The Manhole Covers of Spitalfields
Ever since I wrote about sculptor Keith Bowler’s Roundels, describing how he set new manhole covers into the pavements of Spitalfields with motifs to commemorate all the people, cultures and trades that have passed through, I have been noticing the old ones that inspired him in the first place. This one from the eighteen eighties in Fournier St is undoubtably the most snazzy in the neighbourhood with its dynamic sunburst and catherine wheel spiral. So much wit and grace applied to the design of a modest coalhole cover, it redefines the notion of utilitarian design. In Bath, Bristol, Brighton and Edinburgh, I have seen whole streets where each house has a different design of coalhole cover, like mismatched buttons on a long overcoat, but in Spitalfields they are sparser and you have to look further to find them.
There is a second example of this Clark, Hunt & Co sunburst, that I like so much, in Redchurch St, just a hundred yards from the former showrooms at 159/60 Shoreditch High St of this company who called themselves the Middlesex Iron Works – founded in 1838, proud contractors to the H.M. War Office, the Admiralty and London County Council. And like many local ironworks, gone long ago, but outlived by their sturdy cast iron products. Alfred Solomons of 195 Caledonian Rd is another name I found here in Spitalfields on a couple of manhole covers, with some rather fetching, almost orientalist, nineteenth century flourishes. I discovered that the Jewish Chronicle reported the birth of a son to Alfred’s wife Celia on 18th December 1894 at the Caledonian Rd address, so these plates commemorate them personally now.
Meanwhile Hayward Brothers of 187 & 189 Union St, Borough, are the most ubiquitous of the named manufacturers with their handsome iron artefacts in the pavements of our neighbourhood. They were founded by William & Edward Hayward, glaziers who had been trading since 1783 when they bought Robert Henley’s ironmongery business in 1838. As glaziers they brought a whole new progressive mentality to the humble production of coalhole covers, patenting the addition of prisms that admitted light to the cellar below. You can see one of their “semi-prismatic pavement lights” illustrated below, in Calvert Avenue. Such was the success of this company that by 1921 they opened a factory in Enfield, and even invented the “crete-o-lux” concrete system which was used to repave Regent St, but they ceased trading in the nineteen seventies when smokeless zones were introduced in London and coal fires ceased. Regrettably, Spitalfields cannot boast a coalhole by the most celebrated nineteenth century manufacturer, by virtue of their name, A.Smellie of Westminster. The nearest example is in Elizabeth St, Victoria, where I shall have to make a pilgrimage to see it.
Unfailingly, my fascination with the city is deepened by the discovery of new details like these, harbouring human stories waiting to be uncovered by the curious. Even neglected and trodden beneath a million feet, by virtue of being in the street, these ingenious covers remind us of their long dead makers’ names more effectively than any tombstone in a churchyard. There was rain blowing in the wind yesterday but when the sun came out afterwards, the beautiful old iron covers shone brightly like medals – for those who had the eyes to see them – emblazoned upon the streets of Spitalfields.
In Old Broad St.
In Fournier St, a nineteenth century coalhole cover by Alfred Solomons, 195 Caledonian Rd – I am reliable informed there are similar covers in Doughty St and around Bloomsbury.
A more minimal variant on the same design by Alfred Solomons.
Hayward Brothers’ “Patent Self-Locking Semi-Prismatic Pavement Light” in Calvert Avenue.
A more recent example of Hayward Brothers’ self -locking plate.
In Gunthorpe St, this drain cover commemorates Stepney Borough Council created in 1900 and abolished in 1965.
At the Rectory in Fournier St, this early plate by Hayward Brothers of 187 & 189 Union St, Borough, which is also to be found in Lower Richmond Rd.
Another by Haywood Brothers in Spitalfields – although unlabelled, it follows the design of the plate above.
Bullseye in Chance St
In Commercial St, at the junction with Elder St, is this worn plate is made by Griffith of Farringdon Rd, Clerkenwell.
In Middlesex St. LCC – London County Council was abolished in 1965. Can it be only co-incidental that this old manhole cover in Petticoat Lane Market, in the former Jewish quarter, has a star of David at the centre?
