Stephen Selby, Antiquarian
Stephen Selby lives in a wonderfully rambling flat above Broadway Market which – as he will be sure to inform you – was once an ancient trackway continuing down through Columbia Rd and cutting a swathe across the grid of more recent East End streets. And where it crosses the Hackney Rd – he will add – was the Nag’s Head, a coaching inn that was the haunt of Dick Turpin, the notorious highwayman. Thus, from the moment you begin a conversation with Stephen, you are swept up into his beguiling vision of London that romances the familiar city to become an undiscovered landscape of myth and legend. And some of the stories he has to tell – especially of the founding of London as New Troy by Aeneas’ grandson Brutus three thousand years ago – are quite mind-boggling.
Chain-smoking, sporting snazzy red braces, surrounded by old maps, classical texts, pale brocade sofas, bottles of malt whisky and half-eaten packets of cream crackers, sits the debonair and courteous Stephen Selby – who worked in advertising in New York in the sixties and today is Chairman of the Broadway Market Traders’ Association – who recently unravelled the story of the Hackney hoard – and who now devotes himself to reading the ancient historians in their original Latin and Greek as part of his ongoing investigation into the lost prehistory of London. “I was looking for prehistoric London, so I looked up ‘Prehistoric London’ as a matter of course and I came across Elizabeth Gordon’s 1914 book ‘Prehistoric London, Its Mounds & Circles’,” admitted Stephen, and such is his passion for what this book has to say that he would only give me an interview once I had read it.
“What amazed me was the wide picture of our prehistory that exists and has been around for centuries, yet for the last three hundred and fifty years much of these legends were eradicated,” he told me, with emphatic enthusiasm, showing me – as illustration – a map of London dated 1582 with the inscription, “This ancient and famous City of London was founded by Brutus the Trojan.” Stephen is disappointed that since the foundation of the Royal Society, modern historians set themselves apart from legend and myth though an insistence upon verifiable fact, thereby denying the possibility that legend might contain a version of historical truth which has its own validity. Yet to Stephen’s delight, Elizabeth Gordon worked in the opposite direction, making sense of legend as history and it has inspired him to continue her work a century later.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the twelfth century, created the most widely read account of how, after the Greeks burnt Troy, Brutus rounded up dispossessed Trojans and led them to Britain – the country to which he gave his name – where he founded London as New Troy upon a marshy river valley which resembled Troy. Stephen has been seeking surviving evidence of Brutus and his dynasty that might confirm the veracity of the story. His first discovery was the etymology of Watling St which he believes derives from the Latin “Vates” meaning priest (as in “Vatican”), and his second discovery was that, like Troy, the ancient landscape of London was once scattered with mounds, erased by the modern city yet recorded upon old maps. Holywell Mound (at the junction of Curtain Rd and Great Eastern St) and Whitechapel Mound (upon the current site of the Royal London Hospital) were two in the East End, both of enigmatic origin and both removed in the eighteenth century.
According to Elizabeth Gordon, four mounds in London were of special significance to King Brutus -“Upon the two natural eminences of the Llandin and the Penton, the eyes of Brutus must have rested when he made the choice of his capital, while the two smaller artificial mounds of the White Mound and Tothill may have been erected by the Trojan King as trade increased under his rule.” Llandin (from which London took its name) that we know as Parliament Hill, was the centre of political activity, Penton (at Pentonville) was the centre of worship and observation of the stars, the White Mound (where the Tower of London now stands) was the place of royal burial and Tothill (located at Westminster) was a religious sanctuary. Elizabeth Gordon also tells us that Brutus’ descendant Molmutius laid out the roads, a task completed by his son Bellinus (who gave his name to Billingsgate Market) – especially fascinating to Stephen, eager to suggest that the straight roads usually credited to the Romans might be of greater age, and the mounds could have been instrumental in laying out their courses.
Stephen delights to draw upon old maps, extending straight trackways and linking the mysterious mounds to create a web of connecting coloured lines that hint at a greater scheme without revealing its significance, teasing and fascinating him equally. “The mystery of history,” as he terms it, his eyes misting just a little in captivated amusement as he takes a contemplative puff upon yet another of his Pall Mall cigarettes.
