Ainsworth Broughton, Upholsterer
My interview with master upholsterer Ainsworth Donovan Broughton of 14 Calvert Avenue (commonly known as Mike) was perforce a swift one because he had three sofas, four chairs, a day bed and a Chesterfield to upholster before the end of this week. Although I arrived at the beginning of the working day, Ainsworth had been in since seven, stealing a march on time, and, as you can see from the picture, he had already made swift work of the day bed. Once I arrived, he sat down on his work bench, crossed his arms and displaying his good-humoured accommodating smile, declared, “Right, let’s get this done!”– with the same workmanlike sense of purpose that he would approach a challenging piece of upholstery.
Not so long ago, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green were the home of a thriving furniture industry that has almost entirely disappeared now. While there are people in the neighbourhood who may call themselves upholsterers these days, Ainsworth is the only one that has done the full apprenticeship in traditional upholstery and qualified under the Association of Master Upholsterers. More than this, Ainsworth is the living connection to the time when furniture-making flourished here. Although he is not self-conscious about it, he carries that history on his shoulders, which enables him to carry it lightly – because as the factories closed down and the other traditional upholsterers retired, Ainsworth simply carried on resolutely upholstering chairs and making an honest living at it while the world (and the East End) transformed around him. It was the natural thing for him to do, and it is this ease with his work, and commitment to his craft which makes Ainsworth such a dignified figure today.
“I specialise in traditional upholstery, although I can do whatever people bring along. Traditional upholstery is the old way of doing it, with stuffing and stitching and horsehair. I love it. The modern stuff is just foam! When I found traditional upholstery, I knew I had found my vocation in life. At the London College of Furniture, they banned me from the workshop because I used to stay behind after hours, always stuffing and stitching. Traditional upholstery is just quality – you know it will last thirty years or more. Working out from a frame how to do everything, that’s the joy of it. I’ve always liked to build something up, take it from frame to finished job and see people appreciate my work. There’s pieces of mine I have done for interior designers at Liberty, Sketch and Manolo Blahnik but the people there don’t know my name.
At fifteen, I did a day release from school at the London College of Furniture, and the head of the department saw what I was doing and said, ‘You could be good at this.’ After college, I was apprenticed to furniture makers A&E Chapman of Crouch End for five years and then I had the opportunity to stay on for another couple of years and be an ‘improver’ – before that you were just prepping. One day they took me into the office and said, ‘We’re going to let you loose,’ and it didn’t take much longer before I was able to work at the bench, but I always wanted to be self-employed. So in 1981, I took a studio in the Cleve Workshops in Boundary St and I used to do a day’s work before coming here to do a few ‘copper jobs’ – on the side.
Then one day I took a chance and left, and for six months I had hardly any work but slowly it picked up. I had one customer and then another and it continued like that. Back in the day, every shop in Shoreditch was an upholsterer but they’ve all gone now. In 1984, when the Cleve Workshops were sold, I managed to get one of the derelict shops in Calvert Avenue. The whole area was completely desolate then, there wasn’t anybody living here, but it enabled me to have a workshop because it was cheap. I never took my shutters down until seven years ago, because there was no passing trade, but recently it’s been different, there’s people here who are into traditional upholstery and so I get work locally now. “
Ainsworth does not even have a sign outside his shop, yet customers come and go all the time. In the window you simply see a photocopy of his certificate presented to the most outstanding student at the London College of Furniture in 1976/77. Looking through the metal grille into the crowded workshop where Ainsworth works from seven until seven each day, you see a high shelf up above where bare frames of furniture await his attention, while the walls are lined with racks of tools, cloth swatches and innumerable calculations pencilled directly onto the plaster, and the lino tiles from the shop that Ainsworth superseded in 1984 still cover the floor. In front of the window is a shelf to display his finished handiwork – only Ainsworth is so inundated that it is always piled with incoming work. “I could do even more, if I had an assistant – but I never want to employ anyone.”, he said, shrugging his shoulders dispassionately and revealing the enviable self-reliance that is the source of his tranquil manner.
I did not want to take any more of his working day. So once he was assured that I was satisfied with his interview, I asked Ainsworth if he thought he would finish the three sofas, four chairs, day bed and Chesterfield this week. “We’ll give it a go!” he declared with a smirk as he stood up from the work bench with energy rising, eager to set to work again. Even if anyone that has done a course can claim to be an upholsterer nowadays, it seems that there are plenty who recognise that the noble Ainsworth Broughton is the genuine article – an artist whose technique is stitching and medium is horsehair, practicing a skill acquired through an apprenticeship of five years, with an expertise honed over thirty years, and executed with a satisfaction and delight that is his alone.
