At Stephen Walters & Sons Ltd, Silkweavers
Joseph Walters of Spitalfields by Thomas Gainsborough
When Julius Walters of Stephen Walters & Sons says, “I am just a weaver,” it is an unselfconscious masterpiece of understatement, because he is a ninth generation weaver – the custodian of the venerable family business founded by his ancestor Joseph Walters in Spitalfields in 1720 and moved to Suffolk by his great-great-great-great-grandfather Stephen Walters in the nineteenth century, where today they continue to weave exemplary silk for the most discerning clients internationally, building upon the expertise and knowledge that has been accumulated over all this time. This is the company that wove the silk for the Queen’s coronation robes and for Princess Diana’s wedding dress.
Michael Hill of Drakes Ties in Clerkenwell, takes the train from Liverpool St several times a year to visit the mill and place his orders for silks that are woven there exclusively for Drakes each season, so I leapt at the opportunity to travel up with him and see for myself what has become of one of Spitalfields’ eighteenth century silk weavers.
Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Joseph Walters was there to greet us when we arrived at the long finely-proportioned brick silk mill overlooking the green water meadows at the edge of Sudbury, where his ninth generation descendant Julius came down the stairs to shake my hand. Blushing to deny any awareness of the family resemblance, that his proud secretary was at pains to emphasise, he chose instead to point out to me the willows that had been felled recently – as a couple are each year – for the manufacture of cricket bats.
We convened around a long wooden counter in a first floor room where the luxuriously coloured strike offs – as the samples are called – were laid out for Michael Hill to see, glowing in the soft East Anglian light. Already decisions for Drakes Spring/Summer 2012 collection had been made, the choice of fibre, its weave and pattern, and now Michael was here to make his final choice from the different options upon the table. There is such exquisite intricacy in these cloths that have tiny delicate patterns woven into their very construction, drawing the daylight and delighting the eye with their sensuous tones. Yet lifting my gaze, I could not resist my attention straying to the pigeon holes that lined the room, each one stacked with patterned silks of every hue and design. A curious silence resided here, yet somewhere close by there was a centre of loud industry.
“I’m more like an editor and a colourist than a designer,” suggested Michael by means of explanation, while excitedly caressing the silks between his fingers as he deliberated over the samples. “It comes from everything,” he replied with a bemused smile, when I asked him how he informed his choices, “It comes from when I used to drive around with my father who was a tiemaker, memories of what his generation were wearing, and generally only from other designers in terms of doing something different. ”
“Everything we do comes from somewhere…” interposed Julius Walters enigmatically, as he swung open a door and that unmistakeably appealing smell of old leather bindings met my nostrils. There were hundreds of volumes of silk samples from the last two centuries stacked up in there, comprising thousands upon thousands of unique jewel-like swatches still fresh and bright as the day they were made. Some of these books, often painstakingly annotated with technical details in italic script, comprised the life’s work of a weaver and all now bear panoramic witness to the true colours of our predecessors’ clothing. A vast memory bank woven in cloth, all available to be reworked for the present day and brought back to new life.
Spellbound by this perspective in time, I awoke to the clamour of the mill as we descended a staircase, passing through two glass doors and collecting ear plugs, before entering the huge workshop filled with looms clattering where new silk cloths were flying into existence. Here I stood watching the lush flourishes of acanthus brocades and tiny complex patterns for ties appear in magical perfection as if they had always existed, yet created by the simple principle of selecting how the weft crosses each thread of the warp, whether above or below. Although looms are mechanised now, each still retains its Jacquard above, the card that designates the path of every thread – named after Joseph Marie Jacquard who invented this device in 1804, which became so ubiquitous that his name has now also become both the term for the loom and for any silk cloth that has a pattern integrated into the weave.
With the bravura of a showman and the relish of an enthusiast, Julius led us on through more and more chambers and passages, into a silk store with countless coloured spools immaculately sorted and named – crocus and rose and mud – , into a vaporous dye plant where bobbins of white thread came out strawberry after immersion in bubbling vats of colour, into a steaming plant where rollers soften the cloth to any consistency, into the checking office where every inch is checked by eye and finally into the despatch office where the precious silken goods are wrapped in brown paper and weighed upon a fine red scales.
There are so many variables in silk weaving, so many different skills and so much that could go wrong, yet all have become managed into a harmonious process by Stephen Walters & Sons over nine generations. In his time, Julius has introduced computers to track every specification of ten of thousands of orders a year – one every five minutes – created by so may short runs, and new technology has provided a purifier which uses diamonds to cleanse dye from the water that eventually returns to the water meadow, renewing the water course that brought his ancestors from Spitalfields to Suffolk one hundred and fifty years ago.