Down below, hipsters were perched like crows in a line sipping coffees in Broadway Market, whilst secluded up above in his Georgian green study Stephen Selby, the antiquarian and classical scholar, was reading Herodotus in Greek, consulting his Homeric dictionary and dreaming of an epic ancient world, as on a page of his old schoolboy atlas he traced the line that the Scythians travelled in their exodus from China across Asia to settle in Scotland – a journey evidenced, he assured me, by the tartan clad mummies of Urumchi in Xinjiang.
What is the significance of the Spitalfields Triangle? A perfect equilateral triangle links the sites of the former Whitechapel Mount and Holywell Mount, and St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London, shown here on John Roque’s map of 1746. (Click to enlarge)
Mount Terrace in Whitechapel is the only visible evidence today of the ancient mound that once stood here before the Royal London Hospital was built in the eighteenth century.
At the Geffrye Almhouses
Visiting the Mariners’ almhouses at Trinity Green in Whitechapel last week filled me with curiousity to discover more of the former life of these places, and so I sought out the Geffrye almhouses in Shoreditch which are now the Geffrye Museum, where a couple of dwellings have been restored as they were once inhabited. After three centuries, the bewigged statue of Sir Robert Geffrye – the enterprising Cornishman who came to London at the age of sixteen, enjoyed a prosperous career as an ironmonger and was declared Lord Mayor of London in 1685 – still presides with a satisfied smile upon this fine terrace built in 1714 at his bequest by the Ironmongers’ Company to provide homes for “poor people of good character over the age of fifty-six.”
At that time, much of the land North of Old St was given over to nurseries and market gardens, punctuated by clay pits and kilns for tile making. Quieter and healthier than the City of London, it was the ideal location for almshouses, with the Drapers Company and the Frameknitters company also building to the North and South of the Geffrye site. Built by carpenter Robert Burford, the fourteen Geffrye almhouses were constructed of good quality materials, “of oake or good yellow firr,” and “good plain tyles with heart of oak lathes,” while windows were glazed with “the best Castle (Newcastle) glass,” and each door had “a stoute lock, key and bolt and latch and good hinges.” The buildings were lacking in ostentation, with minimal ornamentation upon the interior where each dwelling consisted of a single unfurnished room of thirteen by fifteen feet.
And for two hundred years, the Geffrye almhouses served their noble purpose until the rowdy city began to impinge upon the delicate sensibility of the elderly residents and, in 1908, the almshouse matron, Annie Young, complained that “All kinds of objectionable rubbish were thrown over the wall…rows between men and women were constantly to be seen…and the children who ran about the yards seemed scarcely to be human.” In 1912, the Ironmongers Company transferred their worthy pensioners to the more isolated and peaceful location of Mottingham in Kent and sold the almshouses to the London County Council who converted them into a museum of furniture, reflecting the location of Shoreditch as the centre of the furniture industry then.
Yet one dwelling remained unaltered with its staircase and internal woodwork intact, in use as the museum warden’s house until 1996, and this has now been restored with one room as it might have been in 1780 and another as it might have been in 1880. Stepping in through the double doors from the yard shaded by great trees, you find yourself in a staircase that once led to four residences on two storeys. On the ground floor you enter the austere eighteenth century room, bare boards, lead-grey painted walls, a few unframed prints, a small dining table, a stick-back chair set by the brick range and a stump bed in the corner. Although this single room – with a tiny closet for preparing food – might have been occupied by a couple, it does not seem cramped and is comparable to, or even larger than, rooms I have visited in care homes for old people today.
A list of residents from the seventeen eighties reveals that most were small tradesmen from London who enjoyed modest success in their working lives, and many were able to continue some form of piecework to supplement their small pensions. They were obligated to keep their rooms clean, to be in before the gates locked at night, to refrain from blasphemy or keeping poultry on the front lawn, and adultery and lewdness were both punishable by expulsion, yet the evidence of the records shows that the apparent strict regulations appear to have been followed leniently. No-one was expelled.
