Laura Knight, Pottery Marks
Laura Knight’s dog Moss wisely takes a nap and lets his mistress get on with completing her latest works ready for her exhibition Pottery Marks, opening at Town House in Spitalfields next Thursday 17th November. Contrary to what you might think, the cups on the table are not evidence of an imminent tea party, but placed there as a reference by Laura while making the new pictures she will be exhibiting, which have all been inspired by her collection of old china.
A graphic artist whose work is informed by a deep affection for vernacular English pottery of the nineteenth century, Laura Knight’s renderings of Staffordshire Figures, Willow Pattern plates and Sunderland Lustreware capture the spirit of these pieces with rare grace and economy of means. In the popular tradition of English Folk Art, using sinuous line and sensuous colour – hers is the assured work of a mature artist in control of her medium.
Working from a Georgian terrace in Clapton, Laura’s ground floor studio also serves as her living room and kitchen which makes it perfectly natural to have pieces of china to hand. “The funny collection of ceramics that one ends up inheriting or buying cheaply over the years.” as Laura describes it. Yet “When the original object is so appealing,” she revealed, “it’s about transforming it into something else rather than slavishly reproducing it.”
The grove of limes on the green outside were just turning gold and shedding their leaves when I paid Laura a visit, taking the opportunity to admire her collection of pictures, china, art books and other treasured paraphernalia, in these two beautifully-proportioned rooms that receive more sunlight when the trees are bare. Laura welcomed me with tea and home made apple cake at her kitchen table, before giving me a preview of the fresh pieces of work which were due at the framers later that day, including a table cloth – that Laura draped across the table – upon which she had painted calligraphic patterns and sewn images of Willow Pattern plates as if laid ready for a picnic.
Yet I was impatient to wolf my cake and stray into the other room to examine the spirited pictures on paper Laura had created using paint, ink, collage and printing – in sets of four – in blue as homages to Willow Pattern, in pink to celebrate Sunderland Lustreware and in subtle ochre referencing Minton pottery. Here was an image of a plate for good attendance at Sunday school inscribed with the names of Laura’s grandparents who grew up in Bethnal Green, George & Ada. Here were all the Minton date stamps from 1842 to 1942, including “V” for victory and an airplane during the war years. Here were scraps of Willow Pattern, inspired by the spontaneity manifest when women chopped up transfers and scattered them on the undersides of tureens in factories a hundred and fifty years ago. Laura’s witty graphic interventions always serving to reveal the maker’s presence behind these familiar artifacts, delighting in the flaws and random elements born of mass-production done by hand.
Pottery Marks came about as a result of my interview with Laura Knight a year ago, and now I cannot wait to see her vibrant images brought together in a gallery for your interest and delight. She appreciates the emotional resonance of beloved ceramic designs which have survived in the popular imagination over generations, and her tender and poetic work is the perfect tonic at the start of an English Winter.
Artworks copyright © Laura Knight
POTTERY MARKS – New work by Laura Knight, runs from Thursday 17th November – Saturday 3rd December at Town House, 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields, London, E1 6QE. Open from 11:30am – 6pm, Tuesday to Sunday.
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Jason Cornelius John, Street Musician
Jason Cornelius John
He first sprang into my consciousness two weeks ago, early one Sunday morning, when I was down among the fly-pitchers in the Bethnal Green Rd. As if out of nowhere, he appeared from behind a telephone box with his guitar in hand declaring, “I am Jason John, I’m writing you a damn good song.” With charisma and intensity, he drew the attention of everyone within earshot and the pavement became his stage as he launched into one of his own compositions, opening his heart and channelling his emotions into a soulful ballad. Even at first sight, Jason John made an unforgettable impression.
And then yesterday, I came upon him sitting with his guitar in a doorway in Folgate St, sheltering from the drizzle on the first chilly day of the Winter, and – once we had re-established our acquaintance – we decided to take refuge in the barroom of the Water Poet where Jason spoke to me of his life as a street musician.