Maurice Franklin, Wood Turner
If you were to rise before dawn and walk down the empty Hackney Rd past the dark shopfronts in the early morning, you would very likely see a mysterious glow emanating from the workshop at the rear of number forty-five where spindles for staircases are made. If you were to stop and press your face against the glass, peering further into the depths of the gloom, you would see a shower of wood chips flying magically into the air, illuminated by a single light, and falling like snow into the shadowy interior of the workshop where wood turner Maurice Franklin, who was born upstairs above the shop in 1920, has been working at his lathe since 1933 when he began his apprenticeship.
In the days when Maurice started out, Shoreditch was the centre of the furniture industry and every premises there was devoted to the trade. But it has all gone long ago – except for Maurice who has carried on regardless, working at his lathe. Now at ninety-one years old, being in semi-retirement, Maurice comes in a few days each week, driving down from North Finchley in the early hours to work from four or five, until eight or nine in the morning, whenever he fancies exercising his remarkable talent at wood turning.
Make no mistake, Maurice is a virtuoso. When rooms at Windsor Castle burnt out a few years ago, the Queen asked Maurice to make a new set of spindles for her staircase and invited him to tea to thank him for it too. “Did you grow up in the East End?” she enquired politely, and when Maurice nodded in modest confirmation of this, she extended her sympathy to him. “That must have been hard?” she responded with a empathetic smile, although with characteristic frankness Maurice disagreed. “I had a loving family,” he told her plainly, “That’s all you need for a happy childhood, you don’t need palaces for that.”
Ofer Moses who runs The Spindle Shop – in the former premises of Franklin & Sons – usually leaves a list for Maurice detailing the work that is required and when he returns next morning, he finds the completed wood turning awaiting him, every piece perfectly achieved. But by then Maurice will already be gone, vanished like a shade of the night. So, in order to snatch a conversation with such an elusive character, a certain strategy was necessary which required Ofer’s collaboration. Early one morning, he waited outside the shop in his car until I arrived, and then, once we had checked that there was a light glimmering inside the shop, he unlocked the door and we went in together to discover the source of the illumination. Sure enough, the wood chips were flying, accompanied by the purr of the motor that powered the lathe, and hunched over it was a figure in a blue jacket and black cap, liberally scattered with chips and sawdust. This was Maurice.
Unaware of our presence, he continued with his all-engaging task, and we stood mesmerised by the sight of the master at work, recognising that we were just in time to catch him as he finished off the last spindles to complete a pristine set. And then, as he placed the final spindle on the stack, Maurice looked up in surprise to see us standing there and a transformation came upon him, as with a twirl he removed his overall and cap, sending a shower of wood chips fluttering. The wood turner that we saw hunched over the lathe a moment before was no more and Maurice stood at his full height with his arms outstretched, assuming a relaxed posture with easy grace, as he greeted us with a placid smile.
“This firm was the wood turning champion of Britain in 1928,” announced Maurice with a swagger.“Samuel, my father, had been apprenticed in Romania and was in the Romanian army for two years before he came here at the beginning of the twentieth century, and then he served in the British Army in the 14/18 war before he opened this place in 1920. He had been taught by the village wood worker in Romania, they made everything from cradles to coffins. All the boys used to sleep on a shelf under the bench then.”
Maurice told me he was one of a family of twelve – six boys and six girls – and he indicated the mark in the floor where the staircase once ascended to the quarters where they all lived. “I started when I was thirteen, I’ve still got my indenture papers” he informed me conscientiously, just in case I wanted to check the veracity of his claim, “I took to it from the start. It’s creative and at the end of the day you see what you’ve made. I’m proud of everything I do or I wouldn’t do it.”
In spite of his remarkable age, Maurice’s childhood world remains vivid to him. “Here in Shoreditch, ninety per cent were Jewish and the ones that weren’t were Jewish in their own way. Over in Hoxton, they’d take your tie off you when you arrived and sell it back to you when you left – but now you couldn’t afford to go there. In 1925, you could buy a house in Boundary St for £200, or you could put down a pound deposit and pay the rest off at three shillings a week. I was born here in 1920 and I went to Rochelle School – They won’t remember me.”
The only time Maurice left his lathe was to go and fight in World War II, when although he was offered war work making stretcher poles, he chose instead to enlist for Special Operations. Afterwards, Franklin & Sons expanded through acquiring the first automatic lathe from America, and opening a factory in Hackney Wick to mass-produce table legs. “Eventually we closed it up because everyone was getting older, except me.” quipped Maurice with a tinge of melancholy, as the last of his generation now, carrying the stories of a world known directly only to a dwindling few.