One flight of stairs above, you enter a room of the eighteen eighties and the immediate difference is that there are more things, more furniture and more trinkets. The brick range is replaced by a cast iron grate while a brass bedstead gleams in the corner – and two brackets above the fireplace carry the innovation of gaslight. In 1898, Henry Barrett the gatekeeper recorded an incident with matron’s new gas oven, “I met with an Axedon today. There Exploded in the matron’s House the Gas. I Filled the Gas oven in the stove & I opened the Door & it exploded in my face, Burned my Face & Hair & Whiskers & Burned off my Eye Lashes. It was God’s Good Providence my Eyes was not Hurt.” Looking from the window out into the tiny courtyard where once fifty people resided in these almshouse, I could only wonder at the drama occasioned by the exploding oven in such an isolated community – where few people left except feet first and some were simply transferred direct to the ironmongers’ cemetery conveniently placed within the grounds at the end of the terrace.
But in spite of the exploding ovens and rowdy neighbours, census records reveal that the Geffrye pensioners lived far beyond average life expectancy at the time – in this shangri la on the Kinsgland Rd – as Henry Barrett recorded in his journal,“Miss Daniel Died after seven years Bedrid, I think near a hundred years old.” Even today, with the steady flow of visitors and school parties to the Geffrye Museum, there is an enduring air of peace in this place that is instantly restored once the crowds have passed through the yard, and inside the almhouses you feel it pervasively, in these quiet rooms where people have sat out time.
The ironmongers’ graveyard in a quiet corner of the grounds.
The courtyard in 1948, photograph by L. Taylor
Schoolchildren visit the museum in 1961.
A room furnished as it might have been in 1780.
A room furnished as it might have been in 1880.
1780.
1880.
The crockery cupboard of 1880.
Geffrye pensioners enjoy the sun in 1903 – amused by their pet monkey on a stand.
Archive images copyright © Geffrye Museum
The Dogs of Spitalfields
Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Sarah Ainslie and writer Andrew McCaldon have been getting up early to join the dogs of Spitalfields and their owners frolicking in Allen Gardens, Weavers’ Fields and Haggerston Park on these recent fine Spring mornings. Although they have no dogs of their own, both Sarah and Andrew grew up around dogs and delighted in the opportunity to make these crafty portraits, as a happy excuse to join the local canine crew.
Tiger (Great Dane) & Paul Clarke
“To me, he’s always “Tig” – that’s how he knows it’s me.
I was dumped, as a baby, on the steps of St. John’s at the bottom of Bethnal Green Road. A woman found me and I was put in the orphanage round the corner. I ended up in the Royal Marines – for twenty-four years, three days and two hours – until 1973, then I went walkabout for few years. Now I look after the nuns at St. Saviour’s.
I trained Tig myself. He’s got to earn his money and the City police borrow him a lot. If he’s looking for you, you better hit the deck quick. He doesn’t bark, he just gets you down on the floor and then he waits for me.
When he’s good, great. When he misbehaves, I’m the guvnor.
The nuns like him because he’s emotional company and when they know he’s about they call for him. They all want him in their room and they get jealous if he spends too much time with one of them.
Tig’s so placid. If a person is placid, the dog will be the same. And I am mellow now too – after twenty-four years of killing you mellow a bit.”
May (Staffordshire Bull Terrier) & Michael Landy
“When I have a hangover and have to get up at seven am in the morning to walk her, I ask myself “Why did I do this?”
I hadn’t had a dog since I was child and, being an artist, it’s not the easiest thing looking after one. She’s a pain in the bum at my studio – every time I look up she’s staring at me. But she’s learnt not to walk on my drawings.
She’s a big chewer, likes destroying anything. I think we’ve both got the same destructive personality!
At my age it’s nice to get back into parks. I was born in Graham Rd in Hackney, I spent a lot of time in parks as a kid, you know.They were places for illicit goings on, you used to get chased, thrown out by the wardens. Now I’m a middle aged man, I’m responsible – for May – and I’m back in parks.”
Shadow (Alaskan Malamute) & Michela Cucchi
“When I first saw him he followed me everywhere, always by my bum, and it’s like the song says – “Me and My Shadow.”
