Bryan Edwards, Pawnbroker
This dapper gentleman in the elegantly understated suit and tie, with the immaculately combed silver hair and naturally distinguished features is Bryan Edwards, who in 1985 acquired Attenborough Jewellers in the Bethnal Green Rd – the largest East End Pawnbroker, established in 1892. You might assume Attenborough’s was the last vestige of a former world of poverty – even a relic of another time – but you would be completely wrong because pawnbroking is a growth industry that is booming in the current financial climate, with each recession providing further opportunity for growth.
Whereas once the pawnbroker served only the poor, now members of all social groups find their way into Bryan’s modern pawnshop with its smart leather couch and air of being an upmarket bureau de change. “We’ve had a lot of people from the City in here,” confided Bryan proudly to me as I enjoyed a tour of his splendid facilities, without any trace of the dinginess that is associated with old-school pawnbroking in the popular imagination.
“Just after the war, there were only a hundred and forty pawnbrokers left in this country,” revealed Bryan – a former President and member of the Council of the National Pawnbrokers’ Association for twenty-seven years – widening his eyes in concern at the thought of those dark days. “We operated under a lot of financial restrictions until 1985 when the Consumer Credit Act of 1974 became law, and that gave us more scope. And now there are over twelve hundred pawnbrokers nationwide,” he continued, with a modest grin of satisfaction at the collective tenacity and prudence of those fellow members of his own industry who have proved themselves survivors through the thick and thin of the post-war years. “We’ve seen some changes!” he declared with the understated swagger of an old trouper.
“In 1985, the limit on lending went from fifty pounds to fifteen thousand in twenty-four hours,” he recalled, his eyes gleaming in retrospective delight, “And when the recession of the nineteen nineties kicked in, that was when it really began to grow and expand. We had people who couldn’t pay their mortgages and City executives coming in.” Adding for effect, “We kept calling up the bank and asking them to send over more money!” he said, to convey the sense of carnival at this glorious moment in the history of pawnbroking.
Bryan’s father started the family business as a jeweller in King’s Cross in 1944 and ran it until an unexpected illness in 1958. “In three years, I had to take over and run the business. I was thrown in at the deep end.” Bryan explained to me, introducing the account of his entire lifetime in the profession in which he has proved such an outstanding success. Counterbalancing Bryan’s modern pawnshop entered by the door on the right hand side of Attenborough’s, is the traditional jeweller’s entered through by the door on the left hand side. Approximately fifteen per cent of the items brought in through the right hand door as security for loans get sold through the left hand door when their owners default on their debt, Bryan told me. The average loan is between five and and fifteen thousand pounds, with jewellery as the most common form of security and approximately five months as the average pledge, I learnt.
“Some people are just not capable of managing their finances. They don’t budget and they overspend.” Bryan admitted reluctantly with a frown of disappointment, as if he felt personally let down. “But we do everything we can not to foreclose because it’s not in our interest to sell a customer’s goods since we lose a customer. Because we are a family business, we always help out if people are in difficulties and we bend over backwards to help those who are in real need.” he said, clasping his hands in concern and speaking more like an altruist than a businessman. His bold confidence reflecting the fact that the banking crisis and consequent dearth of credit and loans has been good news for the pawnbroking industry, enabling Bryan to expand his operations further – manifest in his sleek refitted pawn shop. “Our role is where the banks didn’t help. It’s like instant coffee, it’s instant money!” he enthused with a chuckle, spontaneously coining a slogan in his eagerness to give money away to people.
Bryan led me up an old staircase through a sequence of small matchboarded rooms to arrive at the office up above the shop, with a magnificent nineteenth century fireplace, shuttered sash windows and views up and down the Bethnal Green Rd. Here Bryan gave me his account of himself while his daughter sorted through filing, occasionally interjecting, “Just between ourselves” and “Don’t tell anyone this but…” into his monologue, much to her disapproval. I found it remarkable that he had retained such a trusting nature after more than half a century as a pawnbroker.
