On The Rounds With The Spitalfields Milkman
Dawn has broken over the East End and there goes Kevin, the agile milkman, sprinting down the street with a pint of milk in hand. With enviable stamina, Kevin Read gets up at two thirty each morning, six days a week, and delivers milk in a round that stretches from the Olympic Park in the East to Hoxton Square in the West, doing the whole thing on the run.
The East End is a smaller, more peaceful place in the morning, before all the people get up, and I was inspired to see it through Kevin’s eyes, when I joined him on the round yesterday at four thirty. As we careered around the streets in the early sunshine, travelling effortlessly from one place to another down empty streets that are Kevin’s sole preserve for the first three hours of daylight at this time of year, landmarks appeared closer together and the busy roads that divide the territory were quiet. Kevin’s East End is another land, known only to early birds.
“I never look at it as a job, it’s my life,” admitted Kevin, still enthusiastic after thirty years on the rounds.“Born in Harlow. Educated in Harlow. Top of the class at school. Bunked off at fourteen. Failed all my exams. Moved to London at fifteen. Started as a rounds boy at the Co-op Dairy, just at weekends until I got a proper job. Left school at sixteen. Junior Depot Assistant at Co-op, swept yard, parked milk floats and made coffee for the manager. Don’t know what happened to the proper job!” said Kevin with a shrug, taking his life story at the same breakneck pace as he does his round. But, in fact, this was the mere prologue to Kevin’s current illustrious career, that began in Arnold Circus delivering milk to the Boundary Estate in 1982, where he ran up and down every staircase making a long list of calls for each block. Today, Kevin still carries his vocabulary of Bengali words that he picked up then.
In the intervening years, an earthquake happened. The Co-op Dairy was bought by Express Dairies, then Kevin worked for Unigate until that was sold to Dairy Crest, next working for Express Dairies until that was also sold to Dairy Crest, and finally working for Hobbs Cross Farm Dairy until they went out of business. Quite a bumpy ride, yet Kevin persevered through these changes which included a dire spell in the suburbs of Chingford. “They complain if you put the milk on the wrong side of the doorstep there!”he revealed with caustic good humour, outlining a shamelessly biased comparison between the suburb and the inner city streets that were his first love.
While we drove around in the dawn yesterday, Kevin told me his life story – in between leaping from the cabin and sprinting off, across the road, through security doors, up and down stairs, along balconies, in and out of cafes, schools, offices, universities and churches. No delivery is too small and he will consider any location. Yet it is no small challenge to work out the most efficient route each day, taking into account traffic and orders that vary daily. Kevin has two fat round books that describe all the calls he must do, yet he barely opens them. He has it all in his head, two hundred domestic calls (on a system of alternating days), plus one hundred and thirty offices, shops and cafes. “A good milkman knows how to work his round,” stated Kevin with the quiet authority of a seasoned professional.
Setting a fierce pace, always quick, never hurried, he was always thinking on his feet. With practiced dexterity Kevin can carry six glass bottles effortlessly in his bare hands, with the necks clutched between each of his fingers. He makes it all look easy, because Kevin is an artist. The wide chassis of Kevin’s diesel milk float permits him to cross speed bumps with one wheel on either side – avoiding chinking milk crates – if he lines up the float precisely, and during our seven hours together on the round, he did it right every time.
Yet, before he embraced his occupation, Kevin rejected it. When the industry hit a bump, he tried to find that “proper job” which haunted him, working in a kitchen and then a bakery for three years. But one day he saw a milk float drive by the bakery and he knew his destiny was to be in the cabin. Taking a declining round on the Cattle Road Estate, he built it up to hundred calls, and then another and another, until he had five rounds with four milkmen working alongside him. A failed marriage and an expensive divorce meant he had to sell these rounds, worth £10,000 a piece, to Parker Dairies. But then in 1999, the dairy offered him his old territory back – the East End. “I realised the only time I was happy was when I was working for myself,” confided Kevin with glee, “It was my favourite round, my favourite area, my favourite pay scheme, commission only – next to my first round Arnold Circus! The best of everything came together for me.”