I didn’t want a normal dog, I wanted something I could learn from. These are really the first ever dogs, he’s very primitive, a domesticated wolf effectively. He’ll eat a whole chicken over three days.
He’s very protective of me, wants to be at my fruit and veg stall all day, hates going home. People see me differently, before it was always “You’re the lady on the stall,” now it’s “You’re the lady with the dog.”
When my Mum died and she was at home with us, he knew what was going on, he wouldn’t leave me. After she went, I just walked and walked and walked – with Shadow.
He was my sanity.”
Homer (French Bulldog) & Caroline Johnson
“I didn’t think I’d care for something so much – now I’m totally controlled by this tiny little furball!
Homer preceded me. I’m not his first mother but I like to think I’m his best mother.
He was born in Texas but my husband raised him in New York. Homer had lots of friends there in the East Village, although he didn’t like the fourth floor walk up. When we both moved to London, it was four months before he could join us. We used to have him put on the phone and listen to him breathing.
Now we come to Allen Gardens every day, Homer needs to see his friends, we have to wait until he’s got a playmate. He’s not been fixed so he’s a bit of a pervert!
He’s twelve now, he’s an old man, could probably do with a bit of botox on his face. But he’s a happy dog and as they say, “Happiness keeps you young,” right?”
Charlie Pellicci (Yorkshire Terrier) & Nevio Pellicci
“He’s just been to the dog parlour on Columbia Rd for his summer haircut.
We used to have a guard dog at the cafe, about twenty years ago, an Alsatian called “Sparky,” because we’d been broken into and everyone got worried. But I was too young to appreciate him then.
I chose to get Charlie but he’s become the family’s dog now. Since Dad’s not been there, Mum’s become more attached to him – you know, we’ve started to have child “right of access” issues.
He eats very well! He has all the usual biscuits and steak pie, nice little bits of grilled chicken, seafood, he loves seafood. Only one thing he won’t eat – lettuce. He’ll lick the dressing off but won’t touch the leaves.
It is a good name for him. He looks like a real Charlie.”
Maya (Shih Tzu) & Lorraine Carter
“Oh, it was hard getting up every morning to walk her in the snow, but she loved it. Instead of her ball I threw her snowballs.
Life is different for dogs around here now. My Granddad had a dog, an Alsatian, that used to go on the round with the milkman in the morning and the evening. In Homerton we had a mongrel, he could have a free run, he’d just come back home when he was ready. You’ve got to watch out for them more now, and Maya’s so gentle, I’d be worried she’d be taken from me.
But I wouldn’t live anywhere else. This area’s got “oomph,” I can breathe more here. And getting Maya was the right thing to do.
She’s a joy, an absolute joy.”
Stevie (Wire Fox Terrier) & George Wu
“He’s Tintin’s dog! I always liked Snowy more than Tintin, always wanted Snowy. And he is Snowy, but just not as clever as Snowy.
I got a sofa and came home to find he’d eaten one of the wooden arm rests.
It’s like having a kid. I’m a graphic designer, Stevie comes to work with me every day. He sits in a basket on the back of my bicycle and looks out. He’s ten kilos, it’s a nightmare.
He’s used to being carried, I have to carry him all the time at house parties or private views round here, or on the tube.
Stevie’s with me all the time – wherever I go, he goes.”
Cassius (German Shepherd) & Tony Morris
“Cass’s grandfather won Crufts in 2007 and 2008. I’m planning to enter him into shows too. We’ve been to the Shoreditch Dog Show and won some money. But Cass could win Crufts – I really want to enter him, he’s got winning genes in his body!
I’ve had him since he was eight weeks old. I walk him for two hours every morning. He’s learning to be calm around people and dogs, which is how you win championships.
I grew up on Goldsmiths Row. My dream is to move to St. Albans, because I’ve seen a lot of trouble around here. I’m not scared of anything though. I’m doing a diploma in English, I want to do a course in locksmithery and I’d like to be a gym instructor too.
And I’ll always have dogs.”