Ainsworth in 1973, when he first started at London College of Furniture.
Ainsworth at work on his graduation piece, London College of Furniture, 1976.
Ainsworth Broughton, Master Upholsterer of Calvert Avenue, commonly known as Mike.
At the Bunny Girls’ Reunion
On Sunday night, I attended the most glamorous party of my life. It was a Bunny Girls & Playboy Models’ reunion hosted by ex-Bunny Barbara Haigh, esteemed landlady of The Grapes in Limehouse. Never have I encountered more voluptuous charismatic ladies per square metre than were crammed joyfully together in the tiny bar-rooms of this historic riverside pub that night. With Sarah Ainslie, Spitalfields Life contributing photographer, as my chaperone, I was thrilled to join this exuberant sisterhood of more than a hundred garrulous alpha females for a knees-up. Squeezing my way through the curvy bodies – fine specimens of their sex who have all got what it takes to succeed in life – I arrived on the river frontage where waves were crashing theatrically over the verandah as if, in reenactment of Botticelli’s Venus, each of these goddesses had just emerged triumphant from the Thames’ spray to delight the souls of mere mortals like myself.
The first Aphrodite to catch my eye was cheeky Bunny Sandie (pictured above), the seventh Bunny to join the newly opened Playboy Club in Park Lane in 1966, who is more formally known these days as Lady Sandra Bates. Within seconds of our introduction, Sandie gleefully revealed she had bedded Sean Connery, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty and Telly Savalas, emphasising that her most important conquest was Sir Charles Clore, owner of Selfridges and Mappin & Webb. “I was living in a house in Mayfair at the time, but the owner put it up for sale and wanted to throw me out, so I told Charles and he bought it for me!” she declared with a glittering smile, rolling her chestnut eyes, batting her eyelashes and clutching her hands in girlish pleasure. “You should see my art collection!” she proposed recklessly now that her husband Sir Charles is no more, as we shared a glass of wine on the verandah and the setting sun lit up the clouds, turning the river livid pink.
It was a remarkable overture to an unforgettable evening, because these girls all know how to party. Bunnies had flown in from all over the world, Tasmania, Las Vegas, the Bahamas, Egypt and as far away as Australia to celebrate the glory days of the British Playboy Club that ran from 1966 until 1980. As Marilyn Cole (the first full frontal nude in the history of Playboy in 1972) put it so elegantly in her speech of welcome, “When people ask ‘Where did you go to school?’ I say, ‘Fuck that, I went to the University of Playboy! You learn much more about life.’” An astute comment that drew roars of approval from the assembled Bunnies.
Marilyn, resplendent in a quilted leather miniskirt and thigh length high-heeled boots, ushered me over to meet her famously reclusive husband Victor Lownes, who opened the London Playboy Club. Formerly in charge of all Playboy’s gaming operations, Victor Lownes is a bon-viveur who was once Britain’s highest paid executive, counted Francis Bacon and Roman Polanski as friends and reputedly had five girls a day, sometimes two at once. He looked at me benignly from under a mop of white hair across the chasm of our different experiences of life. “Do you miss it?” I enquired tentatively, and Victor rolled his twinkly eyes in good-humoured irony. “What do you think? I am eighty-two years old!” he replied with dignified restraint.
There was a giddy atmosphere in the Grapes that night and so I chose to embrace the spirit of the occasion and mingle with as many Bunnies as possible. “I was a young girl from a very religious strict background in Birmingham who ran away from home.”admitted Bobbie, one of first black Bunnies, who worked at the Playboy Club from 1975-80, “I was shopping one day and I went along to ‘a cattle drive’ and out of fifty girls was one of a handful accepted to be a Bunny. I had four wonderful years that totally changed my life. It was a terrific experience. I have run my own business for the past twenty years and the things I learnt at Playboy set me on the road to be able to do that.”
“There was only one rule,’Don’t touch the Bunnies!’”explained Bunny Erica, raising a finger of authority,“Membership of the Playboy Club came with a key, which members handed in when they arrived and collected when they left. If somebody went too far the management took away their key. So the men always behaved respectfully. You were never forced to do anything. It’s made to seem cheap now – but we wore two pair of tights, our costumes were fitted and stiffened with whalebone, we even put toilet rolls down the front as padding – it was an illusion. We were supposed to share tips, but I put mine down my costume and when I took it off all the banknotes would fall out. The money was fabulous. Playboy gave us the most amazing part of our lives. It gave us freedom. It gave us a love of humanity. It enlightened us.”
