A Ramble Through Long Forgotten London
Only three tours left this year – Saturday 12th October, Saturday 20th November and Saturday 21st December.
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As the dusk gathers, let us go rambling to explore the sights of long forgotten London in the volumes of Walter Thornbury’s London Old & New. It is a shadowy realm, conjured as if from a dream or nightmare.
This was how Londoners of the late nineteenth century looked back upon the city that had gone within living memory, a London that was already vanishing into reminiscence and anecdote in their time – a lost city, only recalled today in dark and dingy engravings such as these.
Golden Buildings, off the Strand
Boar’s Head Yard, Borough High St
Jacob’s Island, Southwark
Floating Dock, Deptford
Painted Hall, Greenwich
Waterloo Bridge Rd
Balloon Ascent at Vauxhall Gardens, 1840
House in Westminster, believed to have been inhabited by Oliver Cromwell
Old shops in Holborn
Mammalia at the British Museum
Rookery, St Giles 1850
Manor House of Toten Hall, Tottenham Court Rd 1813
Marylebone Gardens, 1780
Turkish Baths, Jermyn St
Old house in Wych St
Butcher’s Row, Strand 1810
The Fox Under The Hill, Strand
Ivy Bridge Lane, Strand
Turner’s House, Maiden Lane
Covent Garden
Whistling Oyster, Covent Garden
Tothill St, Westminster
Old house on Tothill St
The Manor House at Dalston
Old Rectory, Stoke Newington 1856
Sights of Stoke Newington – 1. Rogers House 1877 2. Fleetwood House, 1750 3. St Mary’s Rectory 4. St Mary’s New Church 5, New River at Stoke Newington 6. Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, 1800 7. Old gateway
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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William Henry Knapp’s Memoir
Only three tours left this year – Saturday 12th October, Saturday 20th November and Saturday 21st December.
Click here to book for this Saturday
Jeanette Crawley sent me her transcript of ten pages of a memoir written in 1935 by her great-grandfather William Henry Knapp (1872-1952), describing his early life working in the City of London for a Provisions Merchant at the end of the nineteenth century, of which it is my pleasure to publish these extracts today.
You might assume that the work of a City delivery boy was mundane, yet William delivered breakfasts to condemned prisoners at Newgate, tangled with Secret Service agents and attended executions. ‘Every day was of interest,’ he concluded retrospectively.
William Henry Knapp
I first saw the light on the 27th July 1872 at 73 Carter Lane, London EC2, formerly Shoemakers Row. My father was employed at the above address for forty-five years in the manufacture of tobacco etc and was resident for thirty-two years past, at the place where I grew and noted the ever-changing aspect of the City proper.
At that time, cabs plied for hire and buses made their regular call at such places as the Mansion House and other notable buildings. I also well remember the extra horse ridden by a boy to help pull the bus up Ludgate Hill – what a contrast to the present day.
I attended the local infant school and rose by gradual stages until it was time for lessons on a higher plane and I graduated to St Thomas Charterhouse, a school of sound teaching and hard and fast rules. I see today in my mind’s eye – fifty-four years after – the urbane and full-bearded headmaster, Mr Smith, who in turn was well supported by most efficient class masters Mr Wallace, Mr Cose etc. who were there to teach and no nonsense. I also well remember that a cane was provided but never shared. In my day, recreation consisted of just the bank holiday and two weeks in the summer – what a contrast. As regards the education then and now – well, I will not give it a voice but just think it.
Home life was very regimented and, as I see things today, distinctly correct and helpful to shaping of the lives, creating and fitting us as men and women for the life to be. Parents were eminent and ruled as parents should.
During my school days many great events happened. The Tay Bridge disaster, the Nile expedition, Boer War and later the African War, etc. etc. All very terrible in their way and I well remember seeing the return of some of the guards who fought in their regimentals in those days and were bespattered with blood and dust. In spite of leaving, still the war game goes on.
Now I get along to the age of fourteen years, the usual time for launching out to get one’s own living. I well remember, after a domestic episode in which my father and myself were the chief factors, he giving his dictum that I must find work inside two days or go back to school and, as I preferred the former, I got going and obtained a situation in a house which I served truly and well for over five years.
I can visualise the employer – my ideal of a real man – questioning me as to my own ability for work. Among the questions put was how much can you carry? So, sticking out my chest, I answered ‘Three quarters of a hundredweight, Sir,’ and from that day onward, during my junior capacity, I was well loaded each time I went delivering.
I would point out that we had no trollies, trucks or tricycles, but just a tray containing goods on which I carried the weight of which often totalled a hundredweight and had to be delivered in rotation to the numerous customers. The title of the firm was Sherwood & Vesper Provision Merchants, 45 Ludgate Hill, London EC2, that was controlled by George Beach Newman and to him I owe my knowledge of the Provision Trade.