Forest (Dalmatian) & Joe Pritchett
“A bloke left him on my ex’s doorstep. Her house was like Dr. Doolittle’s. I said I’d take him home for one night and it’s been three and a half years.
He’s “Forest” because he’s a runner, bred to run alongside the carriages and Forest Gump was a runner too. And, well, I’m Nottingham Forest fan.
I had trouble, I found it hard to get on my feet, but now I feel like I’m a do-er. Having to be out three times a day for him, it helps with my motivation, it helps with everything.
I’ve never had to look after anything in my life but now I’ve got Forest.”
Photographs © Sarah Ainslie
The Spitalfields Nobody Knows (Part Two)
Nestling at the base of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s monumental spire for Christ Church, Spitalfields, is the tiny private roof garden on the top of 3 Fournier St, where what was once planted as a camomile lawn has grown to become a wildflower meadow with pink campions, oxe-eye daisies and sorrel abounding. The pitched roofs on three sides entirely conceal this verdant arbor from the street and create a favoured climate where freesias, carnations, honeysuckle, wallflowers, foxgloves, wild strawberries and lettuces flourish, surrounded by espalier fruit trees and rambling roses, all unknown to those who tread the dusty pavements of Commercial St far below. Built in 1754 by Peter Le Keux, a silkweaver, this elegant old house follows the same Tuscan Order of architecture that was Hawksmoor’s guiding principle, and as you ascend the staircase endlessly winding up to the roof garden, you come upon subtle intricate details, like banisters with square capitals, that match those across the road at the church.
The Worrall House of 1720 is the quintessence of the Spitalfields nobody knows – built in a secret courtyard between Fournier St and Princelet St by Samuel Worrall, the builder responsible for many of the surrounding houses, it can only be approached through a narrow passage behind a heavily-encrusted door. When you step through this door, into the dark cobbled alley lined with ancient planks covered with paint and tar that has not been renewed in over a century, you feel – more than anywhere in Spitalfields – that you have stepped back in time. Here Samuel Worrall built a handsomely proportioned yet modest house for himself in his own builders’ yard. Just one room deep with a pedimented door and stone balls atop the gateposts, it resembles a perfect lifesize dolls’ house. Facing East and constructed of a single layer of bricks, it only receives sunlight in the morning and is not a warm building in Winter, yet there is an irresistible grace and mystery about this shadowy house of enchantment, presiding silently upon a quiet courtyard that is outside time.
Joanna Moore’s drawing of Victoria Cottages in Deal St was done upon the spot where Geoffrey Fletcher, author of “The London Nobody Knows,”sat and drew the same view in May 1977, when this terrace was threatened by bulldozers. Built in 1855 by the Metropolitan Association for Dwellings for Housing the Industrious Poor, after the design of Prince Albert’s Model Cottages for the Great Exhibition of 1851, these are one of the earliest examples of two storey cottage apartments. Scheduled for demolition in a slum clearance scheme, they were saved in 1978 through the intervention of Peter Shore who was both local MP and Environment Minister. If Geoffrey Fletcher came back today he would be delighted to step through the old iron gate and discover well-tended cottage gardens where the fragrance of flowers hangs in the air. Pairs of neat white front doors lead either to the ground or first floor dwellings, which, although designed as the minimum in the nineteenth century, appear generous and sympathetic by contemporary standards. To the rear is a peaceful flagged courtyard where residents hang their laundry, tend the shared garden and hold wild annual parties that are the talk of Spitalfields.
Drawings copyright © Joanna Moore
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Brick Lane Market 8
This is Paul Macatoni, the sack seller, with his fine display of printed hessian coffee bags from Africa, Asia and South America, that he has been selling on Sclater St for the past six months. “They’re popular, I’m in a niche market,” he admitted with glee, “People use them as decoration, storage, or to re-upholster furniture, to make cushions, beanbags and one lady even made a handbag out of one.” The amassing of so many sacks draws attention to their aesthetic qualities, attracting curious crowds to admire their typographic decoration and exotic trade marks, ensuring a brisk trade for Paul. The rest of the week he runs a call centre in Chigwell, but on Sundays Paul is big in sacks.
