying cot and Minnie would keep her quiet while I did the cleaning. It’s always been like a family here, a close-knit family business. At seventy-four, I should be retired but I don’t want to and so I am still here. My husband is retired and he does the house work.”
Something becomes classic when it cannot be improved upon and this is the nature of Blustons’ dress shop. Even though most of the customers are octogenarians and their seniors, the renewed appeal of this clothing for the younger generation is now bringing a whole new clientele. So, as there is no reason to suppose that this cycle should not repeat in perpetuity, I hope Blustons will go on forever – the eternal Blustons of Kentish Town.
Barbara Smith & Michael Albert welcome you to Blustons.
Barbara Smith with one of Blustons’ classic dresses.
Michael Albert – “On average, our customers are eighty to one hundred years old.”
Blustons, 213 Kentish Town Road, London, NW5 2JU. 020 7485 3508
At Bedford House
For twenty years, Bedford House, at the corner of Quaker St and Wheler St, sat empty and rotting. Rain came through holes in the roof and thieves broke in to steal the fixtures from this handsome Grade II listed building, constructed over a century ago with the noble intention to be of service to the people of Spitalfields.
Now a group of brave young people have come along who want to care for the building, they have worked hard to clean it up, repairing the holes in the roof and are opening it for events to serve the local community. Crucially, many are homeless, either students without any financial support or those who earn such low wages they cannot afford the exorbitant rents charged today in the East End. As responsible and educated individuals who find themselves struggling in the current economic crisis, they are appealing to the owner – who has let it sit empty all these years – to permit them to stay as caretakers, bringing life and social purpose to this neglected edifice until the time for redevelopment arrives.
Built on the site of a Quaker meeting house of 1656 from which Quaker St takes its name, Bedford House is a handsome red brick gabled building constructed to a florid English Renaissance design by Rutland Saunders in 1894 to house the Bedford Institute. It was named in honour of Peter Bedford, a Quaker philanthropist and silk weaver of Steward St, Spitalfields, who formed the Society for Lessening the Causes of Juvenile Delinquency. From this building all kinds of charitable work was undertaken to alleviate poverty among the local population and educational courses, lectures and religious meetings were held there. In 1947, the Bedford Institute moved out of Spitalfields as the ambition of their activities spread across the London and today their work continues under the name Quaker Social Action. Meanwhile, Bedford House was converted for industrial use as a warehouse and bottling plant for E.J.Rose & Co Ltd, wholesale suppliers of spirits and wine, until they moved out decades ago leaving this atmospheric building in limbo as the preserve of ghosts and shadows, interrupted only by occasional vandals and ravers.
This Summer – perhaps as a response to the times we live in – some significant events occurred, suggesting a new purpose for Bedford House. Two months ago, a small group of around ten homeless people who call themselves Penge Security (after the last place they lived) came to inhabit the spartan residential quarters on the top floors. Then, three weeks ago, they were joined by a collective of artists from Berlin, calling themselves Masse und Macht, who have been organising small scale cultural events to welcome local people into the building. Yet with the owner – an individual reputed to be among the top ten in the rich list – unwilling to engage or even disclose their identity, and the possibility of a forceful eviction next week, the residents of Bedford House might have reason to feel discouraged, but instead I discovered them enthusiastically writing a proposal which might serve as the basis for an agreement to satisfy all parties.
“It makes common sense and it’s responsible to make use of space that’s neglected,” said Anastasia of Masse und Macht, “We want to work with the history of the space and improve it. We want to keep the history alive, instead of letting it just rot and be torn down.” Octave, another member of Masse und Macht, furthered this notion, “We want to open a cultural centre that is an alternative to gentrified Shoreditch. What we want to do is about imagination, not money. We try to do without much money at all. We want to open a free shop, recycling things we find in the street. We have got lots of things to offer and we want Bedford House to be open to everyone.”
“How does anyone afford to pay for a home?” asked Holly, who works in a local shop and has been living in Bedford House for the last two months, colouring with emotion at her own question. “It’s insane, I don’t know how people survive in London. There’s no extra hours going where I work, and even if I got a better job I couldn’t afford to pay rent.”
We all sat in the main hall of Bedford House, perched on large steel cans, in a room that had been six inches deep in debris two months earlier but now was clean and bright with plants and coloured sculptures. The night before a communal meal had been served with local people as guests and that evening an orchestra was due to give a free concert there.
In another time, these educated, modest young people might have received student grants and rented accommodation they could afford, but in the face of the difficult circumstances they confront – which are not of their making – they have found the moral courage to work collectively and take the brave step of inhabiting an empty building with the barest of facilities. More than this, they are thinking beyond themselves to their responsibility to a wider society too. Well-informed, they told me there are as many as half a million homeless people in our country and as many as seven hundred thousand empty buildings – figures which speak for themselves.