My start in life was eight shillings per week for thirteen hours a day, and I recall my father’s question, ‘Where are your wages?’ I proudly placed same in front of him. He then decided that I would hand four shillings to my mother, place two shillings and sixpence in the bank and retain one shilling and sixpence for myself and buy my own clothes – what a proposition for a youth of today.
One of the duties, during my first years, was to take in the last breakfast of the condemned in Newgate Prison. That came about by the fact that we served the celebrated firm of Ring Brymer, the City Caterers, and through them it became my duty to deliver such necessaries.
During the five years with my first firm, many incidents occurred that have been imprinted on my mind, such men as Alderman Treelawn, Sir John Bennett and local characters like W. Straken, the Ludgate Hill Stationers, the sons of the latter were in everyday touch with me and his daughters had a smile for me. For, behold, I was by that time junior clerk and cashier and, as such, received the esteem of the above.
Leading up to those years was the memory of the Phoenix Park Murders and, after the trial, the chief culprit Brady and others were executed at Newgate. Carey the informer was acquitted, receiving a free pardon and I believe a solatium from the British government and free passage to Australia. A destination he failed to reach because he was followed on board the vessel and shot by a man named O’Donnell who was brought back to England and executed at Newgate. As a small boy at that time, I remember among the crowd outside was brother of O’Donnell who, when the black flag went up, excitedly shouted, ‘My brother died bravely’ and, but for the police protection, would have been roughly handled.
Ireland was a mass of trouble in those days and their next actions to voice their demand for Home Rule was the deputing of members of their secret Clan to blow up many important and Public buildings in and about London with dynamite. I well remember many members of the Clan were captured in a house in Nelson Sq, Blackfriars Rd, but, from that time and onwards, there was a reign of terrorism which put the authorities at their wits end.
And, while touching on this subject, I now come to the time when I, in the capacity of junior clerk at Ludgate Hill, was the unconscious messenger and bearer of news of great portent as between the celebrated Secret Service agent Major Le Caron and the British government. The Major was the chief of the Fenian organisation on the American side and his good work between the two countries helped in a large degree to stamp out the Fenian menace. But, from the time of his leaving America for England, he went in daily fear of his life and was guarded wherever he went, and what he could not openly do, I did through my employer Mr Newman.
The connection of the aforesaid was – as under my employ – my employer’s name was George Beach Newman, Le Caron’s real name was William Beach and they in turn were the cousins of the celebrated Jam Manufacturers T.W.Beach. So you see, by their aid, Le Baron was able to distribute his knowledge and not forced to be his own messenger.
His career as Secret Service man was very valuable and I had grown into manhood when next I saw him, by chance, seated in a carriage on his way to Hastings which also was my destination. I did hear, just a few years afterwards, of his death and, as his age was somewhere in his fifties, he died comparatively a young man.
My first working years were very interesting as well as being hard-working and, as a man today beyond the sixty mark, I can think of the romance attached to my first job necessitating my calling at some of the most important buildings, firms and institutions in the City. Some are demolished or out of date but just a few remain and I can recount from memory a few of the places and firms.
My old firm was on Ludgate Hill, next St Martin’s Court, which is bordered on one side by the well known City Stationers, W. Straken. While I have him in mind, I must tell you that his first start in life was sitting in a small window in the left hand corner of St Paul’s Church and printing visiting cards at so much per hundred while you wait. In his case, one can quote the old adage, ‘nothing succeeds like success.’ What a character he was, good features, curly grey hair, immaculately dressed. If he ever wore a hat, it was of the sombrero type worn at a rakish angle, with a silk coat, plush waistcoat and very pronounced black and white check trousers. In his spare time, on bright days, he would parade the pavement near or about his premises and people naturally asked, ‘Who’s that?’ He was a city character once seen could never be forgotten.
At the extreme end of St Martin’s Court stood what we boys called the old London Wall – a mass about forty feet by ten and possibly the position of the ancient Lud Gate, one of the many gates protecting the City. I well remember with the tools of those days it took considerable time to demolish it.
Harking back to my birthplace, the room above the factory in which I was born, stood on the old site of Blackfriars Priory and close handy was also the Church of St Anne’s Blackfriars, destroyed in the Great Fire of London but never rebuilt, where is a grand playhouse to this day and, upon that site, stood Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Theatre. All that remains today of that particular site is the Old Apothecaries Hall, where I have seen the giant spit support a whole Bullock.