This is John Calcutt who has been trading on Brick Lane each Sunday since 1974. “I’m from Hoxton and I used to come down here when I was a little boy, and the stall next to me sold performing fleas.” he recalled affectionately, casting his eyes up and down the market, “It was absolutely packed by eight in the morning, they used to ring a bell at one o’clock then and you had to stop.” Now semi-retired, yet still energetic and limber, John comes from Dagenham to sell rugs here and in Deptford, three days a week.“I don’t like getting up early in the morning but I still come because I’ve got a mortgage to pay,” he confided as he began to fold up his wares, turning morose in his weariness. “I’m just hanging on,” he confessed to me in a whisper, “I don’t even break even but I don’t mind coming, as long as I don’t lose too much money.” It was an admission that revealed John’s depth of sentiment for Brick Lane. But then John remembered that he is close to paying off his mortgage, the result of thirty-seven years hard work here in the market, and brightened visibly, “Another three months, and I’ll be free in July!” he declared, triumphant.
This is Laura & Milly, two skinny art students from London Metropolitan University who have been trading here on Brick Lane for seven weeks, selling books and bric-a-brac from a folding table.“It’s been tough, we’re not going to lie – but today’s been really good,” revealed Milly, sharing an emotional grin of achievement with Laura.“This is our food money for the week, we’ll go food shopping tonight before we get the bus back to Stratford.” she added in excited anticipation of a feast, revealing how essential the stall is to their survival during their studies. The pair fell into market life almost by accident. “We got pissed one night and thought, ‘We’ll give it a go!'” confessed Laura with a blush, making light of the origin of this brave endeavour that has made such a difference to their quality of life –“and now we’re both addicted, because it’s too much fun.”
This is the amiable Frank Ganeda – dealer in minerals – who was born in Eastern Europe, raised in Canada, and after ten years here now admits, “It’s hard to remember the original reasons why I came.” Fascinated by the legends and the touch of all his multi-coloured rocks and crystals that glint and gleam in the sunlight, Frank has found his ideal occupation in life – permitting him to go travelling to warm places each Winter and buy stones, which he can then sell in London each Summer, the high season for sales of minerals. “One of the fascinating parts of this job is picking what to bring to Brick Lane, I can spend hours deciding,” he disclosed, his pupils sparkling with the intensity of his polished stones. And whichever you pick, Frank will regale you with his eloquent patter, outlining their propitious influences, and sometimes rattling them together in his cupped hands and holding them up to your ear, saying, “Let me show you how they sing together.”
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
The Hackney Hoard
The tale of the Hackney hoard is an unlikely adventure that is also a true story – one which begins with a simple hole in the lawn and expands to become a epic international drama of Nazi gold, spanning generations and traversing the globe.
One day, Terry Castle, along with a volunteer and two of the residents at the centre in Bethune Rd, Hackney, where he was employed as a disability support worker, decided to dig a frog pond. “It was my idea,” explained Terry, who characterises himself as a psycho-geographer, “I’m big into amphibian preservation.”
“I got my team together, and we were three weeks into the digging. I was in my office – but I had to keep an eye on them because three people digging in a hole can be at risk of accidents – when the volunteer, who’s a local girl, looks up and says, ‘There’s something here, Terry.’ At this point we were about two and a half feet down. I saw a glass jar sticking out at a forty five-degree angle with its top pointing down. The metal seal had deteriorated to nothing. I thought, ‘This is unusual,’ because there was a lot of rubble at the site from when it had been bombed.
I remembered I had a builder’s trowel in the tool cupboard, so I excavated around the jar for about fifteen minutes. By complete coincidence, two weeks earlier, I had been working eight hours a day on the excavations at Syon Park, so I knew what to do. I studied archaeology at Birkbeck College, although my speciality was prehistory.
We hauled the jar up onto the grass and it weighed considerably more that it should weigh, it was whole and quite large. Thoughts go through your mind. What’s in this glass jar? Weights from a scales, somebody’s pebble collection, or something more sinister? I stuck in my hand and pulled out a roll of paper and put it in the palm of my hand, it was greaseproof paper. A second later, I pulled the paper apart and I saw a roll of gold coins, with the statue of Liberty marching out of the front coin in high relief.