“I went to Las Vegas to a pawnbroker’s convention but I didn’t put a penny on anything, not even a fruit machine.” boasted Bryan Edwards, the model of abstention, giving unquestionably the most original excuse for a trip to Las Vegas I ever heard, yet revealing his humanity by confessing with reckless playfulness – leaning forward and whispering to me so that his daughter would not hear – “Just between ourselves, I did gamble once on a horse in the Grand National because it was called ‘Pawnbroker,’ and it lost!”
Brick Lane Market 3
This is John and his father Alf in the charismatic old shed they have just opened up beside the railway bridge in Brick Lane. Two stalwarts who have spent their working lives buying and selling all manner of commodities in the East End – Alf entered local lore when he bought a lion cub off a ship in the docks forty years ago and sold it at Club Row animal market, while his son John has always traded around Brick Lane.
“I used to to have the biggest railway arch here, then I was in Cheshire St and once I had the biggest yard in Bacon St.” he boasted, explaining that for the past six years he has lived in the tiny caravan nestled snugly at the rear of his shed. When you enter the tall red wooden doors leading off Brick Lane into the huge shack with a multiplicity of stalls and a tea stand, you enter John’s world where he sells “all and everything, from a-z.”
“Is this bric-a-brac or junk?” I ventured, casting my eyes around the ramshackle mixture filling the cavernous space, where Tom the weather-beatened and tanned sailor lurked in the shadows at the rear with his big black dog. Raising his brows at the impudence of my question, “It’s shabby chic!” John declared, twisting his stubbly features into the leery smirk of a showman – “’Shabby chic’ was invented in Brick Lane.”
“I used to come up here with my dad and it was like a day out. If you wanted something you could get it for pennies. This place is what Brick Lane was like twenty years ago,” he continued, introducing his personal view of the changing currents of the market. “Saturday is better for us than Sunday now,” he said,“People come to all the vintage clothes shops but I don’t know how they make any money. I reckon that’s why they call them ‘pop-up shops’ because they pop up and then pop off.”
Over a cuppa from the tea stall, I settled down to enjoy Alf’s lyrical stories of the old East End, of Spratt’s dog food, Twining’s Tea, Percy Dalton’s peanuts, and of the former magnificence of Wellclose Square and when Wilton’s Music Hall was a rag store, and of his poor old pet fox, and Quackers, his pet duck, that followed him around the streets. “I think it’s a more violent world now,” he confided in a whisper, “beyond Vallance Rd is a dangerous place with gangs and drug wars. I won’t go there.”
When John’s two sons arrived from school in their smart green uniforms, I asked them if they planned to continue trading here on Brick Lane but they both shook their heads in unison. “I want them to be traders in the stockmarket,” said John, accompanied by nods of enthusiasm from his boys, “I take them for walks around the Docklands and tell them which companies to work for.”
“You want them to be bankers?” I queried. “I want them to make money,” he confirmed, “A lot of successful people have come out of Brick Lane, Alan Sugar started round the corner and the old man used to sell records to Richard Branson.” And then, turning to his father, their eyes met in a moment of shared realisation. “Where did we go wrong?” he asked, raising his hands with a grimace of bewilderment.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Naseem Khan OBE, Friend of Arnold Circus
Behind this lyrical, quintessentially English image of a little girl surrounded by carnations in a cottage garden in Worcestershire lies an unexpected story – because this is Naseem Khan whose father was Indian and mother was German. They met in London and married in 1935 and Naseem was born in 1939. When the war came, they could not return either to India, which was in the early throes of partition, or Germany which was under the control of Adolf Hitler, and so they went to live in rural Worcestershire for the duration, where Naseem’s mother was able to maintain a discreet profile, concealing her true nationality and passing as French.
These were the uneasy circumstances of Naseem’s origin, and yet they granted her a unique vision of society which has informed her life’s work in all kinds of creative ways – including being Head of Diversity at the Arts Council and more recently Chair of the Friends of Arnold Circus, the group responsible for the rescue and sympathetic renovation of the neglected park and bandstand at the centre of the Boundary Estate last year.