“I’m a West London lad. They know me around Shepherd’s Bush, Hammersmith and Acton because I grew up in Chiswick. I’ve played in Notting Hill and all over the West End, so I thought I’d travel to the East and get myself known here. Sometimes I play in Leadenhall Market, Hoxton Square and at Liverpool St. I write my own songs. I’ve always written, stories, poems and songs. I grew up playing the guitar and I can play bass, violin and piano. Being a musician, singing and playing, it’s like being a storyteller.
My first real involvement with the music scene was as roadie for the Bluetones. I knew them from school, and I stayed at their house and slept on the couch. It was a non-stop party and there were always girls. My first proper taste of the music industry – you got paid and there was always food and drink.
When they took off, I didn’t feel bad but I did wonder, “How could you just make it and leave us all behind?” Then Montrose Avenue came along and replaced the Bluetones, and they pulled more girls. My job went from being a roadie to becoming their minder, making sure they didn’t drink too much and keeping an eye on the girls too.
At smaller venues, I’d get ten to fifteen minutes to play my own songs. I played in Camden once, thirty-six people were cheering me and saying, “That was a good one,” I gave out my phone number and email many times that night. When I played the Hub at the Metropolitan University, there were rows of girls in front and they loved me – but I was frightened when they all shouted at once, I thought they were going to grab me. My girlfriend dropped me at that time – over my music – she said, “You can’t do any other job, and trying to live by playing and singing, it’s impossible.” When Montrose Avenue made it, I thought, “It’s not going to happen to me, this is the second time.” So I took off to France for a year, going down South and playing on the road, then I went to Amsterdam and lived there for a year.
I love playing and singing, that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to it. Two years ago, I was sitting playing in Allen Gardens when I found myself. I started to cry. I could literally see myself. Since that Summer, I’ve had a hunger to play to people. If I see a crowd of people, I want to win their spirit. It fills me with goodwill. When you are going around playing and singing you’ve got to feed your soul. I have a smoke and it gives me a nice merry feeling. In your head you behave like a giant. Sometimes the crowds roar and cheer for me. I walk down the street and people are hugging me.
All the businessmen in their suits and ties, they finish work and go to the pub. Then they go outside to have a smoke, and they see me and they say, “I like your look, what have you got?” I play them a song and they say, “I like that, play us another … and another, and another.” Then, if they’re still into you, they give you a card and say, “He’s never had busker for his birthday, we want you to come over.”
I’m living in Earls Court at the moment in a hotel, it’s forty pounds a night. I have to make that money each day playing on the street. You can’t give in. It’s all up to you. You’ve got to put your feeling into it, heart and soul – because how you feel, that’s how the listener’s going to feel. You got to feel emotion, I’ve played and cried in front of people, and they’ve cried too.
During the day, I rehearse in my room and then I come out and play my songs. Performing on the streets, it’s different from a pub, you’ve got to attract the people. At the end of the day, it’s for no-one else, just me and the listeners, and I’ll know that I played and sang and they felt good. You want everyone to feel a good feeling and think, “That Jason John he was a good man, he hasn’t lost the feeling.”
I walked here today from Earls Court, I followed the South Bank. I got jumped at Old St at the weekend and they took my phone – at four in the afternoon, I couldn’t believe it. The ups and downs of life. It made me cry because I needed those numbers badly. Now the weather’s getting cold, it makes it hard for me to keep playing on the street. I have to start playing in pubs and clubs but to do that I’ve got to find three people whose numbers were in my phone, so we can play together as a group. I was looking for a violinist who hangs around here, I was walking and hoping he’d turn up.”
When I expressed my concern over this immediate circumstance, Jason shrugged it off – self-reliant and philosophical, and taking one day at a time. A man of innate dignity and possessing a sympathetic nature, he impressed me with his single-minded pursuit of songwriting, risking himself and sacrificing conventional ambition for the sake of a purist desire to communicate through music. The street is an unforgiving arena for a performer yet Jason has embraced busking with consistent success and made himself at home on the pavement, creating a distinctive persona that is his alone. “I’ve always liked pin-striped flares and leather jackets, and I always wear shoes. I try to keep them as shiny as I can. If you dress smart with shoes and trousers, you can get in anywhere – but not with jeans and trainers.” he informed me authoritatively, when I complimented him on his style, layered up with old coats and silk scarves.