Let me admit, I have nothing but respect for those I met at Bedford House and it will be wrong if they should now find themselves criminalised for their actions, especially as one said to me, “It was a choice between this or the street.” If whoever owns this beautiful building can afford to let it sit empty for twenty years, they could enter into a custodianship agreement with the residents, who deserve the courtesy of being taken seriously. The irony of honest young people with no homes being thrown out of the building named in memory of Peter Bedford, founder of the Society for Lessening the Causes of Juvenile Delinquency is too great to contemplate.
At the entrance, with E.J. Rose & Co Ltd’s sign.
A mural discovered on an upper floor.
A label pasted to the reverse of a cupboard door from the time this was a store for E.J.Rose & Co
The view towards the Bishopsgate Goods Yard.
Bedford House
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Among the Lightermen
At the bottom of Anchor & Hope Lane, you will find the last lighterage company on the upper reaches of the Thames. Begun in 1896 as William Cory & Sons, delivering coal to London and filling the empty barges with rubbish for the return journey, today Cory Environmental is a vast corporate endeavour, compacting the capital’s waste, transporting it downriver by barge and incinerating it at Belvedere in Kent.
These “rough goods,” as the lightermen term them, are now the only commercial cargo transported on the Thames, once the primary thoroughfare of our city. Yet in spite of all the changes on the river, the task of the lighterman has remained essentially unchanged for centuries. Originally, each barge or “lighter” was rowed or punted by one lighterman with a boy to assist, lightening the cargo of merchant ships delivering to the Port of London. In the nineteenth century, the introduction of steam powered tug boats allowed the lighters to be towed in multiples, but the equation of one-lighterman-one-lighter persisted. And when I joined John Dwan – skipper of the tugboat Recovery – for a day, his crew consisted of mate, engineer and two lightermen to go aboard the barges, manoeuvring and leashing them as required.
We set out upriver from Charlton Pier under an overcast sky, with barges of empty containers in tow for delivery to the depots at Walbrook in the City of London, Cringle in Battersea and Wangas in Wandsworth. “It’s a contact sport! You don’t put your hands in your pockets – that’s the first thing you learn,” John declared with relish when the sturdily-built tug lurched and rolled as the barges were shunted around prior to departure, bouncing off the rubber enforced sides of the boat and clanging together with a boom which resonated like thunder. Starting on the river at age fifteen, becoming a skipper at twenty-one, John has held licences as both waterman & lighterman since 1972, like his father Albert, and grandfathers Gosso Williams and Charlie Dwan before him. And going back as far as he knows – for at least four generations – all the men in John’s family worked afloat. “Most of the people you speak to on the Thames will have ancestors who worked on the river.” he promised me.
Once we reached central London, the clouds parted and – apart from occasional passenger boats – we had the expanse of sparkling water to ourselves. Coming under Hungerford Bridge in the small tugboat just above water level, the Wheel loomed over us on the left while Big Ben and the houses of Parliament rose up to the right, seemingly to create a theatrical spectacle for our sole enjoyment, at the centre of the river. “It’s the best way to see London,” said John in understatement, thinking out loud for my benefit.
We were joined by mate John Hughes, John Dwan’s long time accomplice on the river. They were at school together, started out afloat together as pleasure boat skippers at the age of twenty-one, and now both have sons working on the Thames. With a riverine ancestry as long as his partner, John Hughes can talk of his great-grandfather who was in the great docks strike of 1889. “Years ago there were thousands of us lightermen, if we weren’t happy, the docks shut down. We didn’t really worry what we said, but these days we’ve had to tone it down a bit.” he confided to me with a playful grimace. “The older lightermen could navigate their way in the fog by smell, there were three hundred miles of wharf space then and every one smelled differently. I remember, when I was a boy, coming out of Barking Creek once at three or five in the morning and sitting in the back of the boat, when I looked behind me it was daylight while in front of me it was night, pitch black, like the end of the world. When it was cold, the skippers used to give you a tot of gin…”
Thus a pattern was set for the day – of leisurely discourse and wondering at the ever-changing spectacle of the river, punctuated by bouts of intense activity, shunting the barges at each depot. Every barge has tethering posts at either end and on each side, permitting them to be shifted in any direction by a tug boat. Yet such manoeuvres were rarely straightforward, with plenty of work for the lightermen, walking up and down perilously narrow ledges along the sides of the barges with ropes – attaching and reattaching them to different corners of the barge so the tug could pull the vessels in different directions and thereby achieve the desired position.