If there was a moment which was special that was it. ‘My God, I think we’ve found treasure!’ I said. Then I took it up to the office and and slapped it on the table and said, ‘We’ve found gold.’ I wrapped it up in plastic and put in the safe and called the Museum of London. They came along from the Museum early evening. But I do remember thinking, ‘Shall I take just one, or shall I take a whole roll?'”
Yet Terry did not take a single coin of the eighty double-headed eagle American gold dollars – much to his regret, because neither he nor the others who found them ever received any recompense for their honesty. “I think something’s extremely fishy,” he claims, “We never got a cup of tea or coffee or a biscuit, but we got three years of stress and I’ve lost my respect for the law. I was known as ‘Mr Bling’ in Hackney, which is very hard when you’re not ‘Mr Bling.'”
Once the discovery of the Hackney hoard became the headline of the Hackney Gazette in October last year, it piqued the curiosity of local historian Stephen Selby who applied his sleuthing skills to remarkable effect in unravelling the tale behind the burial of the trove. In the Times’ archive Stephen found a report of a previous find of eighty-two “double eagles” at the same address in 1952 when the current building was constructed. These were awarded by the coroner to Martin Sulzbacher, a resident of the bombed house that once stood upon the site. Sulzbacher was a German Jew who had fled persecution from Nazi Germany in the late thirties and bought a double fronted suburban villa in Hackney. In 1940, when Martin Sulzbacher’s brother Fritz found the family was on an SS hit list in the event of an invasion of Britain, he took the gold coins from the safe deposit box in the City of London and buried them in the garden in Woolworths Killner jars.
Minted in the United States between 1854 and 1913, these coins were part of the hundred million dollar American loan paid to Germany for post-war reconstruction in 1924, money that Hitler eventually appropriated for his own purposes. No-one knows how Martin Sulzbacher acquired them or transported them into Britain, yet it seems the gold brought him no luck. After escaping the Nazis, he was interned by the British government as an enemy alien refugee, and sent to Canada on the Arandora Star which was torpedoed and sunk. Miraculously rescued after hours in the water, he was then sent to Australia on the Dunera, before being brought back to the Isle of Man where his wife and children were also interned.
As if this was not enough, when he was released, Martin Sulzbacher went to the deposit box and found his gold was gone. Meanwhile Fritz had informed a friend that no-one else need know of the location of the buried gold because all five members of his family knew it, but then the house took a direct hit on 24th September 1940 and they were all killed. Poor Martin Sulzbacher waited until the first discovery in 1952 for the return of eighty-two of his coins and, since he died in 1981, it befell to his son Max to come from Jerusalem to collect this recent hoard which was awarded to him by the coroner at St Pancras Coroner’s Court on 18th April. It seems the story ends there and Stephen Selby says graciously, “My greatest satisfaction is to have repatriated Max with his parent’s memory.”
Meanwhile Terry Castle lost his job, partly as a consequence of the discovery, and he has still to plumb the deeper significance of it all – “As a psycho-geographer I do think it’s very strange that we found gold when we digging a frog pond.” – yet he consoles himself with this small comfort – “I’m a free man, freer than I’d be if I had the treasure.”
Archaeologists have now excavated the site to ensure that no further gold coins remain.
Terry Castle, the psycho-geographer who discovered the gold while digging a frog pond.
Stephen Selby, the local historian who unravelled the story of the gold.
A Wedding Dress of Spitalfields Silk
At Kensington Palace is preserved a modest white satin dress of Spitalfields silk of one hundred and seventy years old, made for a tiny woman with a miniscule waist, barely five feet tall and just twenty years of age. Lain upon the table in the former dining room of Princess Margaret and sequestered from natural light behind closed curtains, it has a delicacy that is almost ethereal, as if it were a gown left behind by a sylph or a passing fairy – but in fact this was the dress that Queen Victoria wore when she wed Prince Albert on 10th February 1840.