From the moment Jason first appeared in the market two weeks ago, it was obvious that he has a certain talent and personal charm which win him a degree of respect wherever he goes, and thus his relationship with existence is enviably untroubled, for the most part. At thirty-five years old, Jason Cornelius John knows who is and what he wants from life – as he confessed with a barely-concealed swagger, “I’m not a member of any party and I have no religion. My religion is drinking, smoking, playing music and making love to the ladies.”
Photographs of Jason John performing copyright © Colin O’Brien
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The Young Turks at The Ten Bells
Over a year ago, when I interviewed James Lowe while he was Head Chef at St John Bread & Wine, he confided to me that one day he would like to open a restaurant of his own. And now James has returned to Spitalfields as part of the culinary collective termed The Young Turks, working in partnership with Isaac Mchale to cook a set menu, changing weekly, at The Ten Bells for the next three months.
When I went round for dinner last week, it made me think of another meal long ago in a room above a pub. For when I began my career as a writer, I had a fancy agent who used to know all the smart places to eat and, desirous of feeding me up in the days before I made any income from my writing, he would take me out for lunch regularly. One day, he took me for a meal in the room above the French House in Dean St, cooked by a young chef – just starting out – by the name of Fergus Henderson. Years later, St John, the restaurant that Fergus Henderson created, is firmly established at the centre of the revival in distinctively British cuisine. Thus, when I sat down in the room above The Ten Bells on the opening night of The Young Turks, to study the menu set in plain type upon a sheet of white paper, I felt that somehow I had come full circle.
In this beautiful high-ceiled space with commanding views towards the market and the church, diners get to enjoy four courses and three snacks plus a cocktail for £39 a head, while eyeballing those on the top deck of the 67 bus going down Commercial St. There is a sense of drama, beginning the moment you step from the street into the clattery din of the bar room lined with gleaming nineteenth century ceramic tiles, before you ascend the narrow staircase to encounter a more civilised atmosphere in the dining room above, lined with pieces of art by Tracey Emin and Peter Blake from the private collection of the owner of The Ten Bells, John Twomey.
As one who feels unduly challenged by making selections from menus, I was delighted to be presented instead with a bill of fare outlining the seven plates that awaited me. To start, there were fragrant slices of ham cured by James, then fresh oysters with dulse, followed by a couple of small intensely-flavoured game sausages. By now, the order of dishes and the contrasts they presented were proving a matter of fascination. And it was a intriguing sequence that continued with squid accompanied by watercress and radish, then my favourite dish of the evening – Jerusalem Artichoke with crisps made of its skin – followed by slow-cooked ox cheek, moist and tangy in its own gravy. The meal proved to be a rare culinary experience, alive with subtle flavours and textures, yet thanks to the modest portions I did not feel overly full – just ready for the baked pears which finished off the evening nicely.
“A week ago, there wasn’t even a kitchen here,” exclaimed James in disbelief when I dropped by to visit him next morning, wedging myself in the corner next to the sink while he and Isaac set to work on another of their 9am to 1am days, preparing vegetables and checking dishes that were already slow-cooking for tonights’s service.“I met John Twomey for the first time three weeks ago, I came down to The Ten Bells to have a look at the location and liked the room immediately.” James added, just reminding himself how he came to be there surrounded by a pile of ox cheek so early in the morning.
Evidently, Isaac Mchale, a Glaswegian who worked in Sydney before he established himself in London as chef at The Ledbury and The Cafe in Victoria Park, possesses an admirable phlegmatic energy, demonstrated by applying himself with quiet persistence to peeling endless radishes.“It’s not really a money maker, it’s honestly priced and for limited run – so it’s a chance to do something that’s ours and to say this is what we’re about.” he told me candidly, before laying the radishes to one side and lifting a box of comice pears, then making short work of coring and peeling them all. “The test will be whether people choose to come back.”
Both chefs possess experience and credentials obtained at highly reputable restaurants, and a passion to forge their own identity – as James confirmed, “We’ve been doing pop-up restaurants, because this is how we prove what we’re capable of – it costs a lot of money to open a restaurant and it’s impossible if you don’t have a backer.”