Dexterity in handling boats is a prerequisite in this job and these men have been doing it their whole lives, coaxing five hundred ton barges to travel in exactly the right direction. London’s Victorian bridges were built for the fifty ton barges of their day which gives John Dwan little margin for error when towing several of his vessels through at once. Although he makes it appear effortless, it was apparent that the consequences of an error would be disastrous. “The industry hasn’t changed, the barges just got bigger!” he quipped.
“We’re river men and we don’t want to go to sea.” John Dwan informed me, speaking for his crew, outlining how the lighterman gets to enjoy life afloat and go home to his family at the end of the day. “The only difference between us and a lorry driver is the road don’t change.” he proposed unconvincingly.
As we returned down the Thames with full containers, I looked up at the city workers crossing bridges. We were within metres yet they did not see me, because we were in separate worlds – and I understood how the life of a lightermen encourages a propensity for independent thought, observing life from the water. We passed Charlton, where set out, and travelled on through the afternoon to the vast complex at Belvedere in Kent, where red cranes like giant spiders lifted the containers from the barges. Even six months ago, London’s waste had been creating landfill at Mucking but now, after incineration, the metal can be recycled and the ashes are used to manufacture breeze blocks, which can return to rebuild the city.
After so many generations, the lightermen feel the loss of all the wharves which once lined the Port of London, leaving nowhere to unload even if someone wanted to return to river transport for freight. River transport should be the ideal way to take lorries off the road and transport commodities into London, but the removal of the infrastructure makes such a move impossible, at present. “We’re sliding into history,” John Hughes told me, shaking his head as we sailed in the lone vessel down the empty river where once was the busiest dock in the world. Yet the lightermen are still here for the foreseeable future, and keeping their hands in, lest the tide should change in their favour.
John Dwan, skipper of the tugboat Recovery
John Dwan & John Hughes – both watermen & lightermen – they were at school together and worked on the Thames over forty years.
William Cory & Sons now known as Cory Environmental, London’s last lighterage company.
Outside the Anchor & Hope
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Emanuel Litvinoff, Writer (1915-2011)
In June, it was my privilege to meet Emanuel Litvinoff, who died peacefully in his sleep last Saturday. As a tribute, I am republishing my piece today – the last interview with one of the major writers to come out of the East End. Read “Journey Through a Small Planet,” and you will always think of Emanuel Litvinoff whenever you walk down Cheshire St.
At ninety-six years old, Emanuel Litvinoff is taking it easy now, enjoying long afternoons of contemplation, gazing out from the tall windows of his tiny flat in a Georgian terrace in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, to the tall plane trees where woodpeckers and crows are to be seen. Yet still he thinks back to the two tenements off Cheshire St where he grew up in the nineteen twenties.
In 1913, Emanuel’s mother and father fled Odessa to escape the pogroms in which thousands of Jews were killed – they travelled steerage and hoped to get to New York but they never made it beyond Spitalfields where Emanuel was born in 1915. When the First World War broke out, Emanuel’s father returned to Russia and never returned, which left Emanuel’s mother to bring up her family alone by taking in sewing. These were the circumstances in which Emanuel grew up, within the confines of his East End Jewish ghetto – “the small planet” as he termed it in his writing – and his beautiful account is full of feeling, remarkable for its emotional candour and lack of sentimentality, tracing the kindness and the cruelties of existence in a series of clear-eye episodes from life of the young writer.
Although Emanuel won a scholarship to study the trade of his choice upon leaving school, he discovered that every one he selected was closed off to him as a Jew, and so he struggled, taking a series of menial jobs through the depression of the nineteen thirties and ended up working in the fur trade, nailing wet fur to boards. “It was tough,” admitted Emanuel. “I was often so hungry that I would hallucinate. We fought every day for our lives.” He remembers queueing for food in Whitechapel, applying to the Jewish Board of Guardians for a pair of boots and sleeping rough. Yet Emanuel was a born writer and in 1942 a slim volume of sombre poems was published, and when, on his first wife, Cherry Marshall’s, encouragement, he submitted a short story to an Evening Standard competition, he won a car. In the post-war literary world, Emanuel counted Dylan Thomas among the fans of his work as his writing took flight in the creation of articles, poems, novels and plays. And, with a strong moral sense enforced by his own experience, Emanuel wrote a poem that challenged T.S. Eliot over the antisemitism expressed in his early work, and even Eliot had to admit, “It’s a good poem.”
All this I knew before I went to visit Emanuel Litvinoff, but when I walked into his room, lined with books and illuminated by floor-to-ceiling windows, where he lives with his second wife Mary McClory, I was touched by the modest presence of the man. Recently Camden Council have withdrawn the support for Emanuel which had been recommended by doctors at University College Hospital after Emanuel received treatment there, leaving Mary to take care of her husband without any assistance. Emanuel’s response is sanguine. “It seems the same as 1931 all over again,” he said, shaking his head in disappointment, “This is a depression caused by financiers and bankers, but it’s the poorest who are paying for it.”