Yet Maurice still enjoys a busy social calendar, giving frequent lectures about classical music – the other passion in his life. “I especially like Verdi, Puccini and Rossini,” he declared, twinkling with bright-eyed enthusiasm, because having made chairs for the Royal Opera House he is a frequent visitor there. “I like all music except Wagner. You’ll never hear me listening to Wagner, because he was Hitler’s favourite composer.” he added, changing tone and catching my eye to make a point. A comment which led me to enquire if Maurice had ever gone back to Romania in search of his roots. “I’ve got no family there, they were all wiped out in the war. My father brought his close relatives over, but those that stayed ended up in Auschwitz.” he confided to me, with a sombre grimace, “Now you know why I wanted to go to war.”
And then, after we had shared a contemplative silence, Maurice’s energy lifted again, pursuing a different thought, “I remember the great yo-yo craze of the nineteen thirties,” he said, his eyes meeting mine in excitement, “We worked twenty-four hours a day.”
“What’s the secret?” I asked Maurice, curious of his astonishing vitality, and causing him to break into a smile of wonderment at my question. “All you’ve got to do is keep on living, and then you can do it. It isn’t very difficult.” he said, spreading his arms demonstratively and shaking his head in disbelief at my obtuseness. “Are you happy?” I queried, provocative in my eagerness to seize this opportunity of learning something about being a nonagenarian. “I’ll tell you why I am happy.” said Maurice, with a grin of unqualified delight and raising one hand to count off his blessings, “I’ve got a wonderful family and wonderful children. I’ve been successful and I’ve got an appetite for life, and I’ve eaten every day and slept every night.” Maurice was on a roll now. “I was going to write a book once,” he continued, “but there’s no time in this life. By the time you know how to live, it’s over. This life is like a dress rehearsal, you just make it up as you go along. One life is not enough, everyone should live twice.”
There was only one obvious question left to ask Maurice Franklin, so I asked it, and his response was automatic and immediate, with absolute certainty. “Yes, I’d be a wood turner again.” he said.
“I wake up every day and I stretch out my arms and if I don’t feel any wood on either side, then I know I can get up.”
Maurice’s handiwork.
Ofer Moses, proprietor of the The Spindle Shop
Maurice’s service book from World War II.
Maurice as a young soldier, 1941
Maurice as a child in the nineteen twenties, in the pose he adopts leaning against his lathe today.
The figure on the left is Maurice’s father Samuel in the Romanian army in the eighteen nineties.
Samuel Franklin as proprietor of Franklin & Sons, Shoreditch.
Maurice Franklin
Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven
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The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St
Franceskka Abimbola, Franceskka Fabrics
On a rainy Sunday in Spitalfields when everything is grey, I wend my way to Wentworth St to visit the African textile stores, that glow like multicoloured lanterns illuminated in the dusk – where a troupe of magnificent women preside, each one a shining goddess in her own universe. A radiance which Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Jeremy Freedman celebrates in his exuberant portraits published here.
Sunday is when it all happens in Wentworth St, when customers coming from as far as away as Aberdeen and the Netherlands converge to savour its wonders as the international destination for the best Holland Wax, French Lace, Swiss Voile and Headties to be found anywhere.
Weaving through the Petticoat Lane Market and pausing in the drizzle to gaze into the shop windows, you will spy the fine ladies of Wentworth St holding court in their shops to the assembled throng, simultaneously displaying the wit of matriarchs, the authority of monarchs and the glamour of movie-stars, and all dressed up to show off the potential of their textiles. Identified upon the fascias by their first names, as Franceskka Fabrics, Tayo Fashions & Textiles, and Fola Textile, many of these women put themselves forward personally as bold trendsetters, designing their own fabrics, defining the fashion and styling their customers too. In this, the oldest part of Spitalfields, the textile industry which has defined this neighbourhood for centuries is alive and thriving today thanks to the talents of these shrewd businesswomen of Wentworth St.