Yet in spite of their ambitions, James and Isaac are wisely reticent when it comes to saying anything that might be construed as a “concept” describing their endeavour. “It’s good British food, we want to be more creative with British produce, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” James told me plainly, as he turned his attention from the ox cheek to opening oysters in anticipation of another service of more than two hundred dishes that night.
Isaac Mchale & James Lowe
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Terry Coleman, Umbrella Maker
There are fewer umbrella makers in London now than you can count upon the spokes of one of their creations. Yet when I spoke with Terry Coleman, fifth generation umbrella maker and the most senior member of the trade still working in the East End, he boasted to me he had the oldest name in the world, as if it could be possible to romance his arcane profession still further. “Of all the names in the Domesday Book, only three remain and one is Coleman,” he informed me gruffly with a sagacious frown, “and in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 626, it says, ‘Coleman and his men went back to their own country.'” – proposing that his venerable ancestry might extend even further.
It was suitably erudite patter to accompany the “slotting” of umbrellas – cutting the grooves in the wooden shaft that hold the hand-spring and top-spring, simple devices securing the umbrella in the “up” or “down” position – as we passed a quiet morning at James Ince & Sons Ltd, Britain’s oldest umbrella maker, founded in Spitalfields in 1805 and now operating from a modest factory next to the canal in Vyner St. “There were slotting machines but it’s much quicker to do it by hand. If you use the machine, it requires no skill – you simply feed them in,” Terry declared in disdain, without lifting his eyes from an intricate pastime that filled him with such evident delight.
“We are all umbrella makers in our family, my father, his father and his father, all my aunts and uncles were umbrella makers. My father had is own company, J.W. Coleman of Hackney, and I’ve been an umbrella maker from when I left school at fourteen – there was no choice! As children, we were threadling up the umbrella covers. My dad paid us so much a dozen and we enjoyed it. Me and my brothers were racing each other. Even before we left school, we learnt the trade. I started off as a frame maker but I can do everything – I am a frame maker, cutter, finisher, machinist and tipper. All defunct trades now.”
Richard Ince, the current incumbent of the business started by his forbears more than six generations ago and a man bearing the personal distinction of being Mary Poppins’ umbrella maker, stood across the other side of the workshop, occupied at another bench yet absorbing Terry’s monologue with quiet appreciation. “When me and my brothers are gone, you’ll be the only one.” said Terry, over his shoulder and catching Richard’s eye in an affectionate glance that was indicative of their shared history – both coming from families of East End umbrella makers stretching back generations and witnessing the sharp decline of the trade at the end of the last century. James Ince & Sons Ltd was once a major business in Spitalfields, occupying a prime position in Bishopsgate and employing a large workforce, until the nineteen eighties when a capricious government decided that – for tax purposes – umbrella makers, who had been self-employed for generations, were to become employees – thereby destroying an industry already struggling to compete with cheap imports.
“I’ve been associated with Ince for years and years.” continued Terry, “At first, I worked for Richard’s grandfather, Wilfred. He was a typical City gentleman. Sometimes, he’d ask me, ‘Would you go upstairs and make the frames?’ but the other frame makers used to say, ‘Slow down!’ because they made three dozen in a day whereas I could make a gross. I remember Richard’s father Geoffrey too, an absolutely lovely man who couldn’t offend anybody. He played the organ at St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, and I used to go and sit in the organ loft with him when he played lunchtime concerts.
I set up a little workshop of my own in Hackney and I made umbrellas for Inces, from sixteen-inch up to ten-feet diameter. At one time, I would say we had the monopoly in golfing umbrellas. They were all wooden-shafted then and golf was still a top-end pursuit in the nineteen sixties, so the market accommodated an expensive umbrella. It was my grandfather and his father who pushed the trade towards leisure, and I earned a good living from Ince as a frame maker. One day in 1963, I went in and there was a bundle of golf umbrellas on imported metal frames and Richard’s grandfather said, ‘I don’t know if this is going to catch on’ – but now that’s all there is. When I started an umbrella cost a week’s wages, and all the City gents had an umbrella and a bowler hat.