“I was the very first UK Bunny to be hired in 1966,” declared Bunny Alexis, still glowing with pride over forty years later, “I was a dancer at the Talk of the Town in Leicester Sq on £12 a week, but at Playboy I earned £200. I was already married with a child and on the strength of my two years as a Bunny I was able to buy our first house in Wood Green. It was the hardest work, eight hours a day on five-inch heels with just one half hour break. But it was good fun and we met all the most amazing people. 1966 was a very good year!”
People often ask what happened to the nineteen sixties, yet here the evidence was all around me. It was a buzz to be in a room full of such self-confident women who knew who they were and were supremely comfortable with it too, women with their wits about them, who counted brains amongst other natural assets when it came to interactions with the opposite sex. Women who knew how to make the best of the situation they found themselves in at the Playboy Club – unashamedly constructed as an arena of male fantasy yet, paradoxically, as all these women testify thirty years on, provided opportunities for them to take control of their lives.
Undoubtably there were those that, as Bunny Serena put it succinctly, “screwed their way to the top,” but equally there were many who, as Bunny Lara confirmed, found it, “An empowering experience. They sent us on management training courses, and I learnt how to handle people and manage staff. All of which has come in useful ever since in everything I have done.” She now runs a young offenders’ programme, training staff in conflict management. Many women I spoke with occupy senior management roles in the gaming and entertainment industry today – including one who manages a chain of casinos – in jobs that would have been closed to them previously.
Above all, these were women who were full of life, they had seen so much life and had so many stories to tell, that it was wonderful simply to be amongst them, confirming Bunny Lara’s fond verdict on her experience working at the Playboy Club, “The camaraderie was phenomenal.”
Bunny Cleo, with evidence of her encounter with Sid James at The Playboy Club.
Marilyn Cole, “Whatever else happens in life, good, bad or indifferent, we can always say we had this!”
Bunny Maretta & Bunny friend
Bunny Marisa is now an artist painting in oils.
Bunny Dilys & Bunny friend.
Bunny Alexis, ex-Windmill Girl was the very first UK Bunny to be recruited in 1966.
Bunny Serena & Bunny Jane.
Bunny Bobbie
Bunny Brenda, Bunny Nancy & Bunny Marion
Victor Lownes, “What is a playboy? It is someone who is getting more sex than you are.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Alan Dein's East End Decollage, 1989
Alan Dein, who photographed the East End shopfronts in 1988, sent me some different pictures. A fascinating collection of details that caught his eye – textures, torn posters, graffiti and marginal artwork – which complement the shopfront images through bringing us closer to the streets of 1989/90. Ephemeral minutiae that witness the human presence are rarely recorded and today Alan’s pictures reveal a great deal about the life of the neighbourhood at that time. It is a commonplace to describe the culture of the East End as one of many layers, yet Alan’s photographs make it visibly apparent. These walls speak eloquently and they tell us that everything is in the details, as Alan explained to me.
“I’ve recently rediscovered more batches of transparencies, negatives and prints, dating between 1988 and 1990. Amongst one lot, the focus is on the results of random, natural, and perhaps motivated, destruction of fly-posted political and entertainment adverts. Another set contains relics of hand-written or painted signage. Every one caught in time, at a certain point in their decay, before they were erased forever.
I have favourites: the face of Karl Marx split in two (taken at the time the Berlin Wall came down), the Bollywood dancer that appears to be ripping his own face off (Brick Lane was then awash with brightly-coloured film ads and political flyers), the handsome illustration of a barber’s handiwork, the close-up of a door without a handle (a reminder of all those derelict properties in the backstreets of Stepney at that time), and the hand-painted price list for fireworks that adorned a wall in Bacon Street for years and years.
I’m especially touched by that worn flyer in Angel Alley. It’s for ‘The Streets of East London’ by William J. Fishman. ‘Bill’, as he’s known by his students and his friends, an inspirational figure for many of us who were, and still are, seduced by the social history of the East End. His walking tours were legendary – and at the Freedom Bookshop he was signing copies of his classic, ‘The Streets of East London,’ which came out in 1979. I don’t suppose this photocopy pasted on the wall dated back to then as the book was reprinted many times over, but it could have…”
As a short-sighted day-dreamer, these photographs reflect how I tend to see the world – as a set of close-up details – when I am walking around the East End lost in thought. Transient details like these exist at the fringes of consciousness. Although rarely substantial enough to bear recognition, nevertheless we observe them in peripheral vision, creating the backdrop that informs the drama of our daily lives. You can read them as map of the collective unconsciousness of the neighbourhood.