Franceskka Abimbola, whose business is the longest established here, welcomed me into her kaleidoscopic shop with mirrored ceiling and walls draped in lush fabrics, just as there was a brief lull in the mid-afternoon trade. “In the late eighties, I came here from Edinburgh to Petticoat Lane to buy this fabric and I found the dealers were all Jewish who didn’t wear it and didn’t understand it,” she explained with a humorous frown, “I spoke to Solomon at Renee’s who introduced me to his supplier. So then I wanted to be the first African woman to open a shop, and I used to buy it and sell it from the back of a car. But when I spoke to the supplier about opening my own place, he said, ‘You want to open a shop and start selling my fabrics? I’m going to break you into pieces!’”
Undeterred, Franceskka bravely opened her shop in the Kingsland Rd – at a respectable distance – and, fourteen years ago, she was one of the very first to open in Wentworth St, thus initiating this extraordinary phenomenon where now every other shop here sells Wax, all fiercely competing with their own styles and prices. Thankfully, Franceskka is still in one piece and, in reward for her courage, she is a big success.
“Lots of Nigerian women came at first to buy and ask advice,” she revealed delightedly, “but then women from Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Ghana came too. Many didn’t know how to tie the headtie so I teach them how to do it.” With an unassuming relaxed presence, Franceskka, who has a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Studies, controls her international business empire from this tiny shop, extending to two more in Lagos and a third in Abuja. “I go to the fabric exhibitions in Paris and Spain to get inspiration, I design the fabrics myself and get them manufactured in Switzerland. The French Laces are in vogue at the moment and they are very expensive, but if it’s for a wedding people will go all out to look beautiful.” she said, with a delicate smile and lift of her brow, merely hinting at the razzle-dazzle on offer.
Banke Adetoro at Royal Fashions incarnates the notion of sassy with her extravagant eyelashes, constantly fluttering like butterflies. “There’s nothing you want that you can’t get here,” she informed me with an amused gesture of unqualified authority, when I dropped in, “I get all the latest stuff. I can do as many as twenty buying trips in a year. My shop is the biggest and the most beautiful!” You really need to visit this shop to experience the vast phantasmagoria of patterns on display.
By contrast, across the road at Tayo Fashions & Textiles, I met the alluring Tayo herself in her modestly-sized shop. “My mother used to do this back in Africa, and I picked it up,” she confided to me quietly, “I just started trading at home and through the church, and then I started in a small shop with a little help from the bank. Now I have a shop in Lagos too and I go three times a year.” Outlining the convenient balance between the trade in both continents, “At Christmas it’s busy there when it’s quiet here, and it’s busy here in the Summer when it’s quiet there.” she said. Tayo’s two sons help her out in the shop and I was fascinated that in every single shop I visited these women had their children present. In fact, most had come into it through their families and some already had their children working with them, and I found it an interesting contrast to the perceived dilemma between children and career that many European women face.
Betwixt the fabulous fabric shops in Wentworth St are those selling the accessories to complete the outfit, the gleaming metallic pointy shoes and matching bags in multiple colourways and, of course, the jewellery. My favourite is Beauty Stones, lined entirely with coral necklaces that cascade like a waterfall down the walls to create an environment enraptured like a magic cave in a fairy tale. “In the beginning of African culture, anyone that wears it will be honoured,” declared Onome, the gentle custodian of the coral, “In Africa, we believe it is more precious than gold but, in this market, I have realised that lots of people are in love with it too.” Standing proud, Onome who is a celebrant in her own tribe, gestured to the coral that surrounded her, feeling its benign presence. “It’s my mother’s business,” she continued fondly,”but when she died ten years ago I couldn’t let the business die too.” And today the business is lively, since Onome’s nine children work in the shop (two were adopted after her sister’s death) and, as we spoke, happy little children ran around our legs playing with strings of corals beads they were threading. “It’s really is lovely to look at – sometimes when I put my hand on a bead, it tells me what to do, how to make the necklace,” Onome admitted, clasping a string of coral in her hand, “and the children are very good at the beads too, it’s in the family.”
Speaking with the Wax sellers of Wentworth St, who taught me the Yoruba concept of “Aso- Ebi” – using co-ordinated textiles at a social gathering to express the inter-relationships of all the people there – I realised that these modest shops contain an entire cultural universe with its own sophisticated language spoken in the vocabulary of textiles. Fashion exists here but, more than this, each decision taken, both in the choice and combination of fabrics makes a personal statement, which gives every single outfit a vibrant poetry all of its own.