“All my school holidays and spare time were spent at the mill – but then I went away, and came back again.” confided Julius quietly as we made our farewells, “With eight generations behind you, it changes the way you approach your life. It’s not about this year, it’s about managing the company from one generation to the next, so you deal with your employees and your customers differently.”
Now you know what it means when Julius Walters says, “I am just a weaver.”
Dobby Weaving, 1900.
Aaron Offord, Machine Operator.
Warping in the early twentieth century.
Vikki Meuser, Warping in the early twenty-first century.
Employees in 1966.
Mally Felton at her loom.
Weaving umbrella silk in the nineteen fifties.
Gerald Prentice at his loom.
Preparing skeins of silk for weaving the coronation robes, 1952.
Naomi Wright at her loom.
Weaving the silk for the coronation robes of Elizabeth II, 1952.
Staff photograph 1949, Bernard Walters (grandfather of Julius Walters) sits second from right in front row, with his sister Winnie on his left and Mill Manager Bill Parsons on his right.
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Prince of England, Underground Dancer
As skinny as a coat hanger and as lithe as an eel, this is underground dancer who is widely known among the cognoscenti by his sobriquet Prince of England. He kindly introduced me and Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Patricia Niven to his eclectic and glitzy circle of friends on Saturday, for a thrilling night out at “On the Rocks” in Shoreditch where he is one of the shining stars of the current renaissance in Vogueing. “You’ll see craziness!” he promised.
Arriving at one in the morning, it was as if we had walked into a magical dream. We drifted in elated disorientation in half-light through the billowing coloured smoke and lasers, encountering all manner of ethereal creatures, until we discovered the catwalk where colourful spirits strutted and tottered with endearing whimsical idiosyncrasy as they assumed the fashion model poses that are the constituents of Vogueing. Yet the atmosphere cleared in an instant when Prince appeared in disco pants and a hoodie, demonstrating the hair-raising ability of a young John Travolta to draw attention on the dance floor. With a spring coiled up inside him, the core of his being was manifest and everyone watched rapt as he uncurled his spindly limbs with heart-stopping control.
“I am an Old Way Voguer. It’s all about exteriors and it’s fierce. It’s a mixture of military and martial arts and hieroglyphics. It’s all about lines…” he declared to me with a thin crooked smile of jollity afterwards, still coming down from his performance yet raising his narrow eyebrows as his eyes shone in eagerness to proclaim the credentials which connect him to the origin of his chosen form of expression.
“My mentor is Archie Burnett of the Legendary House of Ninja, who was taught by Willi Ninja – known as the godfather of Vogueing. They have a community in New York, like a faith house, where Black and Hispanic kids who are thrown out of their homes can go to stay and learn dance. But since I am in the UK, I skype them twice a week…” he revealed. Inspired by this direct connection to the House of Ninja and so thin he looks like a drawing of himself, Prince has constructed a life devoted to heroic excellence in Vogueing.
Undoubtedly, Vogueing has unlocked something extraordinary in Prince, and I was delighted to be welcomed by his affectionate community of cartoon princesses of indeterminate gender and pop urchins in outsize singlets – who meet to party together in the early hours, and enjoy being playful in the free expression of their imaginative selves. They are the admiring courtiers and he is their Prince, with the redoubtable Scottee as the court jester in a lacy body suit, in this glamorous secret night kingdom in the Kingsland Rd. “You’ve got to be given your name, you can’t choose it.” Prince explained to me cheerfully, “My friend, Supple, the Dance Scientist, said to me, “You should be Prince of England because there is no-one more English than you in the underground scene,” and now everyone knows me as Prince. It’s cool because I never pitched it and I quite like it.”
Then, with an excited gleam of absurd humour, Prince, the Evangelist of Vogue, regaled me with the legend that Vogueing began when the New York Prisons banned pornographic magazines and inmates had to make do with copies of Vogue instead. Frustrated by this, they began re-enacting the models’ poses and staging pose-off contests which became dance battles. Refined by drag queens in the ballrooms of Harlem, the style eventually reached mainstream exposure in the nineteen eighties, though –“Madonna’s song is not even a Vogue song, you can’t easily Vogue to it!” Nikolas qualified authoritatively.