Mary and Emanuel have been together for twenty-seven years and have a twenty-five year old son, Aaron. Now Mary has given up her job as a teacher to care for Emanuel full-time and while he sits perched in his chair wedged between bookshelves, she has created three elaborate balcony gardens for him to look out upon, growing rocket, beetroot, sweetpeas, nasturtiums and California poppies from seed and even potatoes in a pot. A sense of peace borne of mutual trust presides over this couple here in this quiet flat, looking down upon the old square. Mary brought out some original editions of Emanuel’s books which she had been looking at to compile a collection of his poetry and Emanuel was eager to examine these treasured copies, holding the pages right up to his nose and scanning the lines of verse as if for the first time, yet travelling a half-remembered journey in his mind.
Although frail, Emanuel certainly retains his charm and, when he stands, his physical presence, natural authority and stature become apparent too.“After a lapse of time, the past becomes a mythical country,” he wrote in 2008. A sentiment that has specific meaning for Emanuel Litivinoff as one who has travelled such an odyssey, over almost a century, and for whom the distant past of his childhood can be recalled only in fragments now – yet thanks to his extraordinary literary talent, it is a story and a world that exists forever in the pages of his masterpiece of autobiography, “Journey Through a Small Planet.”
Emanuel at his flat in Mecklenburgh Square, June 2011.
Emanuel revisits Brick Lane, 1972.
Emanuel standing on the Pedley St bridge off Cheshire St in 1972.
Emanuel with his brothers Abe and Pinny on 18th December, 1940.
Emanuel is the second from the right in the second row of this picture of class one at Wood Close School in the nineteen twenties.
The earliest photograph of Emanuel with his two brothers.
Emanuel Litvinoff (1915-2011)
New portraits copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Find out more at www.emanuel-litvinoff.com
John Moyr Smith’s Tiles 4
The Barber
At the very beginning of this year, I began to collect John Moyr Smith’s tiles from the eighteen eighties. Captivated by the elegant lyricism of his designs and working with a meagre budget, it has taken nine months to acquire the forty-five tiles I require to line my fireplace, in advance of installing an iron stove to keep me warm during the coming Winter. Where possible, I have bought chipped, cracked, broken or stained tiles – some even rescued from the bottom of the ocean – and, as a result, I now have a spectacular collection. In mint condition, some of these tiles would change hands for hundreds of pounds, yet many of my specimens only cost a few pounds each.
The selection published here illustrates the eclectic range of subjects which inspired John Moyr Smith, all portrayed with wit and vitality. It is a curious mix of the epic and the everyday that reflects my own sense of the volatile nature of existence. There is a barber, a painter, a potter and a tanner from Moyr Smith’s series of artisans, offering a vernacular counterpoint to his apocalyptic Biblical visions of Christ walking on the water, the the wise men arriving from the East, Jacob’s dream at Bethel, the fall of Sodom & Gomorrah and the slaying of Abel – with Tennyson’s Vivien seducing Merlin and Shakespeare’s Lear grieving for the loss of Cordelia, just to skew the phantasmagoric mirage in other strange directions.
Now that I have forty-five of these dramatic vignettes in ceramic form – each one a story, each one a world – I am going to have an interesting time working out the placement of them, like an outrageous coterie of bohemians in a crowded boarding house. But first, preparations are necessary before the tiles can be installed . When my house underwent renovation in the ninety seventies, the hearth was removed and a disproportionate modern fire surround fitted. Jim Howett has already been to take a look at the hole in the wall where I tore out the large fire surround, and he plans to reinstate the hearth for me with a plain marble hearthstone and a modest wooden surround of the scale and proportion which suit the period of the house. Our intention is that, once it is complete, the new fireplace will look as if it was always there.
Once the fireplace is finished, the interior can be lined with five rows of five of my Moyr Smith tiles at the back and five rows of two on either side. Finally, once the cracked and broken specimens are secured safely in place, the iron stove can be fitted. Jim & I hope to complete this before the end of the year, so that you can see the finished result before Christmas. Then I can settle down to write my stories on dark Winter nights, warmed by the glimmering stove in my fireplace lined with a glorious miscellany of stories.
Christ walking on the sea.
The Painter
King Lear, V, III. A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! Lear laments the death of Cordelia.
The Mason.
Jacob’s dream at Bethel.
The Potter.
The Wise Men from the East.
Sodom & Gomorrah destroyed by fire.
The death of Abel.
A Tanner.
Vivien from Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King.” Having seduced Merlin, the duplicitous Vivien imprisons him in a hollow tree with a charm.
Sensing we are now in Autumn, Mr Pussy waits for the hearth to come to life, with tiles and a new stove.
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