Naseem’s father, Abdul Wasi Khan was a doctor from Seoni, the eldest of ten in a struggling family, who won an award from a foundation in Hyderabad to study in London where he completed a further three degrees qualifying as the highest level of surgeon, although as an Indian, discrimination prevented him practicing his expertise in this country at that time. Naseem’s mother, Gerda Kilbinger came to study English at a college in London, and her best friend at the language school was dating an Indian doctor who was “so handsome, so smart,” but when Gerda finally met this paragon who was to become her husband she exclaimed, “Ach, is that what the fuss is all about?” Gerda may have been initially unimpressed by Wasi’s diminutive stature, which matched her own, yet it was the first of his qualities that she noticed which unified the couple as a pair from the margins in British society.
“They were very concerned that I and my brother be accepted, and they thought the best way to achieve that was to send us to boarding school. But at Roedean, where Home Counties girls were sent – destined to be secretaries at the Foreign Office before they found a suitable young man to marry – I was like a fish out of water,” admitted Naseem, speaking softly yet with sublime confidence, and without any shred of resentment, “My best friends were a small group of Jewish girls.”
“At the end of the war, my mother got permission to go and find her parents in Germany and it was very shocking, the damage, despair and the demoralisation.” she recalled, “I was particularly impressed by my grandfather, a man of great integrity, and I would take my own children each year for open house on his birthday. He used to make a great soup, and members of the local football team and the mayor’s office would come. He would garden all Summer long in his allotment and do metalwork in the Winter. He had just a few good books and a few pieces of good furniture and I always liked that feeling, of having nothing superfluous.”
Blessed with a modest temperament and sharp intelligence, Naseem graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and pursued a wide-ranging career as a journalist, including being among those who launched Notting Hill’s black newspaper The Hustler and becoming theatre editor at Time Out when the new experimental theatre erupted in Britain. Invited by the Arts Council to research aspects of immigrant culture, she left her job to write a report entitled “The Arts Britain Ignores,” a re-examination of what was considered as legitimate English culture, which became a cornerstone of policy and led to a further career for Naseem in policy-making. “It was an important period of recognition of difference, striving to find a world in which all sides are possible, contained and honoured.” said Naseem in quiet reflection.
For twenty-five years, Naseem lived in Hampstead and when her children George and Amelia finished university, she found that her marriage had evaporated. Separating on amicable terms with her husband and splitting the proceeds of the family house, she began a new life in the East End eleven years ago. “What I’d missed in Hampstead was diversity, a sense of community and dynamism,” she revealed with a weary smile, “And being closer to the Buddhist centre in the Roman Rd was a plus for me. When I first came to look at this terraced house beside Columbia Rd, it was Summer and the little garden was an oasis and I thought, ‘This is where I could put down my new life.’ – I knew this was where I wanted to be, although I didn’t realise it at the time. I wanted to be in a place of change.”
Over the last five years, as Chair of the Friends of Arnold Circus, Naseem has created a charity with over five hundred members dedicated to bringing together the diverse community of the Boundary Estate. While the renovation of the park – culminating in the joyous opening last Summer – has been the most visible aspect of the Friends’ work, all kinds of other projects including gardening and music-making continue throughout the year. “I think my particular skill is being able to create a space in which people with different skills and different outlooks can work together and achieve what they want to.” said Naseem, demonstrating her innate magnanimity while thinking out loud, “I am a connector and it means recognising the synergy by which different people can come together to create something new.”
Naseem’s work has contributed to a new sense of self respect and pride in the neighbourhood for the residents of the Boundary Estate. In this sense Naseem Khan’s work here is both a culmination of her personal journey informed by her parents’ experiences, while also continuing the ethos of Sir Arthur Arnold who built the Estate – in the authentic and radical tradition of social campaigners who have brought about real change for the people of the East End.
Naseem’s estimate of her achievement is simpler. “When you live a long time, you do a lot of things.” she said with a grin of self-effacing levity.
Read Naseem’s article about Sir Arthur Arnold Who is Arnold Circus?
Naseem’s grandmother Maria Kilbinger with Naseem’s mother Gerda and Aunt Elsa in 1916.