Umbrella makers were traditionally self-employed, if business picked up there was always a market for skilled craftsmen. I’m retired now, but I’ve kept my hand in by making umbrellas for Inces. I wouldn’t be here today if we didn’t have this order. I haven’t done this for twenty years.”
The copper-plated iron hand springs that Terry was fitting so expertly were from old stock manufactured in the nineteen fifties and Richard Ince had invited him to come in to fit them as part of a forthcoming collaboration between James Ince & Sons Ltd and Ally Capellino, the bag lady of Shoreditch. Ally has specified all aspects of the design of this exclusive batch of umbrellas which are being manufactured at the factory in Vyner St under the personal supervision of Richard Ince. And, once the frames are complete, I shall be returning to report upon the progress of the umbrellas when Richard cuts the covers and attaches them to the frames.
It was a rare privilege to spend a few hours among the last heroic umbrella makers of the East End and be party to their soulful history which began more than two centuries ago in Spitalfields, where their ancestors once contrived contraptions out of whalebone with covers made from silk woven locally. After all this time, they carry knowledge, techniques and language that are theirs alone. This was a trade derived from the sword-stick and walking-stick makers with strong connections to the tent makers and flag makers, part of the vast interconnected panoply of skilled artisans who once existed in the East End. “It’s nice to make something,” said Terry in understated satisfaction, admiring the bundle of wooden shafts each with gleaming hand-springs fitted by hand, the rare handiwork of the East End’s senior umbrella maker, a man with a lifetime’s experience in his trade and a man with the oldest name in the world.
Terry shows the hand-springs from the nineteen fifties to be used for the Ally Capellino umbrellas.
“We used to make umbrellas with a parrot’s head handle and a moving beak”
Richard Ince, sixth generation umbrella maker.
Terry Coleman, fifth generation umbrella maker.
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Brick Lane Market 18
Christine Mattock
Turn left out of Shoreditch High Street station on a Sunday and you’ll encounter the long form of the Mattock family fruit and veg stall, which answers the contour of the Sclater Street viaduct with a parallel line of produce: sacks of purple potatoes; snow-white cauliflowers; gleaming aubergines; dark piles of chestnuts. Here, the mother-and-son team of Christine and Westley Mattock preside. Westley should have been Wesley, after the hero of the 1970s TV series Rich Man, Poor Man Book II, but the couple in front at the register office had the same idea, and Christine added a ‘T’ to mark the distinction. Her husband, Barry, is also part of the team – though a stroke has prevented him from hauling sacks of onions for a living. He now watches business at the stall from a car parked at the roadside. “He doesn’t miss a thing,” says Christine. It’s a friendly warning.
Christine’s father briefly kept a fruit and veg shop in Tottenham, but his heart, she says, wasn’t really in it. The trade really flows from Barry’s side of the family, who arrived from Poland, so the legend goes, after an incident involving a disrespectful ride on top of a hearse. Her mother-in-law knew the East End markets well, and remembered fly pitchers selling diamonds on the kerb. (“They’d brought them over during the war, hidden in the pom-poms on their shoes.”) But old Mrs Mattock’s experience of buying and selling went back even further – when she was a little girl she worked in her father’s kiosk on Drury Lane and the theatre staff would allow her to sneak into the back of the auditorium and watch the performances.
There’s an element of performance in Christine and Westley’s work – though the audience is changing fast. “It’s more of a tourist attraction now than a market,” says Westley. “We get more students and Yuppies these days. We used to supply thirty restaurants, but we don’t anymore. Business has folded in half in the space of a year. We just can’t buy our stuff cheap enough to give everyone a bargain.” The council, he suspects, would like to see the market wither away. Will he stay? “Of course I’ll stay. I don’t know anything but fruit and veg.” And that, he says, is a knowledge of which his customers seem less sure. “I had someone come here the other day who asked me why the potatoes had mud on them.”