This set manifests the background to life in the East End twenty years ago, both literally and metaphorically. Scrutinising these photographs today, we see evidence of the decline of manufacturing, the politicisation of the Asian presence and the enduring radical tradition set against the end of Communism. Time imparts an emotional resonance too, aestheticising these textures in retrospect, as what was unremarkable and barely noticed in its day becomes emblematic to the eyes of posterity.
Yet there is a compelling ambivalence about these pictures too, because we can never know how much is deliberate or random. We cannot know whether tearing the posters was an act of violence or play. We cannot tell how much neglect was wilful or the result of broader changes. We cannot say if these signs indicate personal loss or social development. After a mere two decades, we are already left with human marks that are as ambiguous as cave paintings and, like cave art, we appreciate them for their abstract qualities as much as their elusive significance.
Collage is when you bring elements together to create a picture and decollage is the opposite, when you tear things apart to explore their meaning. This set of pictures is Alan Dein’s East End decollage.
Karl Marx in Spitalfields 1989
Lost door knob in Stepney 1989
Brick Lane 1989
Brick Lane 1989
Brick Lane 1989
“Fireworks without boxes” Bacon St 1989
Whitechapel 1989
Brick Lane 1989
“The Streets of East London” Angel Alley 1989
Shoreditch 1990
Brick Lane 1989
Brick Lane 1989
Commercial Rd 1989
Whitechapel 1990
Shoreditch 1990
Photographs copyright © Alan Dein
With the Pigeon Fliers of Bethnal Green
With the pigeon racing season drawing to a close, I took the opportunity to join Albert Stratton, pigeon flier, and his pal Keith Plastow on Saturday afternoon in Bethnal Green to wait for return of the young birds – born this Spring – given an outing each year as the penultimate race of the season. Even though these fledglings only pecked their way out of the egg in March, many have already spent months in training, building up their stamina with practice flights of twenty-five miles from Harlow three times a week. On Saturday, Albert had eleven young birds among eight hundred competitors, flying one hundred and twelve miles and one hundred and seven yards, from Newark in Nottinghamshire to Bethnal Green.
As soon as I got the call to say “The birds are up!”, I raced over from Spitalfields to Albert’s house, arriving at three thirty. Then we all sat together in nervous anticipation in Albert’s garden for half an hour gazing anxiously at the sky while he amused us with a constant stream of droll banter and, in time-honoured fashion, his wife Tracey reclined on the couch in the living room relaying us the results in the Tottenham game. “It’s a heartbreaking sport, pigeon racing,” confessed Albert, turning melancholy, his eyes fixed firmly on the occluded sky, “It’s like supporting Tottenham Hotspur – if only you got out as much you put in.”
Albert informed me that pigeons fly at fifty miles per hour with no wind, but can reach speeds of eighty miles an hour with a gale force behind them. Saturday’s wind was South West. “Not helpful! It slows them down and pushes them out to East, which gives the Easterly fliers an advantage,” declared Albert, exchanging a grimace with Keith,“Let’s hope it’s not like last week, we were twenty minutes behind the rest.” Albert hoped the first of his birds – liberated at one thirty in Nottinghamsire – would arrive home shortly after half past three but, when four o’clock approached, he shook his head in disappointment as we all checked our watches.“Give me my hat,” Albert asked Keith, exasperated and clutching at straws now, “or they won’t recognise me.”
Positioning himself next to the pigeon shed, Albert waited with a cup of nuts ready for the first arrival, while Keith occupied the back door of the house, puffing on a cigarette to relieve the tension as he peered into the unyielding sky. Then two pigeons appeared, a blue cock and red pied bird. They circled, but instead of flying down to the pigeon shed, landed on the roof of the flats in the next street, looking down at us curiously. Albert and Keith were beside themselves simultaneously with excitement and frustration.
“Three hours flying and then five minutes walking up and down!” quipped Albert through gritted teeth, as he shook the peanuts in his cup to encourage his birds down. At once they flew down, increasing the tension further by alighted on the gutter over our heads. With intense self-control, Albert shook his cup of nuts again, calling tenderly, “Come one, come on,” and after short pause both birds landed on the wooden platform attached to the pigeon shed. Yet even now the tension did not abate, because we had to wait again, in speechless excitement, for the birds to enter the shed through the ‘trap.’
