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.
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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?
Constable’s Dues at the Tower of London
“Back in the mists of time….” began Lord General Richard Danatt – ex-Chief of Staff of the Army, now one hundred and fifty-ninth Constable of the Tower of London – as we sat in the magnificent Queen’s House at the Tower overlooking the Thames, which seemed to be there sparkling solely for our pleasure that morning. “Back in the mists of time, every ship that came upstream had to unload a portion of its cargo in return for the protection of the Tower,” he continued, glancing at the river,“and the Constable of the Tower collected the dues as the Sovereign’s proxy.”
And he gave a private smile because, as a seasoned military man, he is alive to the ambiguity of this tradition which began in the fourteenth century – admitting later that one of his predecessors John de Cromwell was put on trial for piracy in the fourteenth century. Nowadays, the Constable’s Dues is purely ceremonial and the only involvement with piracy recently was when the American ship that rescued the British hostages from the Somali pirates in the Gulf was invited to participate as a gesture of thanks. Yet I learnt that morning that HMS Westminster would be departing for Libya immediately after the ceremony, due to the escalating crisis there, and it emphasised how integral the life of the Tower is to the armed forces, manned by Yeoman Warders who are all ex-servicemen.
When I arrived at the Tower to meet Lord Dannatt, an hour before the ceremony, the fresh parallel stripes upon the lawn at Tower Green were the first hint that something was afoot. Days before, the scaffolding had been removed from the mythic eleventh century White Tower, revealed gleaming in the Spring sunshine after a three year programme of cleaning and renovation. Lord Dannatt sat on the couch beneath his most celebrated antecedent as Constable of the Tower, the Duke of Wellington, and explained that his is the most senior position at the Tower, in one of the oldest offices in the land, dating back to within a few years of the Norman Conquest. He told me the Iron Duke was Prime Minister twice whilst Constable of the Tower – a feat he did not intend to rival. Instead wanted to tell me about the fine choir he has encouraged in St Georges Chapel within the White Tower, where members of the public may come to a service any Sunday morning without the requirement of buying a ticket.
Then when he went off to change into his regalia, and I walked down to the waterfront where a drum band was stationed at the entrance to the Tower and sailors from HMS Westminster under the command of Tim Green were arrayed in ranks outside, two in front carrying an oar upon which was slung the crucial keg of wine – the Constable’s Dues. Yeoman Warders in their ceremonial red uniforms trimmed with gold braid were in evidence, scurrying through the tourist crowds with silver maces and staffs with ferocious blades mounted upon them. There was a certain frisson among the visitors who were puzzled by these strangely dressed men, like the ghosts of another age. Yet the reality was the converse, the Yeoman Warders were enacting a ritual which is six hundred years old while the tourists were interlopers of the modern day.
At midday, the Yeoman Warders swung the gates shut and Commander Tim Green approached, requesting entry. Then “words were spoken” in theatrically-raised voices – that I did not hear exactly – but which amounted to a negotiation in which the keg of wine was offered to the Constable in return for the ship’s passage up the Thames. John Keohane, the Chief Yeoman Warder, operating on behalf of the Constable duly accepted the offer and the gates were opened to admit the crew. Then John, with a dignified spirit that few could rival, led the procession with his mace in the shape of the Tower upon his shoulder. And as I followed, running alongside the drum band and the sailors marching in rank, through the narrow roadways and overhanging stone arches of the Tower, with the sound reverberating all around, I had the feeling of experiencing history – of an event played out for centuries in this ancient mysterious space that was designed for it, and has been here longer than anything else in London. In those moments, I was the ghost witnessing hundreds of years passing before my eyes in endless processions marching through. It was the seduction of pageantry.
Up on Tower Green, the Constable was waiting, resplendent in his long braided coat with an extravagantly feathered bicorn hat in the manner of the Iron Duke. The drum band and the sailors lined up in perfect formation upon the immaculate lawn and began to turn pale in the face of the biting wind at Winter’s end, as they stood immobile for the duration. As the keg of wine was presented, thanks were exchanged before everybody disappeared inside the Queen’s House for a reviving glass of spirits. Before he joined them, I had the opportunity of a brief chat with John Keohane who revealed he would be retiring in September – and leaving the Tower – making this the last Constable’s Dues at which he would officiate. It was poignant moment, watching John being photographed in front of the newly revealed White Tower. “It’s a job I love,” he confided to me with a soulful grin, casting his eyes around Tower Green where the ravens had moved into the space vacated by the procession. “Seven years as chief Yeoman Warder,” he mused quietly after the drama of the morning, “- a job I never expected to get when I came here twenty-three years ago.”
“Can I ask you something?” I enquired impertinently, as we shook hands,“Is there anything inside the keg?” And he looked at me in surprise. “Wine!” he said, breaking into radiant smile, looking at me in a quizzical fashion as if I had entirely missed the point,“We’ll decant it into bottles and enjoy it after the parade on Easter Sunday.” Then, in that moment, I understood everything which happened that morning anew. Although a ceremony, it was no mere performance but a ritual with vivid and authentic meaning for the participants, because the Tower of London is not where history was enacted – it is where history happened, and these people recognise they are part of that continuum stretching back over a thousand years upon this spot. “Back in the mists of time…” as the Constable put it.