Even at twenty-two, Prince is already a seasoned professional who was in Les Miserables for ten months in the West End when he was twelve, and spent his tender years as a working child performer, before emerging as a major talent on the underground dance scene. And with plenty of willing students, Prince teaches Vogueing and its counterpart Waacking – a style that draws its vocabulary of movement from silent films. “Most people lack self-confidence and everybody likes to walk like a model, so Vogueing can help increase confidence.” he informed me persuasively, preaching the Gospel of Vogue, “Although Vogueing came out of the drag scene in the first place, the culture of Vogue became so bitchy in the nineties that it put women off, but I am trying to encourage them back – because the idea is to feel good about yourself, not to put others down.”
Fascinated by the possibility that dance can liberate people, I was touched by the delight I saw around me that night among those who take such joy in exploring ambiguous identity. Yet equally, I was aware that there was also an element of masquerading in which gestures can be assumed. “I’m a straight guy who does it” admitted Prince shyly, without wishing to sound apologetic,“Although many people would probably assume that I am gay – but I do it because I like the power of it. My mentor Archie was the first straight person to join a Vogueing House. He has a good phrase, he says, “You don’t have to be Chinese to enjoy Chinese food!”
Photographs © copyright Patricia Niven
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Marge Hewson, Nursery Nurse
Marge Hewson, Chicksand House, Spitalfields, 1959
On any school morning in Spitalfields, you may always rely upon spotting Marge Hewson between eight thirty and nine o’clock – traversing the streets from Greatorex St to the Chicksand Estate – trudging around in all weathers, ringing doorbells and collecting up her beloved charges until she has acquired a crocodile of as many as twenty small children, that she ushers safely to Christ Church School in Brick Lane where she has been Nursery Nurse for forty years.
And as a consequence, she is one of the most popular people you could ever meet, cherished by generations of local people for whom Marge’s benign presence is an integral part of their childhood landscape. “As big as they are, they’ll still stop me and ask for a hug in the street, even teenagers.” she revealed with a proud blush, as a significant indicator of the outcome of a life lived at the very centre of her community.
“I must admit I have never got away from here, but I am not unhappy with it,” confided Marge upon quiet consideration, when I dropped by to visit her at the school yesterday after four o’ clock, once it had emptied out of pupils and peace reigned. “You can’t really put into words what it was like,” said Marge to me, with characteristically shrewd reserve and a self-effacing smile, before proceeding to evoke her Brick Lane childhood with lyrical ease.
“I was brought up in Flower & Dean St just off Brick Lane – the “Flowerie” we called it. Just a few small shops and tenements, all pulled down now. You knew everybody and everybody knew you, and nobody had any money. You learnt to stand on your own two feet, I think I had a very happy childhood.
Children don’t have freedom now. When I was ten, me and my friend would take a picnic and go to Victoria Park and spend the whole day there. We were often out on the street until ten o’clock at night. There was a policeman on the beat and we used to stand around the lamppost until he came at nine thirty, and he’d say “It’s time you went home.” So we’d stay until he came back on his round again later and then we’d all run home to bed.
We weren’t allowed to go up Brick Lane beyond Princelet St because of the Maltese cafes with prostitutes standing outside. We used to try to bunk into the Mayfair cinema across the road if we could get in the back door. At the bottom of Osborn St was a bomb site called the Chimney Debris where we played, and we went to Woolworths to buy bamboos, and make bows and arrows, and played Robin Hood there. There was no TV, so I went to the library every day. I used to go swimming every day too, at the Goulston St Baths and I balanced my little brother with his bottle where I could see him in the changing rooms, so I could keep an eye on him while I swam lengths. Then we’d buy stale cakes from the bakery on the corner afterwards.
Every Saturday we played Bagatelle, or Newmarket with the four kings, and we had a jar of pennies and my mother would turn them out, and as a family we’d all sit down together. I’d see all the boys come on leave from National Service on Saturday night to visit their girls. They’d all go up Whitechapel Waste to Paul’s Record Shop, where I was too young to go – the boys in their suits and the girls all dressed up. And on Sunday mornings, there was always an escapologist in chains who escaped from a sack on the corner of Wentworth St, it was lovely to go and watch him.”
Christ Church School is a hundred yards from Flower & Dean St where Marge grew up and – while her contemporaries have moved out of the neighbourhood – apart from a foray to the Isle of Dogs, Marge has chosen to live within walking distance of her old territory and she finds it suits her very well. In her time, the East End has transformed through slum clearance and rebuilding, and the movement of peoples in and out of the neighbourhood. And although she would never claim it, Marge through her emotional presence at the school over four decades has become part of the consistent identity of this place as a magnanimous harbour to newcomers, carrying forward the best of the old into the new East End.