Then Keith ran over, dropping his cigarette as he swiftly pulled the ring off the first bird once it entered the ‘trap’and putting it triumphantly into the special clock that records the arrival times. These clocks were all synchronised earlier in the day, and we would only discover who had won when the members gathered at Albert’s house later and the club president unlocked the clocks with the only key. Meanwhile a falcon circled overhead and Albert grew concerned for his other pigeons. “Poor little birds,” he said, turning emotional with relief now that a couple had arrived, asking,“Where’s the other nine?”
“We ain’t seen anyone else’s birds.” Keith reminded Albert hopefully, as he continued putting the rings in the clock and keeping a running total of the times when more pigeons arrived, while Albert became sardonic in defeat, announcing, “The winner will be here soon, whoever’s won it will knock at the door.” Hopes of victory abandoned, Albert’s sole concern was the safe return of his beloved pigeons, and, over the next hour, as they appeared in ones and twos, like weary children returning from an afternoon’s ramble, he was particular to make sure they had slaked their thirst, sympathetically observing them stretching their tired wings. “He’s had enough,” commented Albert affectionately, as a favoured bird dropped down from the sky and sought refuge in the pigeon shed.
“It takes over your life,” Albert revealed to me, caught in the emotion of the moment and speaking frankly of his life-long passion for pigeon flying. “It’s worse than golf. I’ve not been separated from my pigeons for a night, when I could help it,” he confided, referring to a recent spell in hospital. “They go on holiday without me,” he continued, referring to his family, as he consoled himself with the parental delights of his chosen sport, “It’s not just the racing, it’s the breeding. It’s very satisfying when you put a couple of birds together and they have healthy young ones.”
We were interrupted by a knock on the door, and four excited members of the Kingsland Racing Pigeon Club entered carrying their clocks. At the stroke of six-thirty they all stopped their clocks which they lined up on the floor for John Hamilton, president and clocksetter, to unlock them with his key and tabulate the figures that would give a winner. Tracey served tea and these minutes of waiting gave the opportunity for bravado and banter as the members, who are all old friends as well as arch competitors, faced each other out making conversation. First up was a discussion about how many young pigeons had gone missing. Les Hicks (last week’s winner as well as this week’s favourite) declared nine out of nineteen lost, with alacrity. Next up was a discussion about those ignorant fools who denigrate pigeons as flying rats, and, in the process of the discourse contrary to this prejudice, I learnt that the queen is patron of the Royal Pigeon Flying Society and that pigeons have saved thousands of lives in war. Finally the members compared the size of their first ever pay packets, the lowest being £3 and highest being £12.50, but I failed to ascertain which was superior in this subtly competitive debate.
After writing out the figures and scrutinising the printouts from the clocks, John Hamilton had a winner – but Albert Stratton, club secretary, was dubious and insisted on checking the figures with his calculator before the result could be disclosed. Yet after the average velocities of each of the birds had been calculated again, Albert confirmed the president’s result umambiguously, although he chose to add that the victor had emerged only one decimal point ahead. Tracey came in to stand beside her husband Albert to give him moral support as John Hamilton announced the official result. The winners were Mr & Mrs Albert Stratton. It was an unexpected climax to an emotional afternoon.
Enjoy this music video featuring Albert Stratton & his racing pigeons.
Albert Stratton waits with his cup of peanuts, ready to coax any errant pigeon down from the rooftops.
Anxious moments gazing expectantly at the sky.
The first birds arrive in Bethnal Green from Nottinghamshire, in just over two hours and thirty minutes.
Keith removes the ring from the bird’s leg prior to placing it in the clock on the right.
Keith keeps a running score.
Keith Plastow, seasoned pigeon flier, “My father kept pigeons before me.”
John Hamilton, president and clocksetter of the club, transcribes the race times from the clock.
John and Albert, club secretary, check their calculations to confirm the result.
John Hamilton, President of the Kingsland Pigeon Fliers Club.
A victorious flier, safely home.
Columbia Road Market 50
Over coming weeks I shall be introducing you to all the Columbia Road Market traders I have been buying plants and flowers from over the past year.