Alan Langley & Ryan
Alan Langley sold his first bicycle nearly sixty years ago – and found himself taken down to the police station for his trouble. “When I was nine years old I used to do work for an old Jewish girl in Stamford Hill, lighting her fire for her and doing the housework on the Sabbath,” he recalls. “She didn’t pay me in money, she used to give me things. And she gave me this lady’s bicycle. And I came back and sold it.” A suspicious policeman, however, decided to intervene – and Alan found himself being asked a few stiff questions in more formal surroundings. His father was understanding. “He was the sort of man who would buy and old clock and clean it up and come down here and sell it, just for the buzz of selling something.”
Alan tried other trades, too: he had a spell in the Merchant Navy, he worked for a Fleet Street press agency – and had the pleasure of seeing the future Lord Snowdon sacked for turning in a bunch of sub-standard photographs. But Alan came back to bicycles, and stuck with them for half a century. In that time his pitch has migrated from Club Row to Chiltern Street to Sclater Street, and he has acquired fifty years’ experience of the commercial life of the East End. He remembers the market when you could buy dogs and budgerigars as easily as apples and pears; he recalls the days when fly-pitchers could avoid the attentions of the council by offering the right bribe to the right official; he remembers when Goanese sailors would arrive en masse to buy bicycles, load them up into a pantechnicon and drive it back to the docks. And he’s still here: freewheeling on Sclater Street.
Westley Mattock
Matthew Sweet’s Envoi
And this is where I pack up my stall and wait for the Gentle Author to reclaim the pitch. Rather unwillingly, I must say – it has been a privilege to spend a week in the Author’s shoes, wandering the streets of Spitalfields and bothering some of its most interesting inhabitants with impertinent questions.
I’m not a Spitalfields resident myself, though I grew to love this area in the late nineties, when I was snooping around the place looking for the remains of Victorian opium dens – and later, when I would pop over from south of the river to take my baby daughter to Rhyme Time at the Whitechapel Idea Store – the highlight of which, I recall, was an excellent re-enactment of the story of Ibrahim and Ishmael with Action Men. (Where you there too?) I’m a Sunday visitor now, since London Transport kindly built an overground rail link between my home in SE26 and Shoreditch High Street.
But one day, if I can afford it, I hope to retire to Spitalfields. And if the Gentle Author’s successor is still padding the cobbles, I will force him or her to interview me, and I shall regale them with outrageous stories about how life used to be in the East End of the first years of the twenty-first century. And I will make it all up.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Vera Day, A Kid For Two Farthings
Vera Day knows horror when she sees it. In more than sixty years of movie acting she has been strangled by a gurning Boris Karloff, infected by the alien contagion of Quatermass II and involved in the writhing pseudopodia of The Woman-Eater (tagline: “SEE THE WOMAN EATER ENSNARE THE BEAUTIES OF TWO CONTINENTS!”) She survived all these terrifying experiences to give a grandstanding speech on the rules of poker in Guy Ritchie’s gangster flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It’s one of the most memorable moments in the picture, and she did it in one take.
Vera, like her contemporary, Barbara Windsor, is a product of that post-war moment in which an unmistakably East London accent was no longer a bar to being a movie glamour girl. Other blonde bombshells of the period had to mind their language: Diana Dors submerged any trace of Swindon under a sassy transatlantic drawl; the Stockport-born Sabrina had to be content with stooging silently beside the comedian Arthur Askey. (Although the fan mags declared that the 1955 trackside melodrama Stock Car would be the first to allow audiences to hear her speak, the producers broke the deal, and dubbed her.) But nobody silenced or elocuted Vera Day. She sounded like a girl from Forest Gate. Triumphantly, she still does.
“Every girl was a glamour girl in those days, whether she was blonde, brunette or redhead,” she reflects. “It was obligatory to have the 37-22-24.” She traces the hour-glass shape in the air. I suspect the same calculations were made by Jack Hylton, the band-leader and impresario who plucked her from a hairdressing salon and put her into a show at the London Hippodrome – and by the movie director Val Guest, who first put her on the big screen in Dance Little Lady (1954).