My early work took me to the halls of all the great City companies and I was always impressed by their stately grandeur, and many a tasty morsel has come the way of yours truly – for my work took me right into the kitchens to see his highness the Chef, who reigned supreme in all matters pertaining to food.
When the factory buildings adjacent were demolished, the workers came across the old foundations of the priory and many interesting finds were made including some thousands of arm and leg bones and skulls. I think it was conjectured at the time that there were remains of old Friars or a collection of remains from the Great Fire.
We now retrace to Ludgate Circus where stands the King Lud public house, very famous in its day. On the opposite side, Q.Dells the Phrenologist who placated his windows with leaflets on his knowledge of the human brain and was also another of the City’s characters.
My firm found every public house of note to Temple Bar and – possibly the best house of all still remains – The Old Cheddar Cheese, in those days run by another notability, Beauford Moore. I had the honour of delivering the real Cheshire Cheese that stood on the public house bar for all and Sundry to taste.
In Cornhill stood the firm of Ring & Brymer, the most noted of all City Caterers, where Turtle Soup was made from real turtles. I have seen them myself delivered by the vanload and no other firm at that time knew better how to serve up and prepare a banquet than they. When I review those days bygone – what an account – one regular order alone was forty pounds of Harris’s bladders of lard and, during the year, an order for two hundred and fifty York Hams and always ten special hams for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet.
Their weekly order averaged about fifty pounds, payable every Friday morning. This would make the mouths water of tradesmen today. At that time, the Mansion House used to have its own kitchen and staff. The chef was supreme, his name sounded to us like ‘Shrubshole.’ The housekeeper on many occasions handed me some titbit with a kindly, ‘Would you like this, sonny?’ and sonny did, you bet!
There is one more episode of my early days on Ludgate Hill and that was the coming to my old firm – just before Christmas time – of fine grand elderly gentlemen who were the principals of Courage’s, the Brewers which at that time was termed ‘Tomkins, Courage Cracknel & Co.’ Those five gents used to select and taste from two hundred and fifty to three hundred Stilton Cheeses to give away as Christmas presents. Each and every one of them had to be packed there and then, under their watchful eye, and labelled to Mr or Mr so-and-so. There they sat around an improvised table, tasting cheese, drinking some celebrated Courage’s Stout and munching Bath Water Biscuits. A sight for the Gods, and I doubt if it will ever occur again in the Provision Trade. These reminiscences are as good as a tonic to me. In spite of hard work and long hours, every day was of interest.
Photographs of Ludgate Hill courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
Benjamin Shapiro Of Quaker St
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Ben Shapiro
In the East End, you are constantly reminded of the people who have left and of the countless thousands who never settled but for whom the place only offered a contingent existence at best, as a staging post on their journey to a better life elsewhere. Ben Shapiro has lived much of his life outside this country, since he left as a youth with his family to go to America where they found the healthier existence they sought, and escaped the racism and poor housing of the East End. Yet now, in later life, after working for many years as a social worker and living in several different continents, he has chosen to return to the country of his formative experience. “I’ve discovered I like England,” he admitted to me simply, almost surprised by his own words.
“I was born in the London Hospital, Whitechapel, in 1934. My mother, Rebecca, was born in Manchester but her parents came from Romania and my father, Isaac (known as Jack), was born in Odessa. He left to go to Austria and met my mother in Belgium. He was a German soldier in World War I and, in 1930, he come to London and worked as a cook and kosher caterer. I discovered that immediately after the war, he went to Ellis Island but he was sent home. In the War, he had been a radio operator whose lungs had been damaged by gas. He spoke four or five languages and became a chef, cooking in expensive hotels and it was from him I learnt never to sign a contract, that a man’s word is his bond. He had an unconscionable temper and by today’s standards we would be called abused children. I once asked my mother if she would leave him and she said, ‘Where would I go with three children?’ I have a younger brother, Charles, who lives in New York now and a younger sister, Frieda, who died three years ago in Los Angeles.
My parents lived in a flat in Brick Lane opposite the Mayfair Cinema, until they got bombed out in World War II. We got bombed out three times. My first school was the Jewish Free School, I went to it until I was four and the war broke out when I was five. My father was in Brick Lane when Mosley tried to march through in 1936 and the Battle of Cable St happened. He remembered throwing bricks at the police. When the war broke, we became luggage tag children and one of my earliest memories was travelling on a train with hundreds of other children to Wales. We lived with a coal miner’s family and, at four or five, he would come home covered in coal dust. His wife would prepare a tin bath of hot water and he would sit in it and she would wash him clean, and then we could all have supper.