Sheba Eferoghene, Novo Fashions
Tayo Oladele, Tayo Fashions & Textiles
Fola Mustapha, Fola Textile
Banke Adetoro, Royal Fashions
Onome Efebeh-Atano, Beauty Stones
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
With grateful thanks to Sheba Eferoghene for making the introductions.
You can read my original feature about Jo & Sheba Eferoghene, Novo Fashions
Steve Brooker, Mudlark
In London, the Thames has always been the natural receptacle for concealing and disposing things, creating a miry hoard of secrets, all just waiting for Steve Brooker, the mudlark, to come along and snaffle them up. Over the last seventeen years while he has been searching, the mud has been eroded by wash from the Thames Clippers, exposing an unprecedented level of finds that compel Steve to come mudlarking several times each week at low tide and be the first to see what has been newly revealed.
Steve is widely known as the Mud God – which seemed a little far fetched to me – until I saw him striding towards me eagerly in his chest-high bespattered waders, clutching his yellow plastic bucket and trowel. Over six feet tall with a grizzled beard and intense, glittering eyes, he was as excited to get down onto the beach as a child on the first day of the Summer holiday. Only someone with Steve’s natural authority can carry off such unmediated enthusiasm naturally. He is a man who is confident of his place in the world, and that place is the foreshore of the Thames.
We came down the slipway as the tide fell towards its lowest ebb. The day was mild yet occluded, and my heart lifted as I was released from city streets into a vast open space, the domain of water and sky. The territory of the Mud God. He understands the idiosyncrasies of the tide, and the nuances of the mud banks and the river bed. As well as coins and buttons, he finds Roman shoes, Medieval pins, eighteenth century witches’ bottles, nineteenth century lovers’ tokens, twentieth century voodoo dolls, live bombs and new guns – and sometimes he find human bodies too. He knows where to look and he does not need a metal detector because he has sharp eyes.
When Helen Mirren lost her ring throwing her grass clippings over the river wall from her Wapping garden, it was Steve who found it for her in the river. When villains throw handguns and sawn-off shot guns into the river at Woolwich to lose them forever, it is Steve who collects them and hands them to the police – he found fifteen recently.
Mudlarks tend to work in pairs for safety’s sake on this hazardous river and I had the privilege to be Steve’s partner in slime for a day. And I was happy to be in his company because Steve is a member of the Society of Thames Mudlarks, has a licence from the Port of London Authority and has the necessary experience to judge the treacherous movement of the tide against the access points to the shore.
On the beach, Steve used his trowel to indicate where the mud had been washed away revealing a fresh bed of stones beneath, suggesting the type of location worthy of searching. Scraping away the top layer, he scanned for objects and passed me a Medieval pin – a sign that other personal or domestic artifacts might be present. Thus the pattern was established of walking, scanning and pausing to scrape at promising sites. We continued until Silvertown where thousands of bullets mysteriously litter the foreshore, an unexplained military dump from World War II. All around the Isle of Dogs, we walked upon a shore littered with the metalwork of the ship building industry that was once here. Lying redundant, we saw eighteenth century iron splitters used for breaking up tree trunks into planks, to build ships sunk long ago.
At low tide, we reached Mast Point where Steve finds whole clay pipes. Pipes that once fell from a stevedore’s hand and sunk into the mud without breaking. Here I saw impacted layers of eighteenth and nineteenth century river bed, now exposed by erosion, with tantalising fragments of white pipe protruding. We squatted down to peer at the tiny bowl of a pipe, washed from the mud by the waves that very day and exposed from the mud for the first time. In the shape of a lady with a wide skirt that formed the bowl of the pipe, it was a tiny sculpture with a presence all its own, and we were the first to touch it since whoever dropped it two hundred years ago. Steve’s eyes popped because he never saw one like it before. Moments like this are what keep bringing Steve back, because he knows will always find something, yet he never knows what it will be.
We walked miles along the water’s edge in the centre of London and the only others we met were two friends of Steve’s, also searching the shore. I forgot entirely about the city on the river bank above us, because I was down in the river bed in the land of the mudlarks. All of the history of London was present with us, you just had to look, and it was a magical place to be.
Take a look at www.thamesandfield.com where you can see more than thirteen thousand pictures of Steve Brooker’s incredible finds that have earned him his reputation as the Mud God.
The detritus of the former shipyards lines the shore.
Thousands of bullets lie in the mud at Silvertown.