Naseem’s mother’s German school attendance card issued 1913.
Gerda & Wasi, newly married in 1935 in Edinburgh.
Naseem’s British identity card issued 1940.
Naseem with her father, aged eight, 1948.
Naseem’s family and neighbours in Worcestershire in 1951. Her mother Gerda stands in the centre with her father Wasi on the far right and her Uncle Mujtaba standing between them. Sitting in the centre is Naseem’s half-sister Shamim. Standing on the far left is Harold Tolly, the baker, with his wife Myfanwy, the midwife, seated on the right holding Anwar on her lap.
Naseem and her brother Anwar, 1952.
Naseem at Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall, 1958
The Temptation of Buddha, Naseem is the dancer in front on the right.
At a year’s Buddhist retreat at the Upaya Zen Centre in New Mexico, 2007.
Naseem Khan OBE, Chair of the Friends of Arnold Circus
Learn more at www.naseemkhan.com and www.foac.org.uk
At Liverpool St Station
When I was callow and new to London, I once arrived back on a train into Liverpool St Station after the last tube had gone and spent the night there waiting for the first tube next morning. With little money and unaware of the existence of night buses, I passed the long hours possessed by alternating fears of being abducted by a stranger or being arrested by the police for loitering. Liverpool St was quite a different place then, dark and sooty and diabolical – before it was rebuilt in 1990 to become the expansive glasshouse that we all know today – and I had such an intensely terrifying and exciting night then that I can remember it fondly now.
Old Liverpool St Station was both a labyrinth and the beast in the labyrinth too. There were so many tunnels twisting and turning that you felt you were entering the entrails of a monster and when you emerged onto the concourse it was as if you had arrived, like Jonah or Pinocchio, at the enormous ribbed belly.
I was travelling back from spending Saturday night in Cromer and stopped off at Norwich to explore, visiting the castle and studying its collection of watercolours by John Sell Cotman. It was only on the slow stopping-train between Norwich and London on Sunday evening that I realised my mistake and sat anxiously checking my wristwatch at each station, hoping that I would make it back in time. When the train pulled in to Liverpool St, I ran down the platform to the tube entrance only to discover the gates shut, closed early on Sunday night.
It was late August and I was in my Summer clothes, and although it had been warm that day, the night was cold and I was ill-equipped for it. If there was a waiting room, in my shameful fear I was too intimidated to enter. Instead, I sat shivering on a bench in my thin white clothes clutching my bag, wide-eyed and timid as a mouse – alone in the centre of the empty dark station and with a wide berth of vacant space around me, so that I could, at least, see any potential threat approaching.
Dividing the station in two were huge ramps where postal lorries rattled up and down all night at great speed, driving right onto the platforms to deliver sacks of mail to the awaiting trains. In spite of the overarching vaulted roof, there was no sense of a single space as there is today, but rather a chaotic railway station criss-crossed by footbridges, extending beyond the corner of visibility with black arches receding indefinitely in the manner of Piranesi.
The night passed without any threat, although when the dawn came I felt as relieved as if I had experienced a spiritual ordeal, comparable to a night in a haunted house in the scary films that I loved so much at that time. It was my own vulnerability as an out-of-towner versus the terror of the unknowable Babylonian city, yet – if I had known then what I knew now – I could simply have walked down to the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market and passed the night in one of the cafes there, safe in the nocturnal cocoon of market life.
Guilty, and eager to preserve the secret of my foolish vigil, I took the first tube to the office in West London where I worked then and changed my clothes in a toilet cubicle, arriving at my desk hours before anyone else.
Only the vaulted roof and the Great Eastern Hotel were kept in the dramatic transformation that created the modern station, sandwiched between new developments, and the dark cathedral where I spent the night is gone. Yet a magnetism constantly draws me back to Liverpool St, not simply to walk through, but to spend time wondering at the epic drama of life in this vast terminus where a flooding current of humanity courses through twice a day – one of the great spectacles of our extraordinary metropolis.