Me and my brother were sent back to London when the Blitz was in full swing, but my sister stayed in Aylesbury for the entire duration of the war and the family wanted to adopt her. When I returned with her fifty years later, she met the daughter of the family, her ‘step-sister’ – for the first time since then – and they recognised each other immediately, and fell into each other’s arms.
In London, the four of us lived in a two bedroom flat and my brother and I slept together in one bed. My parents talked Yiddish but they never taught me. In the raids, we took shelter in Whitechapel Underground but my father would never go. He said, ‘I’ve been through one war – if I’m going to die, I’ll die in my bed.’ My father gave me sixpence once to go and see ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ at the cinema, but we got to the steps just as the siren sounded and I waited thirty years to see that film.
Then I was sent off again, evacuated to a Jewish family in Liverpool. On the train there, I met a boy and we decided to ask to be billeted together. We were eight or nine years old and we slept together and, every night, he wet the bed. So we had to hang out our mattress and pyjamas every day to dry them, they didn’t get washed just dried. Once Liverpool became a target for bombing, I got sent home again. After the war, he contacted me and said, he’d had an operation to correct his bladder.
I have distant memories of being sent away again to the countryside, to Ely. When we got to the village green at Haddenham, a man came up to me and asked, ‘Are you Jewish’ and I said, ‘No’ so he said, ‘You can come and live with me then.’ All the children in the school knew I was Jewish and asked ‘Where’s your horns?‘ but I was well cared for and didn’t want to leave in the end. My father never visited or wrote letters, I think it was because he had been in World War I and he was familiar with death, and he could have been killed in the Blitz at any time. If he died, I would have stayed. We were always well fed and I have a theory that my father sent them Black Market food.
Towards end of the war, we were housed by London County Council in Cookham Buildings on the Boundary Estate. I remember looking out of the window and seeing German planes coming overhead. There was flat that was turned into a shelter but we all realised that it would not protect us and, if a bomb dropped, we should all be killed. Above us, there was an obese woman with two children and she never got to the shelter before the all clear sounded.
Our flat was damp due to bomb damage and I caught Rheumatic Fever, and was admitted to the Mildmay Mission Hospital and was at death’s door for two months, and then sent to Greyshall Manor, a convalescent home. After that, we qualified for rehousing and we were the first tenants to move into the newly-built Wheler House in Quaker St in 1949. It was comfortable and centrally heated and we had a bathroom. From there, at fourteen years old, I went to Deal St School. It was where I first experienced racial intimidation and bullying, so I told the teacher and he said, ‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you?’ Eventually, I became Head Prefect, which gave me carte blanche to discipline the other pupils.
During the years at Wheler House, I became friendly with the bottling girls from the Truman Bewery who walked past at six in the morning and six at night. I knew some of the Draymen too and they let me feed the horses. Soon after we moved in, my father wouldn’t give me any pocket money, he said, ‘You’ve got to earn it.’ I went down Brick Lane and enquired at a couple of stalls for a job and I had a strong voice, so a trader said, ‘I need a barker,’ and, for about a year, I became a barker each weekend in Petticoat Lane, crying ‘Get your lovely toys here!’ I was opposite the plate man who threw crockery in the air and next to the chicken plucker.
I worked in the City of London as a junior clerk in Gracechurch St, near the Monument, but I feel – if I had stayed – I would still be junior clerk.
The lady next door, she had a friend from America and she sponsored my brother to go there. So then we all wanted to go and, on June 6th 1953, we went down to Southampton and took a boat to New York and then travelled to Los Angeles. It was for health reasons. My mother had been unwell and my father said it would be a better life, which it turned out to be. I was seventeen years old.”
c.1900, Odessa – My father Isaac is sitting in the centre, he was born around 1896 and left in 1906, during the last great pogrom, to go to Vienna
c. 1920, London – My mother Rebecca is on the right with her sister on the left. Her parents were known as Yetta & Maurice
Ben on the left, aged seventeen years old, photographed with his family on the boat going to a new life in America in 1953
Ben and his family were the first people to move into this flat in Wheler House, Quaker St, when the building was newly completed in 1949
Judith Piepe In The East End
Only three tours left this year – Saturday 12th October, Saturday 20th November and Saturday 21st December.
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Peter Parker came across the remarkable figure of Judith Piepe (1920-2003) while researching ‘male vice’ in the East End for the second volume of his anthology Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-1967
Judith Piepe, 1966
In 1963, Stepney councillor and social worker Edith Ramsay was corresponding with a young priest called Kenneth Leech about her difficulties dealing with immigrants and homosexual men in the borough. He recommended that she get in touch with Judith Piepe, who lived in Dellow House just off Cable St, but had for many years worked with ‘male prostitutes in Soho’.