The lady as we found her face down in the Thames mud
The lady recovered after two hundred years.
Our haul, a tudor brick, decimal coins, bullets, marbles, a spur, an eighteenth century fork, a cabinet handle, clay pipes, a shell dated 1942, a fragment of a Bellemine jug, a broken seventeenth century buckle and a horse’s tooth.
Steve Brooker, the Mud God.
Mudlarking on the Thames, with remnant of a mesolithic forest in the foreground.
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At the Bunny Girls’ Reunion
On Sunday night, I attended the most glamorous party of my life. It was a Bunny Girls & Playboy Models’ reunion hosted by ex-Bunny Barbara Haigh, esteemed landlady of The Grapes in Limehouse. Never have I encountered more voluptuous charismatic ladies per square metre than were crammed joyfully together in the tiny bar-rooms of this historic riverside pub that night.
With Sarah Ainslie, Spitalfields Life contributing photographer, as my chaperone, I was thrilled to join this exuberant sisterhood of more than a hundred garrulous alpha females for a knees-up. Squeezing my way through the curvy bodies – fine specimens of their sex who have all got what it takes to succeed in life – I arrived on the river frontage where waves were crashing theatrically over the verandah as if, in reenactment of Botticelli’s Venus, each of these goddesses had just emerged triumphant from the Thames’ spray to delight the souls of mere mortals like myself.
The first Aphrodite to catch my eye was cheeky Bunny Sandie (pictured above), the seventh Bunny to join the newly opened Playboy Club in Park Lane in 1966, who is more formally known these days as Lady Sandra Bates. Within seconds of our introduction, Sandie gleefully revealed she had bedded Sean Connery, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty and Telly Savalas, emphasising that her most important conquest was Sir Charles Clore, owner of Selfridges and Mappin & Webb. “I was living in a house in Mayfair at the time, but the owner put it up for sale and wanted to throw me out, so I told Charles and he bought it for me!” she declared with a glittering smile, rolling her chestnut eyes, batting her eyelashes and clutching her hands in girlish pleasure. “You should see my art collection!” she proposed recklessly now that her husband Sir Charles is no more, as we shared a glass of wine on the veranda and the setting sun lit up the clouds, turning the river livid pink.
It was a remarkable overture to an unforgettable evening, because these girls all know how to party. Bunnies had flown in from all over the world, Tasmania, Las Vegas, the Bahamas, Egypt and as far away as Australia to celebrate the glory days of the British Playboy Club that ran from 1966 until 1980. As Marilyn Cole (the first full frontal nude in the history of Playboy in 1972) put it so elegantly in her speech of welcome, “When people ask ‘Where did you go to school?’ I say, ‘Fuck that, I went to the University of Playboy! You learn much more about life.’” An astute comment that drew roars of approval from the assembled Bunnies.
Marilyn, resplendent in a quilted leather miniskirt and thigh length high-heeled boots, ushered me over to meet her famously reclusive husband Victor Lownes, who opened the London Playboy Club. Formerly in charge of all Playboy’s gaming operations, Victor Lownes is a bon-viveur who was once Britain’s highest paid executive, counted Francis Bacon and Roman Polanski as friends and reputedly had five girls a day, sometimes two at once. He looked at me benignly from under a mop of white hair across the chasm of our different experiences of life. “Do you miss it?” I enquired tentatively, and Victor rolled his twinkly eyes in good-humoured irony. “What do you think? I am eighty-two years old!” he replied with dignified restraint.
There was a giddy atmosphere in the Grapes that night and so I chose to embrace the spirit of the occasion and mingle with as many Bunnies as possible. “I was a young girl from a very religious strict background in Birmingham who ran away from home.”admitted Bobbie, one of first black Bunnies, who worked at the Playboy Club from 1975-80, “I was shopping one day and I went along to ‘a cattle drive’ and out of fifty girls was one of a handful accepted to be a Bunny. I had four wonderful years that totally changed my life. It was a terrific experience. I have run my own business for the past twenty years and the things I learnt at Playboy set me on the road to be able to do that.”