No matter how early I get to the market – whatever the season or the weather – herbsellers Mick & Sylvia Grover are always already set up, possessing resilient smiles and ready for business at the corner of Ezra St and Columbia Rd, where they sell the enormous variety of sweet-smelling and useful plants which they grow themselves in Hainault. Married forty-nine years ago, they spend all week together tending to the hundred and fifty different herbs they cultivate at their nursery, and every Sunday running the stall.“My family have always been in the flower business, but over the years we’ve specialised in herbs,” explained Mick who began at eight years old, selling flowers in Romford Market with his mother and father. He fills with affection to recall his grandfather, a flowerseller with a horse and cart, who sold ice cream in the Summer months, calling out “Oki poki, a penny a lump, eat it quick or it makes you jump!” Mick & Sylvia set out on their own in the Caledonian Rd Market forty years ago selling flowers and plants. “Although we always had a nursery, we only started this ten years ago,” he revealed, with understated pride for his beloved herb stall that has become an East End landmark as well as the lynchpin of the flower market.
Photograph copyright © Jeremy Freedman
David Dimitriou, actor/dog-walker
It is my pleasure to publish this guest interview by my friend Clive Murphy, novelist, poet, oral historian and long-time resident of Spitalfields. “The twenty-seven year old David Dimitriou of Leyden St, E1, spoke to me in my Brick Lane flat on the evening of Friday August 6th. I had thought he was dog-walker. Sometimes when ‘resting,’ he is a dog-walker, but he is principally a character actor of many voices.” Clive Murphy
“Actually, I am in a play tomorrow! ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – Lysander. I’m a little worried about the approach the director’s taking. He’s asking for Lysander to be wide boy, a South East Londoner. “Yeah, yer go,” I talk like that. I’ve managed to keep the chav accent centralised, and the movement and costume should do much of the talking. I’ve to wear a long white tracksuit and a sleeveless t-shirt. If you’re given an interpretation you run with it. I don’t mind upsetting a few purists. We’ve all, not only the Mechanicals, got a comic element. For example, Oberon’s a Deep South American army man.
We’re performing at the Bromley Park Amphitheatre. It’s my first open-air show. What happens if it rains? I haven’t a clue. It starts at six and lasts two hours so we should be OK for light. There’s no electrics, no “Am I in the spot?” As long as I am heard I’ll be happy. I’ve to be up at eight o’clock and take the train to Bromley for the ‘tech.’ Then it’s on stage at six, finish at eight and back for a matinee only, at two on Sunday.
I think of myself as a character actor. I’ve even been a rock drummer, a conceited comic arsehole, in a spoof documentary that won second place at the South Carolina Film Festival. My agent put me up to ITV recently for what I thought was the part of a Middle Eastern owner of a laundromat. I spent an entire three days preparing a Middle Eastern Accent, based on my own Greek Cypriot background, and, when I got to the audition, the director told me the character was brought up in England! Once you’ve prepared your lines with a special accent, it’s pretty hard to change the inflections at a moment’s notice, so I failed. I was so self-conscious I don’t think I did any acting at all!
No, I don’t take Unemployment Benefit when ‘resting’. I did to begin with, but they’re far too negative at the Job Centre, always trying to catch you out. Every time I wrote something slightly wrong on the form, they stopped my £70 a week. My rent is £1,500 a month which my girlfriend, Naomi, and I split between us. I can only manage with the help of non-acting jobs. For instance, I sometimes work for a company called Look Media. They give me a scooter on the back of which is a trailer with some, say, anti-foxhunting slogan attached. You drive around anywhere they send you for £15 an hour. I’ve been an usher at Wyndham’s and I’ve helped in Customer Care for Eurostar. Moneywise it’s tight but I’m a good saver. Luckily I’ve met a businesswoman in the foyer of the block where I live. She was with a gorgeous little puppy, a Bichon Frise called Frankie. I said, “If you’d like me to walk him for you every now and then, let me know.” She rang suggesting three times a day. It’s £15 according to the internet, so I charged her £10 as she lives upstairs. She later cut me down to three walks for the price of two. I get told off almost every day for allowing Frankie amongst the greenery of Spital Square. I used to take him to the gardens beside Christ Church but he kept finding chicken bones.
Don’t forget I’ve only been acting professionally since 2007 when I was twenty-four. I was born in Birmingham but was taken almost immediately with my only sibling, my older sister who’s now a diving instructor, to Nicosia where my father was in the family business, Alexander Dimitriou – founded by my great-grandfather, which imports Massey Ferguson tractors and Honda cars. My mother had been an actress. She’d toured St Joan around America. In Nicosia there was only Greek theatre so she founded an amateur company there called The Anglo-Cypriot Theatre. I appeared in her pantomimes from the age of seven as a dormouse in ‘Cinderella,’ one of the townsfolk in ‘Mother Goose.’ I played Lomax in ‘Major Barbara’ at the age of fourteen. I’d no idea what I was doing, but I enjoyed myself so much I guess it was then I decided to go on the stage. I remember that, around that time, Simon Gilligan impressed me as a terrific Falstaff. Eventually I came back to England permanently not just for holidays. I did my A levels at a sixth form college, Cambridge Arts & Sciences CATS. I adored the place. We could smoke. We could wear tattoos. We didn’t even have to be back with our Houseparents until eleven o’ clock at night.