Judith was a well-known figure, not just for her social work but also because she befriended leading folk singers, including Bert Jansch, Al Stewart, Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, Peter Bellamy, and Simon & Garfunkel. She took her surname from her second husband, whom she married in England in 1951, but the details of her early life remain unclear, perhaps because it contained a good deal she wanted to forget.
She was born in Silesia (then part of Prussia, now in Poland). Her paternal grandfather was a wealthy Jewish financier, but her father, Fritz Sternberg, became a well-known Marxist economist. She was an only child, and 1926 moved with her father to Berlin, her mother – who may or not have been a French gypsy – having committed suicide three years earlier. When the Nazis came to power, Sternberg fled to Czechoslovakia, presumably leaving his thirteen-year-old daughter behind in someone’s care.
Judith was nevertheless taken hostage by the Gestapo, who imprisoned her for three months and tortured her in an attempt to find her father’s whereabouts. Yet Fritz seems to have taken little interest in his daughter, and after her release, she married briefly, then left Germany on her own, wandering around Europe without home or money for several years until she came to Switzerland where she studied for a doctorate in philology.
Shortly before the outbreak of war, Judith moved to the East End of London and found a job teaching at a girl’s school. She had been brought up an atheist but in 1946 she became a Christian and her faith guided the social work she had taken up. The church of St Anne’s, Soho, became her centre of operations, and it was here in 1967 that Kenneth Leech became an assistant priest and co-founded Centrepoint, the charity for the homeless.
Judith’s work revolved around ‘kids on the loose around Soho with nowhere to go, homosexual boys, kids on drugs’, all of whom she got to know by visiting the places where they congregated. In training she had been warned against becoming too involved with those she was trying to help, but she dismissed this as ‘a poisonous piece of teaching – complete rubbish’. ‘If I sat in an office looking respectable behind a desk they couldn’t come to me when they’re in difficulties,’ she said. ‘But because I spend my nights hanging about the clubs whether they are, they can talk to me. It is easier to help one’s friends than to help strangers. The kids know that I am fond of them – and they’re fond of me.’
Asked how young people recognized her as someone who could help them, she replied that it was a question of her past. ‘When one has been a refugee, knocking around Europe without a valid passport, without the right to stand on the ground where one stands or breathe the air one breathes, one is an outcast,’ she said. ‘When somebody has TB, after it has healed there are scars left which are visible to the x-ray machine. I’m no longer a refugee or an outcast, but the scars are there and outcasts have x-ray eyes.’ Young people, she believed, recognized something in her that made them feel she was one of them.
Recommending Judith to Edith Ramsay because of her counselling of rent boys, Leech had added that ‘her success and knowledge of this type of work is quite remarkable’. Indeed it was. Dismayed that many youths ‘had to prostitute themselves to airforce officers just to get a meal and shelter from the rain for the night’, she provided some of them with temporary accommodation in her spacious flat at 6 Dellow House. Here they might find themselves in the company of the famous folk singers for whom Piepe also provided beds when they were visiting London. It seems likely that it was staying in this mixed household that inspired the nineteen-year-old Al Stewart to write his song ‘Pretty Golden Hair’, which describes how a teenager drifts into homosexual prostitution.
Judith was drawn to folk music because she felt that it addressed the same social problems. She also realised that folk music was a way of reaching young people who would never ordinarily go to church, and she arranged for concerts to be held in the crypt of St Anne’s. ‘These troubadours of the 1960s sing to win your love for the unloved, the despised, the rejected,’ she said; their songs ‘are not particularly pretty, nor are they intended to be. But they are true, and the truth sets us free’.
Her suggestion that these songs ‘arose out of the situation in which I work’ was taken up in a 1966 episode of Meeting Point, BBC television’s series of documentaries on broadly religious themes. An interview with Judith about her work was juxtaposed with performances of such songs as Stewart’s ‘Pretty Golden Hair’ and Bert Jansch’s ‘Needle of Death’, which described heroin addiction.
Also featured was Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Blessed’, the lyrics of which – ‘Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on’ – echoed Judith’s beliefs. Paul Simon was a particular favourite, and in 1965 she was instrumental in his recording his first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook – perhaps through her partner Stephen Delft, a highly regarded maker and repairer of guitars, who was also a talented sound technician frequently employed at Abbey Rd studios. She also wrote the liner notes for the album, and the introduction and notes to the book of the same name.