Just four months earlier, Victoria had set eyes upon her grown-up cousin for the first time only yards from where I had come to view her dress. And as I was led through the echoing passages at the Palace – where Spitalfields Life was granted special access to see this garment sewn of cloth woven in Spitalfields – I came into a fine stair hall known as the Stone Steps at the core of the building. Victoria was born in a room at the top of these steps, which as a child she was not permitted to climb or descend without another holding her hand, such were the stifling restrictions known as the Kensington System imposed upon the young queen by her mother. Although Victoria had been crowned at eighteen, until she married she could not move out to live independently at Buckingham Palace.
Yet upon these steps on 10th October 1839, Victoria was aroused by a vision of such rapture that it changed her life –“At half past seven I went to the top of the staircase and received my two dear cousins Ernest and Albert, – whom I found grown and changed and embellished. It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert who is beautiful…. so excessively handsome, such beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose, and such a pretty mouth with delicate mustachios and slight but very slight whiskers, a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist.” This was the man who would father her twelve children, and five days after their meeting she proposed to him.
When Victoria chose the dress to marry Albert, she broke from the lavish precedent of George IV’s eldest daughter Princess Charlotte who had married in a heavy dress of silk net embroidered with silver. Victoria might have been expected to wear red velvet robes trimmed with ermine and a gown of ostentatious wealth for her marriage, but instead she chose to wear a simple white satin dress that was within the aspiration of any woman of means – a decision that reflected her wish not to emphasise the difference in status between herself and her groom.
The dress was made in two pieces, a skirt and bodice sewn of the finest gauge of ivory silk satin woven in Spitalfields. The simple bell-like skirt was supported by layers of petticoats and Victoria wore a corset of whalebone beneath the bodice. White Honiton lace ruffles adorned her sleeves, with a band of lace at her neckline, while a lace overskirt and train of lace completed the dress. The graceful simplicity of Victora’s youthful conception broke with tradition, expressive of her confident independent spirit, yet it initiated the custom for the white wedding dresses that we know today.
Although plainest among the wedding dresses in the royal collection, Victoria’s is the most radical in its assertion of the wearer’s personality, expressive of her personal desire not to outshine Albert, while equally, in her selection of Spitalfields silk and Honiton lace, celebrating the accomplishment of the native textile industry. A gesture of consummate diplomacy when there were those who might criticise her choice of a foreign husband. But beyond these declared intentions, through its lack of decoration, Victoria’s dress has a human quality as a piece of clothing, emphasised here in the place where she lived, and where one day she walked out of the door forever to commence her new life with Albert.
“10th February 1840, Got up at a quarter to nine, Mamma came and brought me a nosegay of orange flowers. Wrote my journal, had my hair dressed and the wreath of orange flowers put on. Saw Albert for the last time alone, as my bridegroom. Dressed. I wore a white satin gown with a very deep flounce of Honiton lace, imitation of old. I wore my Turkish diamond necklace and earrings and Albert’s beautiful sapphire brooch…”
Once she arrived at Buckingham Palace after her marriage – Victoria wrote – “I went and sat on the sofa in my dressing-room with Albert, and we talked together there from ten minutes to two till twenty minutes past two.” Only this silk gown and its creases were witness to that intimate half hour when Albert and Victoria were first alone together as husband and wife. But we know she carried the affectionate memories of the day, because Victoria continued to wear the train of Honiton lace from the wedding dress for the rest of her life and, even after Albert’s death, as an old lady in black, she wrapped herself in the white lace that enshrined her tenderest emotions.
Standing alone in the small dining room of the apartment in Kensington Palace, I cast my eyes upon the one hundred and seventy year old gown gleaming upon the table for one last time. This dress of Spitalfields silk was an instrument of liberation for Victoria, to leave the restrictions of her childhood and her past, to enter the arms of the man she loved, and to walk out in the wide world of potential that lay before her.
Marriage of Victoria and Albert by George Hayter, 1840
Top: Queen Victoria in her Wedding Dress by Franz Winterhalter, 1840
With grateful thanks to Joanna Marshner, Senior Curator, Kensington Royal Palace.
You may also like to read about Ann Fanshawe’s Dress of Spitalfields Silk.