After the time of my A levels, RADA came along to CATS and set up a Foundation Course for those who wanted to go into acting, and I was asked to be part of the pilot scheme as I’d appeared with some success in several college shows. Helen Strange was the main voice coach. And Ellis Jones, head of RADA at the time, so inspired me that I started auditioning for Drama Schools. Failing to get into one at one, I thought, “Sod it! I’ll go to Uni!” and over three years at Exeter, I did a BA in Drama after which I was accepted by Mountview Theatre School, Wood Green, for a post-graduate year. I was auditioned by Andrew Jarvis. Andrew had such an amazing way of engaging your attention that I developed a sort of man crush on him. He once said something to me that’s always stuck in my head: “I’m not questioning how hard you’re trying. Don’t try harder, try differently!” When he left to take the part of Lord Elron in “The Lord of the Rings” at Drury Lane, I was devastated, I was in tears, I was almost ready to quit.
Fortunately, Sheila Allen – yes, the Sheila Allen – came to Mountview to teach a Shakespeare Module and she decided to take me under her wing. She said, “Stop trying to find idols to teach you to act! Just do it!” And she gave me the role of Iachimo in ‘Cymbeline’ to build me up, help me to believe in myself. We became friends and remain friends. Whenever I need advice, she gives it to me over the phone or at her home in Hampstead. In return, I give her computer lessons. Sheila is a no-nonsense teacher. No ‘method.’ No morphing. No St Joan having to spend days locked up in a room like a real prisoner.
Sheila is very much about the line endings in Shakespeare. Many think that if there’s no punctuation at the end of the line you just run it on. Not Sheila. She, like John Barton, believes Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameters for a reason and that the line before frames the line after. “If it were done when ’tis done., then ’twere well/It were done quickly…” A slight pause after the tenth syllable gives more emphasis to the next line and achieves a more profound feeling. I phoned her about my performance tomorrow. She said, “Get your Complete Works and read it to me!” I did, and she noticed I wasn’t doing my line endings properly.
I’m sorry, Clive. It’s now 9:40. I’ve got to leave you. I must have a good night’s rest before tomorrow’s show. All right. One or two questions. Superstitions, apart from not naming ‘the Scottish play’? Well, before every performance I must wear odd socks and I must not walk over three drain grids in a row or under any pavement road signs. Also, I’ve a lucky mascot that goes on my make-up table if there is one, otherwise it stays in my backpack. It’s a Swedish house gnome my sister gave me, and it looks like Santa Claus crossed with an elf.
No, there won’t be a prompter tomorrow and no, I won’t forget my lines. That’s how you’ve got to think. I’m looking forward to playing Lysander very, very much. In fact, what I most want to do with my life is appear in plays which I consider great, and with actors – Dare I say? Like me! – who are without pretensions, just interpreting the roles given them as honestly as they can.”
You may like to read about The Shakespearian Actors in Shoreditch
Lysander & Helena as envisaged by John Simmons (1823-76)
David Dimitriou’s head shot. Hair: black, eyes: hazel, equity status: full, skills include stage combat with rapier and cloak, accents: Greek, London, Estuary (native), Middle Eastern, RP, Russian and Italian.
Clive Murphy’s books of oral history are now available from Labour & Wait
Derek Prentice, Master Brewer
This is Derek Prentice, master brewer, on a return visit to the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane where he first started out, aged seventeen, in 1968. On the right you can see the dark brick of the old brewery (the colour of the porter that was famously brewed here), and on the left you can see the yellow brick of the new buildings (the colour of the lager that brought the brewery’s demise). In this picture, Derek stands poised between the two walls – in a position that is emblematic of his ambivalence about the changes he has seen in the industry during his long career that began here in Spitalfields. “I helped build the new brewery and I helped close it too,” he confessed to me with a wry smile, “Yet Truman’s gave me a taste for the romance of brewing. What gave me most pleasure was being here at the age of twenty working in the old brewhouse.”