Shortly after my night on the station experience, I got a job at the Bishopsgate Institute – and Liverpool St and Spitalfields became familiar, accessed through the tunnels that extended beyond the station under the road, delivering me directly to my workplace. I noticed the other day that the entrance to the tunnel remains on the Spitalfields side of Bishopsgate, though bricked up now. And I wondered sentimentally, almost longingly, if I could get into it, could I emerge into the old Liverpool St Station, and visit the haunted memory of my own past?
A brick relief of a steam train upon the rear of the Great Eastern Hotel.
Liverpool St Station is built on the site of the Bethlehem Hospital, commonly known as “Bedlam.”
Archive images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
David Eyre, Chef
This is David Eyre, Head Chef at Eyre Brothers in Shoreditch, where, last night in his kitchen, he and his team prepared sixty meals between eight and nine o’clock, or if you include starters and side dishes, one hundred and twenty dishes – one every thirty seconds. Yet more important than David’s obvious panache and dexterity, is the superlative quality of the food at his Spanish/Portuguese restaurant which specialises in tapas and deft versions of traditional Iberian dishes.
It is no surprise that there is a discernible shine upon David’s brow and his stray locks have strayed – although in the circumstances I think we may indulge these details that only enhance the charm of his raffishly handsome Humphrey Bogart features, augmented by the deep baritone voice in which he calls out orders to his fellow chefs. Caught here in this fleeting moment of stillness within the clamour of the evening’s service, David was briefly silent, clutching himself in disbelief and wonder and joy at the horde of happy diners, noisily enjoying their meals in the moodily lit restaurant next door.
“I love cooking, so it suits me brilliantly that people want to eat what I like to cook,” David admitted to me with a broad grin, as if this state of affairs were merely accidental, when the truth is that he one of those who has encouraged the taste for Portuguese and Spanish cuisine in this country over the last twenty years.
It was David’s childhood in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, that gave him his passion for this particular food. “My father came from Spitalfields originally, ” he confided to me,“and my mother from the West Indies and I was sent to a school in Zimbabwe where the food was really horrendous, though I was fortunate that my mother was a fine cook. I came to London to do an Engineering degree but my passport was British, and I didn’t want to return to Mozambique and become an ex-patriot, so I decided to stay here. And I got offered a job at Massey Ferguson, the tractor manufacturer, but when I saw where I was going to work, I said, ‘I’m going to get a job as a waiter and you can keep this!'”
With a business partner that he met while working in Covent Garden, David opened The Eagle in the Farringdon Rd, Clerkenwell – the celebrated gastropub that set the template adopted by thousands of others in subsequent years. Yet even this spectacularly influential endeavour is one that David seeks to explain away. “We couldn’t get the finance to open a restaurant, so we opened a pub,” he revealed, “I was very briefly married at the time and my wife’s aunt was rich. She said, ‘The recession’s coming but people always want a drink, so open a pub.’ And we managed to scrape together fifteen thousand pounds and got a pub because the government monopoly commission was forcing breweries to sell them off at the time. It was the constraints that made it possible. We served coffee and steak sandwiches and braised vegetables (and Italian sausages because Gazzano’s was next door). It was all about the ingredients. And the menu changed twice a day because we had no fridge.”
Let me admit, in those days I had an office in Clerkenwell where I went to write every day and, if my work was going well, I treated myself to a delicious steak sandwich at The Eagle as a reward. Although it seems difficult to remember now, there were no other pubs at that time where you good get such high quality Mediterranean food in a bar.
Displaying his characteristic trait, rather than attribute The Eagle’s extraordinary success to his talent as a chef – and skirting over how he taught himself to cook – instead David confessed with a pitiful smile of self parody, “I used to groan the busier it got, because it caused me more and more sweat!” Seven years later, David moved on to open Eyre Brothers in Charlotte Rd, Shoreditch – “a jumped-up sandwich bar,” as he termed it, and from there it was only a short hop to the current restaurant.