She claimed that when Simon & Garfunkel became famous and were put up by their record company at a grand London hotel, they still preferred to stay with her in Dellow St. Judith tried her hand at writing lyrics herself, providing the words of ‘The Hungry Child’ a song for Peter Bellamy’s band The Young Tradition that appeared on their 1967 album So Cheerfully Round
She described Simon’s ‘I am a Rock’ as ‘an almost clinical description of isolation’, the kind of isolation from which she hoped to rescue young people. Particularly isolated, she felt, were homosexuals, who were ‘very much a despised and an outcast minority – probably the only minority in this country that are not yet equal before the law’.
That those who administered the law were not always as objective as they should be was demonstrated when two plain-clothes policemen asked her what she was doing in a café much frequented by rent boys. When she explained her mission, one policeman said: ‘Well, I suppose you mean well, but you’re wasting your time with this lot. These queers are nothing but animals and ought to be exterminated.’ She ‘blew up at him’, and after he had departed, ‘very red in the face’, his colleague said to her: ‘I don’t think you’re wasting your time. I think if there were more of you there’d be need for fewer of us.’ This was in 1966, and the law would change the following year.
Meeting Point ends with film of Judith striding though the dark streets in her stylish cloak and thigh-length boots to the accompaniment of Stephen Delft performing ‘Come Down Lord from Your Heaven’, a ‘Soho De Profundis’ they had composed together. The couple would eventually marry in 1981, after which they bade farewell to Soho and the East End and emigrated to New Zealand. Now chiefly remembered for her connections to the world of folk music, Judith Piepe should also be celebrated for her social work, particularly with young rent boys. So many were helped by this remarkable woman.
Dellow House, Cable St where Judith Piepe lived
St Anne’s, Soho, which was Judith Piepe’s centre of operations
Blessed
By Paul Simon
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
Blessed is the lamb whose blood flows
Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?
I got no place to go
I’ve walked around Soho for the last night or so
Ah, but it doesn’t matter, no
Blessed is the land and the kingdom
Blessed is the man whose soul belongs to
Blessed are the meth drinkers, pot sellers, illusion dwellers
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?
My words trickle down
From a wound that I have no intention to heal
Blessed are the stained glass, windowpane glass
Blessed is the church service, makes me nervous
Blessed are the penny rookers, cheap hookers, groovy lookers
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?
You may also like to read this earlier story by Peter Parker
The War on ‘Vice’ in the East End
The Gentle Author’s Writing Course
Spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Spitalfields, eat cakes freshly baked to historic recipes, enjoy delicious lunches catered by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog.
HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 1st-2nd February 2025
This course is suitable for writers of all levels of experience – from complete beginners to those who already have a blog and want to advance or refresh their approach.
We will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world and the opportunities it can deliver – writing newspaper and magazine articles, publishing books, talks, walks ann community campaigns.
SALIENT DETAILS
Courses will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 1st-2nd February, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.
Lunch, tea, coffee & cakes are catered by the Townhouse included within the course fee of £350.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on a course.
Please note we do not give refunds if you are unable to attend or if the course is postponed for reasons beyond our control.
Comments by students from courses tutored by The Gentle Author
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“The Gentle Author’s writing course strikes the right balance between addressing the creative act of blogging and the practical tips needed to turn a concept into reality. During the course the participants are encouraged to share and develop their ideas in a safe yet stimulating environment. A great course for those who need that final (gentle) push!”
“I haven’t enjoyed a weekend so much for a long time. The disparate participants with different experiences and aspirations rapidly became a coherent group under The Gentle Author’s direction in a gorgeous house in Spitalfields. There was lots of encouragement, constructive criticism, laughter and very good lunches. With not a computer in sight, I found it really enjoyable to draft pieces of written work using pen and paper.Having gone with a very vague idea about what I might do I came away with a clear plan which I think will be achievable and worthwhile.”
“The Gentle Author is a master blogger and, happily for us, prepared to pass on skills. This “How to write a blog” course goes well beyond offering information about how to start blogging – it helps you to see the world in a different light, and inspires you to blog about it. You won’t find a better way to spend your time or money if you’re considering starting a blog.”
“I gladly traveled from the States to Spitalfields for the How to Write a Blog Course. The unique setting and quality of the Gentle Author’s own writing persuaded me and I was not disappointed. The weekend provided ample inspiration, like-minded fellowship, and practical steps to immediately launch a blog that one could be proud of. I’m so thankful to have attended.”
“I took part in The Gentle Author’s blogging course for a variety of reasons: I’ve followed Spitalfields Life for a long time now, and find it one of the most engaging blogs that I know; I also wanted to develop my own personal blog in a way that people will actually read, and that genuinely represents my own voice. The course was wonderful. Challenging, certainly, but I came away with new confidence that I can write in an engaging way, and to a self-imposed schedule. The setting in Fournier St was both lovely and sympathetic to the purpose of the course. A further unexpected pleasure was the variety of other bloggers who attended: each one had a very personal take on where they wanted their blogs to go, and brought with them an amazing range and depth of personal experience. “
“I found this bloggers course was a true revelation as it helped me find my own voice and gave me the courage to express my thoughts without restriction. As a result I launched my professional blog and improved my photography blog. I would highly recommend it.”