Now that Truman’s Beer is being brewed again, some of those involved in the former Brick Lane brewery have come forward to contribute their experience to the new venture, giving me the opportunity to speak to them about the company, and it was my pleasure to meet Derek as the first in this series of interviews.
We met over a glass of beer in the courtyard outside the Vibe Bar, an eighteenth century building that was once the Brewers’ House, where Derek used to sleep in a bedroom on the top floor when he worked late and early shifts. Rising before dawn to commence the brewing, Derek would return to the Brewers’ House in the early morning where the housekeeper would draw a bath and cook him breakfast before he returned to work again. A pattern of life that feels remote, walking through the fashionable bars, shops and new digital industries that fill these buildings today. Yet for Derek the memory remains vivid, as I quickly realised when he gave me a guided tour which stretched over several hours, talking excitedly almost in a whisper, delighting in the minutiae of brewing, mashing, sparging and pitching – running through the precise activities that took place in each space, while we wove our way through the elaborate palimpsest of old and new buildings that once housed the entire process on this site.
In spite of Derek’s passion for brewing, he came to it almost by chance.“I finished my A levels and was planning to go to university but I didn’t get the grades. So as I was interested in science and I loved beer, I wrote to Watney’s and Truman’s. Then, after two or three weeks here as a lab tech, I decided on a career change because I rather liked it. Brewing involves bringing together a number of disciplines I was interested in.” he explained thoughtfully, before changing tone to add, “And I got to go to Margate twice on a beano from Liverpool St Station with entry to Dreamland and tents serving free beer!”
As a newcomer, Derek was in awe of joining of the vast brewery, housed in the ancient labyrinthine complex, that was a closed society with its own codes and hierarchies.“After a couple of years, I was asked to join the brewing team led by George Brown, a forceful Scotsman who had run a brewery on a ship in World War II. And each year, you were summoned to meet the members of the Buxton family up in the board room, when you got a pay rise. We called it ‘carpet day.’ They’d say, ‘Thankyou very much for your efforts this year and we give you another two and sixpence a week.'” revealed Derek fondly as we walked through the corridors of the Directors House – chased by an over-zealous security guard – where today the paintings (including Gainsborough’s portrait of Ben Truman) are gone from the walls, the busts are absent from the niches and each room houses a different media company.
Leaving the old buildings on Brick Lane behind, Derek led me through a passage to where towering yellow brick manufacturing blocks stretch across Wilkes St and up to Quaker St. This was the expansion that happened in the seventies and eighties as Ben Truman’s seventeenth century house and the nineteenth century brewery gave way to modern industrial production. Truman’s became streamlined to “Truman” and the “s” was painted out on the chimney. In this era, Derek was appointed packaging manager and became in part responsible for the new development, but I could sense an uneasy emotion in him as we explored these spaces. He surveyed the buildings and shook his fist at them, “This yellow brick shit built factory!” he declared. Because, ultimately, it was industrialisation that closed the place down, the culture of economy and efficiency at the Truman Brewery led to its expansion and then to its own extinction too.
“I left in 1989 because I could see how it was going. I like brewing in traditional breweries rather than beer factories, and as early as the seventies the Truman Brewery had become a production facility. It had lost the heart and the family element. What made the brewery special was the people and the characters. There were fantastic people, you had a lot who had done over fifty years and families that had worked here for generations.” said Derek. He became animated with delight at this thought and then stopping in the midst of the crowds of young people who have now adopted these buildings as their social space to confide to me quietly, “I have been searching for it ever since.”
The Truman Brewery in Brick Lane was where Derek Prentice learnt to be a brewer and in his first years there, he had a glimpse of brewing as it had been for centuries in Spitalfields. But subsequently, he saw it corrupted until it became a factory making three different colours of beer and blending them to create each of the brands that the corporate owners required.These conflicting experiences informed Derek’s life, leading him to work next for Young’s for seventeen years and now at Fuller’s in Chiswick – he has spent the rest of his career working for small breweries.
The Truman Brewery as Derek first saw it before the “s” was painted out on the chimney.
The extent of the brewery before the expansion that happened in Derek’s time.
Looking back down Brick Lane.
The Directors’ House
A corridor in the Directors’ House
The Directors’ Dining Room where Derek came to collect his pay rise on “carpet day.”
The Brewers’ House where Derek used to stay in the top floor rooms when was working late shifts.
Derek sitting in the courtyard of the Truman Brewery today.
Portraits copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Archive pictures copyright © Truman’s Beer