“There was only one rule,’Don’t touch the Bunnies!’”explained Bunny Erica, raising a finger of authority,“Membership of the Playboy Club came with a key, which members handed in when they arrived and collected when they left. If somebody went too far the management took away their key. So the men always behaved respectfully. You were never forced to do anything. It’s made to seem cheap now – but we wore two pair of tights, our costumes were fitted and stiffened with whalebone, we even put toilet rolls down the front as padding – it was an illusion. We were supposed to share tips, but I put mine down my costume and when I took it off all the banknotes would fall out. The money was fabulous. Playboy gave us the most amazing part of our lives. It gave us freedom. It gave us a love of humanity. It enlightened us.”
“I was the very first UK Bunny to be hired in 1966,” declared Bunny Alexis, still glowing with pride over forty years later, “I was a dancer at the Talk of the Town in Leicester Sq on £12 a week, but at Playboy I earned £200. I was already married with a child and on the strength of my two years as a Bunny I was able to buy our first house in Wood Green. It was the hardest work, eight hours a day on five-inch heels with just one half hour break. But it was good fun and we met all the most amazing people. 1966 was a very good year!”
People often ask what happened to the nineteen sixties, yet here the evidence was all around me. It was a buzz to be in a room full of such self-confident women who knew who they were and were supremely comfortable with it too, women with their wits about them, who counted brains amongst other natural assets when it came to interactions with the opposite sex. Women who knew how to make the best of the situation they found themselves in at the Playboy Club – unashamedly constructed as an arena of male fantasy yet, paradoxically, as all these women testify thirty years on, provided opportunities for them to take control of their lives.
Undoubtedly there were those that, as Bunny Serena put it succinctly, “screwed their way to the top,” but equally there were many who, as Bunny Lara confirmed, found it, “An empowering experience. They sent us on management training courses, and I learnt how to handle people and manage staff. All of which has come in useful ever since in everything I have done.” She now runs a young offenders’ programme, training staff in conflict management. Many women I spoke with occupy senior management roles in the gaming and entertainment industry today – including one who manages a chain of casinos – in jobs that would have been closed to them previously.
Above all, these were women who were full of life, they had seen so much life and had so many stories to tell, that it was wonderful simply to be amongst them, confirming Bunny Lara’s fond verdict on her experience working at the Playboy Club, “The camaraderie was phenomenal.”
Bunny Cleo, with evidence of her encounter with Sid James at The Playboy Club.
Marilyn Cole, “Whatever else happens in life, good, bad or indifferent, we can always say we had this!”
Bunny Maretta & Bunny friend.
Bunny Marisa is now an artist painting in oils.
Bunny Dilys & Bunny friend.
Bunny Alexis, ex-Windmill Girl was the very first UK Bunny to be recruited in 1966.
Bunny Serena & Bunny Jane.
Bunny Bobbie
Bunny Brenda, Bunny Nancy & Bunny Marion
Victor Lownes, “What is a playboy? It is someone who is getting more sex than you are.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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At Lady Sandra Bates’ Birthday Bash
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A Fox in Hoxton
At this time of year, as the shadows get longer, the foxes of the East End grow bolder, reclaiming their territory. Those that have acquired a taste for curry come streaming down Brick Lane in the early hours to pillage the bins, and throughout Spitalfields you may even see foxes during daylight hours skulking in the side streets, as familiar with humans as we have become with them. Consequently, I did not blink when I caught a glance of the first of Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Martin Usborne’s fascinating fox photographs. My immediate assumption was to admire his skill in capturing a rare moment – until I saw the other pictures and realised that a sly ruse was involved.
Now that digital manipulation of photography has become commonplace, there is an elegant poetry in the plain contrivance of taking a stuffed fox and placing it in the street, because a natural correlation exists between the still life of taxidermy and the frozen moment of a photograph. So familiar are we with photography as a record of an event that we naturally imagine the movement before and after the frame, an impulse that still exists even after we know the fox is immobile.
There is also the delight of complicity here, in observing how different people gamely participated in Martin’s project, when he spent three days wandering around with a dead fox that he rented from “Get Stuffed” taxidermy hire in Islington. (Martin was assured that the fox died of natural causes and was given to the taxidermist by the RSPCA.) The comedy of the undertaking is irresistible, even if it is underscored by the poignancy of this displaced creature returning to its urban habitat after death.
Athough foxes are common in the city, the surrealism of their presence never fails to startle, and these cunning photographs play upon this familiarity, pushing the limit of credibility. Since foxes appear to be as at home in the East End as we humans are, it would not actually be out of character for them to do any of the things shown here. It makes perfect sense to see a fox get cash from a machine and then hit the fried chicken shop. Equally, when I saw the picture of the fox with the girls in the cocktail bar, I could not help wondering if it was a hen night.