Watch the ceremony of the installation of the Constable of the Tower of London in 1938 by clicking here
Lord General Richard Dannatt, Constable of the Tower of London, with the Duke of Wellington – his most celebrated predecessor.
John Keohane, Chief Yeoman Warder of the Tower of London
The keg of wine as the Constable’s Dues.
Commander Tim Green of HMS Westminster
The gate of the Tower is closed against the ship’s crew until “words are spoken”
The Chief Yeoman Warder leads the procession followed by the drum band ahead of the ship’s crew with the Constable’s Dues.
On Tower Green
The keg of wine is presented by the crew of HMS Westminster
Lord General Richard Dannatt in his uniform as Constable of the Tower.
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You can read my pen portrait of John Keohane, Chief Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London
Brick Lane Market 2
Pickles
Had I walked this street on a Sunday in 1911, I would have had florins or farthings or halfpennies in my pocket, and I would have been in search of a linnet or a parrot or maybe a Japanese Nightingale to share my home. And this narrow road would have been packed with all variations of humanity, a dark heaving mass ebbing and flowing, searching high amongst the piles of cages for a feathered companion to add song to their days. And, according to George Sims in his book “Off the Track in London,” when you buy a canary off a road hawker “he puts it in a little paper bag for you, and you carry it away as if it were a penny bun.”
But it is not 1911, it is now, and I am in search of a woman called “Pickles” who has traded at the market on and off for the last thirty years.
Ahead of me, I see a petite woman, pretty, with a red flower in her hair. The colour cuts through the grey light like a burst of joy. She stands in front of her Aladdin’s cave, part-tucked into a wall next to an old railway chapel. It is filled with the clothes and trinkets of past lives; rows of beads and racks of shoes, of hats – once someone’s favourite skirt, favourite jumper – ready to live again on swaying bodies. A treasured hoard of glass and crockery, of books and purses, and a mother’s hand-made dolls, and all – all – so cared for by Pickles, and displayed as she once would have done in her shop, the one with the old-fashioned bell above the door.
“Every class of man and woman came to that old bird market,” says Pickles, “and the same today. Markets – they’ve always been a great leveller,” and she hands me a welcomed cup of tea.
“I was hit hard by the development of Spitalfields. I always thought that this was a place that if you fell upon hard luck, hard times, you could start again. But it’s been difficult. When the old bridge was taken down, I lost everything – home and livelihood. Change bulldozes everything. I wrote to Prince Charles, and even Prince Charles tried to save the bridge. Development has no place for the everyman history,” she adds, her green eyes flashing. And I feel the injustice, a force potent and understandable. A sense of wrongness, an awakening to a world that is suddenly awry and unrecognizable.
“Even for kids, there are no discoveries to make anymore, nowhere to play,” Pickles adds. “Imagination is squashed – such a lack of creativity. I played on bomb sites when I was a child, and in the sink mud of the Thames,” she laughs. “I had a lot of freedom. Well it was after the war, and I suppose my mum had got quite desensitized, because of all the things she’d seen. She wasn’t overly protective. When I was nine, I got run over on the Wandsworth Bridge Road. When the policeman came to tell my mum, she said, ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I suppose people were used to expecting the worst. When she came to see me in the hospital, I made out I was worse than I was and groaned and pretended to pass out. I had to stay like that till she’d gone – serves me right!” she laughs.
“Later I went with my mum and lived in a gypsy caravan. That’s where I learnt how to recycle things – make use of everything. Mum used to cut the zips and buttons off clothes and I‘d take them to the rag man and collect money. I’ve worked since I was fourteen. Played truant and worked as a waitress, a shop assistant in Woolworths, worked in a hat factory, started as a packer and ended up being able to make a block and hats. I’ve always done something, kept going. Always been a bit of an outsider too – I’ve lived up North, lived down here, lived wherever I could make a home.”
“Maybe it’s the gypsy caravan in your blood,” I venture.
“Maybe. But even my Nan moved a lot during the war. I think she was trying to outrun Hitler!”
“So what did you do after the development? After you were moved on?” I ask, and she points to the yellow van with the image of Mickey Mouse and “Pickles Parties” painted along the side. “I couldn’t do markets for a bit. A lot of stuff was ruined or in storage, and it hurt too much. So I did that. I made lucky dips and did face painting.”
And I marvel at Pickles’ spirit, at her passion and articulacy. Her tenacity and style is infectious. And as a sudden chill whips along the street, I’m about to cap my pen, when I stop.
“I have to ask you, you know,” I say.
“Oh Blimey, not my age!”
“No. Why are you called Pickles?”
“Ah,” she laughs, “that’s another story…”
Portrait copyright © Jeremy Freedman
ENVOI
My week is over and thanks are due. Thank you to the Gentle Author for the opportunity to spend time in Spitalfields Life – it is a beautiful and memorable world. Thank you to photographer Patricia Niven who has been with me all week and who has enhanced all I have written with the most wonderful and affecting images.
Sarah x
Photograph copyright © Patricia Niven