“An excellent and enjoyable weekend: informative, encouraging and challenging. The Gentle Author was generous throughout in sharing knowledge, ideas and experience and sensitively ensured we each felt equipped to start out. Thanks again for the weekend. I keep quoting you to myself.”
“My immediate impression was that I wasn’t going to feel intimidated – always a good sign on these occasions. The Gentle Author worked hard to help us to find our true voice, and the contributions from other students were useful too. Importantly, it didn’t feel like a ‘workshop’ and I left looking forward to writing my blog.”
“The Spitafields writing course was a wonderful experience all round. A truly creative teacher as informed and interesting as the blogs would suggest. An added bonus was the eclectic mix of eager students from all walks of life willing to share their passion and life stories. Bloomin’ marvellous grub too boot.”
“An entertaining and creative approach that reduces fears and expands thought”
“The weekend I spent taking your course in Spitalfields was a springboard one for me. I had identified writing a blog as something I could probably do – but actually doing it was something different! Your teaching methods were fascinating, and I learnt a lot about myself as well as gaining very constructive advice on how to write a blog. I lucked into a group of extremely interesting people in our workshop, and to be cocooned in the beautiful old Spitalfields house for a whole weekend, and plied with delicious food at lunchtime made for a weekend as enjoyable as it was satisfying. Your course made the difference between thinking about writing a blog, and actually writing it.”
“After blogging for three years, I attended The Gentle Author’s Blogging Course. What changed was my focus on specific topics, more pictures, more frequency, more fun. In the summer I wrote more than forty blogs, almost daily from my Tuscan villa on village life and I had brilliant feedback from my readers. And it was a fantastic weekend with a bunch of great people and yummy food.”
“An inspirational weekend, digging deep with lots of laughter and emotion, alongside practical insights and learning from across the group – and of course overall a delightfully gentle weekend.”
“The course was great fun and very informative, digging into the nuts and bolts of writing a blog. There was an encouraging and nurturing atmosphere that made me think that I too could learn to write a blog that people might want to read. – There’s a blurb, but of course what I really want to say is that my blog changed my life, without sounding like an idiot. The people that I met in the course were all interesting people, including yourself. So thanks for everything.”
“This is a very person-centred course. By the end of the weekend, everyone had developed their own ideas through a mix of exercises, conversation and one-to-one feedback. The beautiful Hugenot house and high-calibre food contributed to what was an inspiring and memorable weekend.”
“It was very intimate writing course that was based on the skills of writing. The Gentle Author was a superb teacher.”
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“I did not enrol on the course because I had a blog in mind, but because I had bought TGA’s book, “Spitalfields Life”, very much admired the writing style and wanted to find out more and improve my own writing style. By the end of the course, I had a blog in mind, which was an unexpected bonus.”
“This course was what inspired me to dare to blog. Two years on, and blogging has changed the way I look at London.”
The Tragical Death Of An Apple Pie
Cover price is £35 but if you order now you can buy it for £30 and you will receive a signed copy on publication, 17th October.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
The time in the year for apple pie has arrived again. So I take this opportunity to present The Tragical Death of an Apple Pie, an alphabet rhyme first published in 1671, in a version produced by Jemmy Catnach in the eighteen-twenties.
Poet, compositor and publisher, Catnach moved to London from Newcastle in 1812 and set up Seven Dials Press in Monmouth Court, producing more than four thousand chapbooks and broadsides in the next quarter century. Anointed as the high priest of street literature and eager to feed a seemingly-endless appetite for cheap printed novelties in the capital, Catnach put forth a multifarious list of titles, from lurid crime and political satire to juvenile rhymes and comic ballads, priced famously at a ‘farden.’
A An Apple Pie
B Bit it
C Cut it
D Dealt it
E Did eat it
F Fought for it
G Got it
H Had it
J Join’d for it
K Kept it
L Long’d for it
M Mourned for it
N Nodded at it
O Open’d it
P Peeped into it
Q Quartered it
R Ran for it
S Stole it
T Took it
V View’d it
W Wanted it
XYZ and & all wished for a piece in hand
Dame Dumpling who made the Apple Pie
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Remembering Rogg’s Delicatessen
Alan Dein fondly remembers Barry Rogg and his celebrated Whitechapel delicatessen
Barry Rogg by Shloimy Alman, 1977
As the years tick by and the places and the people I have loved pass on, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on a remarkable character whose shop was an East End institution for over fifty years.