In reality, there is a large family of foxes that live in a secret enclave in the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, which makes them perfectly placed to take advantage of the night life on their doorstep. Here in Spitalfields, I have become quite used to seeing foxes gambolling in my back yard. Although guests get excited to see the foxes emerging from the undergrowth seeking chicken bones whenever I serve dinner in the garden, this has become commonplace to me now. Sometimes in the Spring, fox cubs waken me with their cries while playing outside my bedroom window and if I go out at night to bring in washing from the line they prowl around me in the dark. Similarly, the neighbourhood cats appear to have entered into an understanding with the foxes, and I even saw Mr Pussy rubbing noses with a fox this Summer. And I shall never forget returning from the premiere of “Fantastic Mr Fox” to confront a fox on the street in Spitalfields at midnight and half-expecting him to ask, “How was it then?”
So you will understand why Martin Usborne’s clever fox photographs stuck a chord, they are only one step removed from actuality – and their subtle irony renders them as playful and engaging satires upon the absurdity of our curious inner-city existence.
Photographs copyright © Martin Usborne
You may also enjoy Martin’s pictures of Joseph Markovitch of Hoxton.
Second Annual Report
As a slow writer who struggles to put words together, it astonishes me to discover myself writing this Second Annual Report. It certainly was a foolhardy undertaking that I set out upon two years ago on 26th August 2009 – promising to write a story every single day – but I do not regret it because it has brought me so much pleasure.
I do not quite know how to account for the more than seven hundred stories that I have published since then. In fact, I try to avoid an overview because it fills me with vertigo to contemplate how many words I have written, almost as disorienting as trying to imagine what lies ahead over the next quarter century of this endeavour. Yet the reality of this project consists always in writing today’s story and, as far as possible, I submit myself to the job in hand, which can be relied upon to provide more than sufficient challenge to fill one day.
As a child, I never understood why I could not go and speak with everybody, and I used to knock on the doors of people in my street and ask about their lives. Even now I do not know why people choose to be strangers to one another and not enter into conversations at bus stops and on transport. Fortunately, my chosen occupation permits me to fulfil my lifelong curiousity about the lives of others. And, in the last two years, I have met more people than I ever did in my life up to the moment I began writing these pen portraits, and a good many have now become friends.
Although I had some experience of writing before I commenced, these two years of contriving a story daily have changed my life. Sometimes people assume that I knock off several at once and publish them at leisure. But the truth is that I always write tomorrow’s story today, often working late into the night until it is ready.
Whenever I get the chance to look back at previous posts, I am struck how they flow one after another, as if preordained, when, in fact, I rarely know what is coming next. It is a situation that creates a certain internal drama, exciting and terrifying at the same time. While – from those already published – I may persuade myself that tomorrow’s story will appear inevitably, I get fidgety as the day fades if I have not yet begun writing, or – worse – I have not decided what I am writing about. Yet each night, when I publish my story, the drama is resolved and I can go to sleep peacefully, before waking up ready to start again.
As you will appreciate, it keeps me on my toes, with so many people to write about and you, the readers, awaiting tomorrow’s story. I recognise a constant imperative to do my subjects justice and I know I cannot disappoint you. It is a perfect situation for a writer, especially a slow writer.
I did not realise that this would be the outcome when I set out, but I am very grateful for it, because it has proved so rewarding. Years ago, when I complained of my long afternoons struggling to compose a single sentence, people used to say, “If someone put a gun to your head, couldn’t you write faster?” Now this is situation is remedied, I can answer those people by declaring, “I have found the gun!”
As I pass the two year milestone, I am going to take a moment to draw breath, celebrating this anniversary by publishing a week of favourite posts. Meanwhile, I shall take the opportunity to tidy my desk, weed the garden, sew on buttons and prepare myself to set forth again through the streets of Spitalfields. But first, I have something extraordinary planned to commemorate this auspicious moment and I must leave you here while I run off to do it. Naturally, you will read an account, as the first post opening the third year of stories on Monday 5th September.
And thus, with all these thoughts in mind, I come to the end of this second year of Spitalfields Life.
I am your loyal servant
The Gentle Author
You may also like to read the First Annual Report