“I began here at the school in 1979 before East Pakistan became Bangladesh, there wasn’t too many Bengali children here then but as others left and more arrived it became 100% Bengali. Now I see another change, we have more children of different races, including Colombians and Eastern Europeans which makes it a truly multicultural school. When the Bangladeshis first came there wasn’t much English spoken, they used to turn up at all times of the day and with layers and layers of clothing against the cold.
At first we had only one big classroom and fifty children with just me and one teacher. A lot didn’t speak English and sometimes I would take a child home but the mother wouldn’t answer the door because she didn’t understand the language, so then I’d have to grab a passerby to translate. Conditions were hard for Bengalis, with families living in one room in tenements, and we worked as a team to help with their problems, taking them to hospital or the doctor if they didn’t speak English.”
I realised Marge Hewson was reluctant to talk about all the work she did, because she chooses discretion when speaking of the past disadvantage of those who are her community today. Instead she wanted to confess how much it means to have this role at the school which has given her such profound emotional reward and sense of belonging.
“I came here for six months and I stayed forty years, and there are children here now – I knew their parents when they were little. I like this school, I know all the people and I know this area back to front. I’ve got a lot of affection for the families round here. If I lost my purse, or I needed anything, I could knock on any door and they would help me, I know. I love my life in Brick Lane.”
Chicksand House 1959 – Marge on the right, with Sandra her sister-in-law and Mary her mother-in-law.
Marge at Chicksand House with her first child, 1961.
Marge enjoys a knees up at a wedding in the sixties.
With a class at Christ Church School, 1977.
In the school playground with her husband Philip, a cab driver, in the nineteen seventies.
Marge Hewson
Robson Cezar, King of the Bottletops
If you are a regular in the pubs around Spitalfields, you may have noticed a man come in to collect bottletops from behind the bar and then leave again with a broad smile, clutching a fat plastic bag of them with as much delight as if he were carrying off a fortune in gold coins. This enigmatic individual with the passion for hoarding bottletops is Brazilian artist and Spitalfields resident Robson Cezar, and he needs to collect thousands because he makes breathtakingly intricate pictures with them.
Each day, Robson cycles from Spitalfields down to his studio at Tower Bridge where he delights to store his vast trove – the king of bottletops in his counting house – spending endless hours sorting them lovingly into colours and designs to organise his finds as the raw material for his very particular art. An art which transforms these ill-considered objects into works of delicacy and finesse, contrived with sly humour, and playing upon their subtle abstract qualities of colour and contrast.
It all started a couple of years ago, when he asked Sandra Esqulant at The Golden Heart in Commercial St to collect her bottletops for him. For months she gathered them conscientiously and it gave Robson the perfect excuse to drop in regularly. And last year, I showed you some smaller pictures he made, but over this last Winter Robson has begun creating larger, more elaborate bottletop works. As a consequence, Robson often sets out now to visit several bars each night to collect the harvest of bottletops which he needs, that is obligingly – if incidentally – created by the thirsty boozers of our neighbourhood.
And in return for the patronage of getting their bottletops, Robson makes pictures for the pubs. At first he made a golden heart in bottletops as a personal gift for Sandra, but when The Bell in Middlesex St offered him the opportunity to cover the exterior of the pub with bottletops, he seized the opportunity to do something more ambitious. Using over six thousand bottletops, and subtly referencing the colours of the red brick and the green ceramic tiles, Robson has contrived a means to unify the exterior of the building and render it afresh as a landmark with his witty texts. And since they were installed last year, people smile and stop in Middlesex St to take photographs when they catch sight of Robson’s bottletop panels on The Bell. With such eye-catching street appeal, Robson’s work is a natural complement to Ben Eine’s alphabet that he painted on all the shutters along this street last year.
A week ago, Robson’s latest picture was installed at the Carpenters Arms in Cheshire St where landlords Eric & Nigel have been obligingly collecting bottletops for over a year. Hung up on the roof beam in the bar, this is in a different vein from Robson’s works at The Golden Heart and The Bell – creating a stir among the regulars, who are puzzling over the choice of phrase SCREAM PARTNERS for the CARPENTERS ARMS. Go round to take a look yourself and if cannot work it out at once, then a couple of drinks will increase your powers of lateral thinking.