“The reason I take my inspiration from Portuguese culture,” concluded David, “is because it is a modest way of life, in which peasants eat better than kings. I abhor pretentious restaurant food, designed on plates with tiny portions, that’s all about the chef and not about the ingredients. The English like food where they can see what they’re getting and here, even though this is a modernist restaurant, it is really granny’s cooking – that is if you have a granny who can cook!”
For one service, I joined David in the kitchen where he stood at the centre, studying the orders as they came in, giving instructions to his sous chefs for vegetables and tapas, while they called back their timings before he composed each dish upon the plate personally, leaning over with hunched shoulders to place the food with conscientious delicacy. David was in constant motion, turning and striding up and down, occasionally raising his arms in flights of lyricism – in gestures that were in part those of a conductor, in part those of the triumphant victor and in part those of hysteria. Yet as the orders accelerated, the team got onto a roll and the kitchen became a very dynamic place to be as everyone worked together as virtuosi under David’s tutelage. I realised I preferred to be there with them in the kitchen rather than sitting in the restaurant, I did not envy the customers – except, that is, for their food cooked by David Eyre.
You may also like to read about
Maria Pellicci, the Meatball Queen of Bethnal Green
The Pump of Death
See these people come and go at the junction of Fenchurch St and Leadenhall St in the City of London in 1927. Observe the boy idling in the flat cap. They all seem unaware they are in the presence of the notorious “Pump of Death” – that switched to mains supply fifty years earlier in 1876, when the water began to taste strange and was found to contain liquid human remains which had seeped into the underground stream from cemeteries.
Several hundred people died in the resultant Aldgate Pump Epidemic as a result of drinking polluted water – though this was obviously a distant memory by the nineteen twenties when Whittard’s tea merchants used to “always get the kettles filled at the Aldgate Pump so that only the purest water was used for tea tasting.”
Yet before it transferred to a supply from the New River Company of Islington, the spring water of the Aldgate Pump was appreciated by many for its abundant health-giving mineral salts, until – in an unexpectedly horrific development – it was discovered that the calcium in the water had leached from human bones.
This bizarre phenomenon quickly entered popular lore, so that a bouncing cheque was referred to as “a draught upon Aldgate Pump,” and in rhyming slang “Aldgate Pump” meant to be annoyed – “to get the hump.” The terrible revelation confirmed widespread morbid prejudice about the East End, of which Aldgate Pump was a landmark defining the beginning of the territory. The “Pump of Death” became emblematic of the perceived degradation of life in East London and it was once declared with superlative partiality that “East of Aldgate Pump, people cared for nothing but drink, vice and crime.”
Today this sturdy late-eighteenth century stone pump stands sentinel as the battered reminder of a former world, no longer functional, and lost amongst the traffic and recent developments of the modern City. No-one notices it anymore and its fearsome history is almost forgotten, despite the impressive provenance of this dignified ancient landmark, where all mileages East of London are calculated. Even in the old photographs you can trace how the venerable pump became marginalised, cut down and ultimately ignored.
Aldgate Well was first mentioned in the thirteenth century – in the reign of King John – and referred to by sixteenth century historian, John Stowe, who described the execution of the Bailiff of Romford on the gibbet “near the well within Aldgate.” In “The Uncommercial Traveller,” Charles Dickens wrote, “My day’s business beckoned me to the East End of London, I had turned my face to that part of the compass… and had got past Aldgate Pump.” And before the “Pump of Death” incident, Music Hall composer Edgar Bateman nicknamed “The Shakespeare of Aldgate Pump,” wrote a comic song in celebration of Aldgate Pump – including the lyric line “I never shall forget the gal I met near Aldgate Pump…”
The pump was first installed upon the well head in the sixteenth century, and subsequently replaced in the eighteenth century by the gracefully tapered and rusticated Portland stone obelisk that stands today with a nineteenth century gabled capping. The most remarkable detail to survive to our day is the elegant brass spout in the form of a wolf’s head – still snarling ferociously in a vain attempt to maintain its “Pump of Death” reputation – put there to signify the last of these creatures to be shot outside the City of London.