She soon became one of British cinema’s most prolific showbiz blondes. At the 1955 Royal Variety Show she shared the bill with Morecambe and Wise, Gracie Fields and Alma Cogan. She spent a season crooning for the diners at the Edmundo Ros supper club on Regent Street – and much longer performing live TV dramas and comedies. (“By raising an eyebrow,” said The Times of Vera’s turn in the title role of The Red-Headed Blonde, “she can put down an opponent as if with a feather dipped in acid.”) The film work also came briskly. In Too Many Crooks (1959) she’s the moll in a gang of thieves led by George Cole and Sid James – in one brilliant scene, she stuffs fistfuls of stolen banknotes down the front of her dress, as a distracted Terry-Thomas attempts to yank them out again. In Fun at St Fanny’s (1956), she is a conniving actress who infiltrates a private school attended by a very little Ronnie Corbett and the agreeably horse-faced comic Cardew Robinson. In A Kid for Two Farthings (1955), Carol Reed’s strange symbolist drama set among the stalls and shops of Fashion Street, she fights Diana Dors for the attentions of an East End bodybuilder. Reed, Vera recalls, would instruct actors by performing the lines himself. “It was strange, watching him being me, and then Primo Carnera, this huge Italian wrestler.”
The press took an interest in her, too. Picture Show reported, quite erroneously, that she had been injured in a car crash on the way to the Danziger studios. (A merciful deliverance if it had happened, given the quality of Danziger productions.) The Mirror asserted, more accurately, that a German film company had offered her a £15,000 contract to play a stripper. (“It’s one thing to give them rocket bases,” they thundered, “but that’s no reason for Vera to show Deutschland Alles.”) Her separation from her first husband, a Charles Atlas model and masseur called Arthur Mason, attracted the attention of the gossip columnists – as did the details of his brushes with the law. While they were married, however, the copy was good: “Given a couple of extra inches all round,” exclaimed the Daily Mirror in April 1960, ‘Miss Day (husband Arthur Mason) might begin to challenge Miss Monroe (husband Arthur Miller)”
Mason wasn’t much of a Miller. But Vera did survive a skirmish with Marilyn Monroe. She had a small part in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), and Monroe saw to it that it was as small as possible. “Marilyn insisted I wore a brown wig,” she remembers. “I’m a blonde and she didn’t want any competition at all.” But an attempt to sabotage her costume seems to have backfired. “Marilyn had this one white dress to wear which if you’ve seen the film you’ll know was very figure-hugging. One day the designer Beatrice Dawson called me to say they were making me a new dress. This dress when I got it clung to me like I couldn’t tell you. It was flesh-coloured and it looked as if I was nude. It was a dynamite dress. And I walked on that set and she nearly had a heart attack.”
Vera Day is now in her late seventies. I am pleased to report that she remains resolutely, furiously, ineluctably blonde.
Vera Day (left) with rival blonde Dian Dors (right) in A Kid for Two Farthings.
Carol Reed’s film of Wolf Mankowitz’s novel was filmed on location in Spitalfields in 1954.
Vera Day in 2006
portrait of Vera Day copyright © Definitive Images
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Michael Shapiro, from Stepney to Peking
Michael Shapiro
There is no reason why you should know the name of Michael Shapiro. He is one of the missing people of East End history. Even his closest friends and colleagues knew little of his ultimate fate, and those still alive who remember him talk of him like a man lost at sea long ago.
In the 1930s, however, he was one of the principal intellectuals of radical politics in the capital; a lecturer at the London School of Economics who gave unofficial legal advice to the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was a campaigner passionately dedicated to liberating his neighbours from the miseries of damp flats and exploitative landlords – the author of a crusading pamphlet, Heartbreak Homes: An Indictment of the National Government’s Housing Policy (1935). He was one of the leaders of the group of demonstrators who, in September 1940, invaded the air raid shelter of the Savoy hotel to protest about the poor protection for those who lived in the areas where the bombs were falling most thickly. After the war, he was propelled into local government and took office as a Communist councillor for Stepney. But then began his love affair with Mao Zedong’s China – an affair that brought him close to destruction and estranged him from the country of his birth.