Robson Cezar came to Spitalfields in the footsteps of fellow Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, who along with Caetano Veloso was one of the many Brazilian cultural exiles in London in the nineteen sixties. Oiticia staged an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967, introducing the new cultural movement of Tropicalia to Europe by recreating a favela in the gallery. And now Robson is creating his own Tropicalia here in the twenty-first century, reinventing this poverty aesthetic with a pop exuberance that reflects the cosmopolitanism of his own life experience – which began in a favela in Brazil and took him on a journey from South to North America and eventually to Europe, where he found his home in the East End of London.
Combining the sensibility of a fine artist with the painstaking technique of a folk artist, Robson’s bottletop pictures are egalitarian in nature yet sophisticated in intent. They look like signs but they are not signs, or rather they are pictures pretending to be signs. Their exquisite technique and colouration is a crazy joke in contrast to the misrule engendered by the volume of alcohol imbibed to produce this number of bottletops. Yet the lush shimmering beauty of Robson Cezar’s work enchants us with all the bottletops that litter our streets disregarded, and reminds us of all the other pitiful wonders of human ingenuity that we forget to notice.
At the Bell in Middlesex St.
At the Carpenters Arms, Cheshire St.
Why SCREAM PARTNERS at the CARPENTERS ARMS?
Portraits of Robson Cezar in his studio copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Artworks copyright © Robson Cezar
White Collar Boxing at the York Hall
Last week, I took a ringside seat beneath the vast barrelled roof at the York Hall in Bethnal Green to attend a night of White Collar Boxing – the sport which gives City workers with no pugilistic experience the chance to slug it out in the ring and channel their excess pugnacity into three short volatile rounds, cheered on by an audience of their contemporaries. And Spitalfields Life contributing photographer Jeremy Freedman was there to capture the event, as this latest phenomenon took over the spiritual home of British boxing for a night.
My heart leapt at the first round as the two opponents set upon each other in their curious Mickey Mouse primary-coloured outfits of big gloves and baggy shorts, imparting a bizarre histrionic cartoon quality to the violence. It was apparent at once that this event which is in theory about power is actually about vulnerability. Without experience – or the peak of fitness, or practised technique – what is revealed is raw will and human spirit. And over a thousand passionate boxing fans, including a high contingent from the City, were there to savour the visceral appeal of this emotive contest.
Each boxer emerged from the dressing room to parade in ostentatious confidence through the crowd to a booming soundtrack that promised glory, cheered on by their co-workers and loved ones – having their laces checked, being fed liquid from a bottle, and cossetted like babies, with pats and strokes and cuddles of encouragement – as they approached the moment of exposure.
When the rounds are only two minutes there is little room for mistakes, yet mistakes abound, and in each case I found that what I – and the crowd – were searching for was the signal expression of dominant willpower which would decide the bout. Though even as winners became apparent, it was often those who held up in defeat that won the emotional victory, for the sake of their courage in exposing personal vulnerability. And many opponents embraced passionately at the end, drawn together by the strength of emotion they had shared, dripping with perspiration and drained of energy, yet exhilarated to have tasted an overpowering experience that they could not get at the office.
This is high theatre, enacted beneath a golden glow of light within the cathedral gloom of the great hall, marshaled by a compere in a dinner jacket, and with busty wenches, in high heels and hot pants, parading the ring carrying placards between rounds – as if to offer an equal counterpoint to the extreme notion of masculinity as pure violence enacted there.
These contenders are brokers and bankers, businessmen and women, who have a fighter inside and they want to let it out loose in the pursuit of primal gratification – you might say that White Collar Boxing is the overflowing of the fierce aggressive emotional life of the City made manifest in physical terms.
Broad St Boxing Club, where they train in their lunch breaks, is an old-school East End boxing club run by Johnny Gleed who has been coaching boys there for forty-three years since he gave up his own distinguished career that once saw him boxing here at the York Hall and at the Albert Hall. Johnny was enraptured to be back at the York Hall and enjoying the infectious enthusiasm of the night. “We run the gym to keep the kids off the streets,” he told me, “but an event like is a tremendous injection of energy for us.”
“I was a boxer who retired,” he explained, “and I went along to a show to help put the gloves on the boys and one asked if I could train him. Then you get into the habit and you don’t want to let the boys down. Everyone that helps out at the gym is an ex-boxer. We’ve won everything going.”
As the evening passed, the bouts intensified in pitch, the crowd had more beers, and a roar grew. A succession of young striplings and old bruisers took the ring, taunting, grappling and pummelling relentlessly, retreating to their corners to be re-hydrated and have their bloody noses wiped before seeking more pain. This was York Hall, the centre of the boxing world and the place was alive with collective hysteria.