In the photo from 1927, you can see two metal drinking cups that have gone now, leaving just the stubs where the chains attaching them were fixed. Tantalisingly, the brass button that controls the water outlet is still there, yet, although it is irresistible to press it, the water ceased flowing in the last century. A drain remains beneath the spout where the stone is weathered from the action of water over centuries and there is an elegant wrought iron pump handle – enough details to convince me that the water might return one day.
Looking towards Aldgate.
The water head, reputed to be an image of the last wolf shot in London.
The pump was closed in 1876 and the outlet switched to mains water supply.
Archive photographs copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Great News!
Although Thomas Rowlandson had the unexpected good luck to inherit a fortune of £7,000 from a French aunt, he was born as the son of a wool and silk merchant in Old Jewry in the City of London, who went bankrupt when Thomas was just two years old. Yet due to a profligate nature, Thomas’ inheritance got quickly squandered and he turned to caricature as a means of income, achieving memorable success. A series of life experiences which may permit us to surmise that Rowlandson’s use of the term “Lower Orders,” in the title of his “Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders” (a set of fifty prints published in 1820), was not entirely without irony.
While many sets of images of the “Cries of London” over the centuries presented a harmonious social picture in which hawkers knew their place, I treasure Rowlandson’s work for the exuberant anarchy that he brings to his subjects who stride energetically through the London streets like they own them, gleefully lacking any sign of subservience. Rude, rambunctious, horny and venal as rats, these are Londoners that we can all recognise and, even though Rowlandson’s vision is not a flattering view of humanity, his lack of sentimentality endears us to his subjects, in spite of their flawed natures.
In Rowlandson’s work, the drama of the city is all-consuming as everyone strives for gratification, whether making a living, seeking sexual pleasure, or purely to assert their being. And, to the outside eye, these inhabitants appear almost childlike in their preoccupations, because nobody has time for self-conscious reflection when everyone is too busy pursuing life.
In the Newspaper Seller and the Cab Driver, the “lower orders” are placed in relation to their “superiors” and, in each case, the tension of the relationship is obvious. The Paper Sellers’ trumpet and loud cries are irking their customers by awakening them in the early morning, while the Cabbie is affronted by his meagre tip and challenges his passengers. And neither shows any regard for those who are offended by their lack of manners.
By contrast, in the plates of the Postman and the Rose Seller, the tension is erotic – the Postman checks out his young female customer while a voyeur cranes from a balcony above and the Rose Seller assumes a faux innocence when an old lecher chucks her under the chin – in each instance proposing transactions both covert and overt. Then there are the clownish Cat & Dogs’ Meat Seller, beset by hungry dogs, and the senile Night Watchman, oblivious of burglars. Only two hawkers demonstrate humility, the Knife Grinder preoccupied with his work and the Curds & Whey Seller sitting to watch the happy young mother and her children with tacit envy. Finally, the China Sellers and the Tinker mending pots and kettles are grotesques. The China Sellers ingratiate themselves in a predatory manner, but the Tinker meets his match in the demanding old hag.
There are some appealingly scruffy spontaneous lines here that would not be out of place in a drawing by Quentin Blake. By his early sixties, Rowlandson had sacrificed the precise elegant flowing lines of his early career for these off-the-cuff sketches which communicate character with great immediacy.
Ultimately, the central ambiguity and source of drama in Rowlandsons “Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders” is the question – Who is playing who? And even in this selection, of just ten from the set of fifty, it is apparent that there is no simple answer. Instead, Rowlandson presents a series of precise scenarios that trace delicate lines of social and economic distinction with wit and humanity, avoiding any didactic or moral conclusion. Above all, these wonderful prints illustrate that moral worth does not equate with the “Lower” or “Higher” orders, and their relative economic worth. Thomas Rowlandson’s Londoners are just as good and as bad each other.
Wot d’yer call that?
Cats and Dogs’ Meat?
Letters for Post?
Past one o’clock and a fine morning!
Buy my Sweet Roses?
Knives and Scissors to Grind?
Curds and Whey?
Any Earthenware? Buy a Jug or a Teapot?
Pots and Kettles to Mend?