Just south of Commercial Rd, Rogg’s delicatessen stood at the junction of Cannon Street Rd and Burslem St with its white-tiled doorway directly on the corner. One step transported you into a world of ‘heimishe’ or homely Jewish food that still had one foot in the past, a land of old-time street market sellers and their Eastern European roots.
Rogg’s was crammed from floor to ceiling with barrels, tins and containers of what Barry Rogg always called “the good stuff”. He was the proud proprietor who held court from behind the counter, surrounded on all sides by his handpicked and homemade wares. The shelves behind him were lined with pickles and a variety of cylindrical chub-packed kosher sausages dangled overhead.
Barry’s appearance was timeless, a chunky build with a round face that sometimes made him look younger or older than he was. He would tell you the story of Rogg’s if you wanted to know, but he was neither sentimental about the heyday of the ‘Jewish East End’ nor did he run a nostalgia-driven emporium. Rogg’s customers were varied and changed with the times. There was always the Jewish trade but, up to their closure, Rogg’s was also a popular a haunt for dockers who would traipse up from the nearby Thames yards. After that his customers were made up from the local Asian community, until there came another wave when he was being discovered by the national press increasingly focusing eastwards.
Barry’s grandfather started in the business at another shop on the same street in 1911. By 1944, when Barry was fourteen and still at school, he had already begun to help the family out at their new corner shop at 137 Cannon Street Rd. In 1946 he moved in for good, though he had only anticipated it would be a two-year stint as the building was earmarked for compulsory purchase for a road widening scheme that fortunately never happened.
I got to know Barry Rogg in 1987 when I joined a team of part-time workers at the Museum of the Jewish East End – now the Jewish Museum – who were collecting reminiscences and artefacts relating to East End social history. Then Rogg’s was one of the very last of its kind in East London. By the nineties it was Barry alone who was flying the flag for the Yiddisher corner deli scene that had proliferated in Whitechapel from the late nineteenth century. Thankfully, due to his popularity and the uniqueness in the last decade of the twentieth century, we have some wonderful photographs and articles to remember Barry by.
There are tantalising images of the food but we no can longer taste it. An array of industrial-sized plastic buckets filled with new green cucumbers, chillies, bay leaves and garlic at various stages of pickling, the spread of homemade schmaltz herrings, fried fish, gefilte fish, salt beef, chopped liver, the cheesecake. I am sure everyone reading this who visited Rogg’s will remember how their senses went into overdrive. The smells of the pickles, the herrings, the fruit and the smoked salmon, the visual bombardment of all the packaging and the handwritten labels. “Keep looking” was a favourite Barry catchphrase and how could you possibly not?
Of course, you could spend all day listening to the banter with his customers. I also fondly recall conversations with his partner Angela, who helped out but generally kept a low profile in the back of the shop. Rogg’s was Barry’s stage. He had a deep love for the theatre and for art, and one wonders what else he might have done if – like so many of his generation – he had not ended up in the family business as a fifteen-year-old out of school.
Barry died in 2006 at the age of seventy-six. Years ago, I co-compiled an album for JWM Recordings, Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World: Yiddisher Jazz in London’s East End from the twenties to the fifties. As a follow-up, my co-compiler and regular companion on trips to Rogg’s, Howard Williams suggested releasing another disc, this time with a food theme and dedicated to Barry Rogg.
This disc dishes up two sides recorded in New York in the late thirties and forties. Slim Gaillard – whose hip scatological word play would be celebrated in On the Road – performs a paean to the humble yet filling Matzoh Balls, dumplings made of eggs and matzoh meal. Yiddish singer Mildred Rosner serves Gefilte Fish a galloping love affair with this slightly sweet but savoury ancient recipe which consists of patties made of a poached mixture of ground deboned white fish, boiled or fried. These two classic dishes have graced the Jewish luncheon or dinner table for generations and the recipes are included.
On the label is Irv Kline’s portrait of Barry from 1983. Irv was an American who had retired to live in London. Barry’s photograph formed part of Irv’s study of surviving Jewish businesses in the East End, a travelling exhibition which I helped to hang during the eighties. I recall Irv being a real jazz buff so I hope that he too would appreciate the music accompanying his portrait of Barry Rogg.
Click here for information about the ‘Gefilte Fish/Matzoh Balls’ recording
Irv Kline’s portrait of Barry Rogg, 1983
Alan Dein’s photograph of Rogg’s with one of Barry’s regular customers framed in the doorway, 1988
Shloimy Alman’s photograph of Rogg’s interior, 1977
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