Johnny Gleed, ex-boxer, and trainer at Broad St Boxing Club for forty-three years.
Chrissy Morton of Bad Boy Promotions, who staged the event to support Broad St Boxing Club.
Aaron O’Neill after his first fight, a draw. Aaron had just been training since a couple of months before Christmas. “I’m going to win aren’t I?” he told me earlier, “I’m doing it to get a buzz.”
Monica Harris, Keeley Lane and Kirsty Jones.
Louise Berridge & Annika Sintim, the only women contenders, before their first fight….
…and after, Louise won – yet still friends.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Brick Lane Market 5
On any Sunday, at the heart of Brick Lane, where all the food stalls cluster upon the railway bridge, you will find eager gamers around Carrom boards, absorbed in their games, and you can guarantee there will be a crowd of spectators too, mesmerised by this fascinating sport from India that is a curious blend of Billiards and Drafts. Played with discs upon square wooden boards coated in french chalk, the objective is to knock you opponents counters into the pockets at each corner.
If you look closely among the throng you will spot the cunning genius responsible for this spontaneous flowering of a vibrant game culture that has complete strangers of diverse backgrounds playing together across the table every week. Slight of build, with spidery limbs and lanky hair – a man who greets everyone as a friend – this understated presence is Carrom Paul, President of the Carrom Association of the United Kingdom.
“One day fifteen years ago, I went to Ealing and I saw these game boards that I’d seen in India, so I bought four and brought them back to the Spitalfields Market and set them up for people to play, but it got so big I had hassle from the other stallholders. I was selling religious artifacts then, and once I sold the Carrom boards, I thought I wouldn’t get any more. But this old Indian man came along and explained that the pockets at each corner are the four great religions of the world, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism, and when all the religions meet in the centre there will be peace and the moon will turn red, represented by the red counter at the centre.
So then I decided to buy lots! I moved to the Upmarket and they gave me the dead stall out the back where no-one goes, but I opened the fire exit and played my music and everyone came in from Brick Lane and the place was full of people playing Carrom. Eventually they put my rent up from thirty to one hundred and ninety pounds a week, and squeezed me out of there in 2009. Then the food stalls on Brick Lane invited me to join them and set up my Carrom boards and play my music, and I’ve been here ever since. And now, this is my life! It’s become my life because I love the game so much. The beauty of it is there is no luck, no chance, only tactics and play. You get lovely people come to play, no blaggards, drunks or druggies – they can’t be bothered. It’s a magnet. It’s chilled out and it’s relaxed.”
Gentle Paul comes up to Brick Lane from Tunbridge Wells every weekend. He takes the day off on Monday, does his website orders for Carrom boards on Tuesday, delivers them on Wednesday, and spends Friday and Saturday preparing for Sunday. Now he has a mission to get Carrom declared an Olympic sport, and since Billiards, which is a derivative of Carrom, has already been listed, he has high hopes of success.
It certainly is a beautiful spectacle Carrom Paul has conjured on Brick Lane, an unlikely haven where anyone can sit down and play for free. He paired me with Robbie, a passing white-haired gentleman to try a friendly game, just to learn the ropes and develop our technique for flicking the counters, and by the end of the game – which I found unexpectedly relaxing – we had become friends. It is a perfect Sunday pass time, civilised and egalitarian, with subtle religious overtones.
You can visit Paul’s shop www.carromshop.co.uk
Carrom Raj, the Carrom Master in Brick Lane– “to my mind, he is the best Carrom player in the UK.”
Spitalfields Nippers
Let me introduce you to the Spitalfields Nippers of 1912 as photographed by Horace Warner. Although the origin of these pictures is an enigma, these frisky nippers of a century ago require no introduction or explanation, because they assert themselves as the mettlesome inhabitants of their territory.
Geographically, they are creatures of the secret byways, alleys and yards that lace the neighbourhood. Imaginatively, theirs is a discrete society independent of adults, in which they are resourceful and sufficient, doing their own washing, chopping wood, nursing babies and even making money by cleaning windows and running errands.
A few nippers may be swaggering for the camera, but most are preoccupied with their own all-consuming world, and look askance at us without assuming the playful, clownish faces that adults expect today. These nippers have not been trained to fawn by innumerable snaps as contemporary children are, and consequently they have a presence and authority beyond our expectation of their years.
Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They may look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.
Click here to order a copy of SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS by Horace Warner