Owlish and prematurely bald, Michael Shapiro combined his devotion to theoretical Marxism with a passion for the quickstep, and once smuggled a ticketless girlfriend into a dance at St Pancras Town Hall by yanking her up through a window. The state treated him with suspicion: during the war, MI5 took an interest in his activities – though by 1943, the Ministry of Labour made enquiries about employing him and his fellow East End radical Phil Piratin to write official propaganda material in a sphere “where their technical qualifications could be utilised and their views do less harm.” Two years later, they both had something better than the indulgence of Whitehall. They had power.
In the summer of 1945, democracy returned to Britain. The General Election that brought Clement Attlee his landslide victory also gave the Savoy invaders cause to celebrate. Voters in the East End remembered how the Stepney Communists had campaigned for deep shelters; knew that fewer of their neighbours would have died in the fire and falling masonry if the National Government had listened to their demands. They handed out their reward at the ballot box. Twelve Communists took their seats on Stepney Borough Council. Among them were Michael Shapiro and the leading man of yesterday’s blog, Max Levitas. Phil Piratin was elected MP for Mile End.
Finding people with clear memories of Michael Shapiro was not easy, but I did talk to someone who knew him in the post-war years, as a prospective stepfather. Anna Shepherd told me about the romantic friendship that blossomed between her mother and Shapiro in the late 1940s, after his separation from his first wife, Eileen. Anna recalls the jaunts they took together – visits to the Tower of London, to a fortune-teller’s stall in Petticoat Lane market, and longer trips, under the aegis of the Communist Party, to campsites in the New Forest. Once the children had gone to bed, the adults danced into the night. “All this time,” Anna recalled, “he was studying Chinese and couldn’t wait to see the victory of Mao over the Kuomintang. I asked him why he was so interested in China. He knew all about the Long March and then said that Jews had settled in China thousands of years ago. I was very surprised.”
In 1950 Shapiro left England to work as an advisor to the state news agency in Peking. After his departure, few of his friends and family ever saw him again. In 1955 his name appeared in a Ministry of Defence report on the treatment of British Prisoners of War in North Korea. Two witnesses claimed to have encountered him as he toured the prison camps under the protection of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. One, a sergeant in the Royal Ulster Rifles, alleged that Shapiro had threatened to have him executed by firing squad. The charge was never substantiated, but the damage was done.
Unable to return to England, Shapiro started a family in the serviced bungalow provided by the Peking government, wrote articles applauding his hosts and became a shadowy presence in hostile accounts of China in the British press. In the 1950s a Daily Express reporter clocked him at an official banquet in Peking and dismissed him as an “ingratiating, even obsequious figure [who] trotted about eagerly, trying to make friends, or at least acquaintances with the British visitors.” The Times reported him as being one of a number of expatriates who helped the Red Guard ransack the British Mission in Peking in August 1967. Another report cast him as the tormentor of Harry Lloyd, another British defector who suffered a nervous breakdown after being accused of anti-Maoism. “While he was in Peking recuperating, a group of radical foreigners led by British Communist Party member … Michael Shapiro came to his bedside to harangue him about his political errors.”
This zeal did not save him from suffering: the Chinese authorities rewarded his loyalty with five years of detention without trial. Shapiro was fortunate, however, in that he was rehabilitated without being killed first: when he died in 1986, Deng Xiaoping hailed him as “a staunch international soldier and sincere friend of the Chinese people.” In February 2010, I wrote to Michael’s brother, Jack, to request an interview. He died with the letter unopened on his kitchen table. At his funeral, tributes were offered by representatives of the governments of China and North Korea, and by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a minuscule group of die-hards of which he was Honorary President. At the time of writing, it is still possible to view Jack Shapiro on Youtube, denouncing Khrushchev’s revisionism. His brother Michael has his memorial, too – a journalism prize given to promising young reporters in Beijing. Perhaps the time will come when one of them will feel able to write an honest biography of the man after whom the award is named.
A pamphlet written by Michael Shapiro while a councillor for Stepney.
[youtube lWyBmPl8FVE nolink]
Michael Shapiro’s brother Jack (1907-2010) eulogises China in 2008.
Archive images from Bishopsgate Institute
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