But, returning to East End, Kevin discovered his customers had become further apart. Where once Kevin went door to door, now he may have only one or two calls in a street, and consequently the round is wider. Between three thirty and eleven thirty each morning, Kevin spirals around the East End, delivering first to houses with gardens and secure locations to leave milk, then returning later to deliver milk to exposed doorsteps, thereby minimising the risk of theft, before finally doing the rounds of offices as they open for business. During the day Kevin turns evangelical, canvassing door to door, searching for new customers, because many people no longer realise there is a milkman who can deliver.
Kevin is a milkman with a mission to rebuild the lost milk rounds of the East End, and he has become a local personality in the process, celebrated for his boundless energy and easy charm. Now happily settled with his new partner, whom he met on the round, he thinks he is delivering milk but I think he is pursuing life.
If you want Kevin to deliver milk or yoghurt or eggs or fresh bread or dogfood, or even compost, to you, contact him directly by phoning 07940095775 or email kevinthemilkman@yahoo.co.uk
Lenny Hamilton, Jewel Thief
Mid-afternoon on a weekday is a good time for a discreet liaison at The Carpenters Arms in Cheshire St (the pub that used to belong to the Krays), especially if you are meeting a jewel thief. Lenny was initially averse to the location, “What do you want to go to that filthy old place for?” he complained, until I reassured him they had cleaned it up nicely, though when he told me the story of his personal experience of the Kray twins I came to understand why he might harbour an aversion.
“I used to go round to their house in Vallance Rd on and off for three years, until Ronnie burnt me with the pokers, and his mother and Charlie had a go with him over it.” revealed Lennie with a pleasant smile, introducing his testimony, before taking a slug of his double Corvoisier and lemonade. It was a story that started well enough before it all went so horribly wrong.
“I was just six weeks out of the army, doing my National Service (I used to box for the army), when I went back to work in Billingsgate Fish Market at the age of twenty-six. Georgie Cornell looked after me – he was the hardest man I ever saw on the cobbles but he had a heart of gold as well. He gave me five pounds to buy my mother some flowers and said ‘Make sure you give her the fucking change!’ He was a nice fellow. He used to line up all the tramps at the market and give them each half a crown and make sure they got a mug of tea and two slices of dripping toast. Then with the change, he’d say ‘Now go down and buy yourselves a pint.’
Leaving work, I was walking down Maidment St, and on the corner I saw this big fellow wrestling with these two little fellows. So I went to help them, they got away and I got arrested, because the guy I was wrestling with was a police officer. When I got taken down to Arber Sq police station, he said to me, ‘Do you know what you’ve done? Them two young fellows was the Kray twins and now they’ve got away. They’re on the run from the army.’ I apologised and they let me go.
Later, when the Krays got control of a snooker hall, The Regal, I was playing snooker there and they came in and this fellow put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You don’t know who I am do you? I am Reggie Kray – and this is my brother Ronnie.’ I thought I was seeing double, you couldn’t tell them apart. They took me across the road to a pub called The Wentworth to buy me a drink because I did them a favour. They liked me at first. That’s how I came to be going round their house for nearly three years.
One day, I was down the Regency Club working for Harry Abrahams, he had his own “firm” and Albert Donahue was part of it. One of the Krays’ “firm”, Pat Connolly was there and he was drinking with a young couple. Then some fellows arrived from South London and sent us all a drink over. I ordered one for myself and the young fellow, but I didn’t know what the girl was drinking, so I asked her, ‘What do you want, love?’
The fellow that was with her went to cut me with a razor! Pat Connolly said ‘You don’t do that to Lenny.’ So, the fellow asked to have a talk with me in the toilet and I thought he wanted to say sorry. As I went into the toilet, walking in front of him, someone said, ‘Watch your back!’ and he went to cut me down the back with his cut-throat razor. I dived down to the cubicle door, and ducked and dived, as he came at me with the razor. Then I got up and smashed him in the face and I didn’t realise that I broke his nose. I also didn’t realise he was Buller Ward’s son, Bonner – and Buller was friends with the Krays.
My pal Andy Paul was living with me at the time because his wife had thrown him out, and he worked with the Krays as a doorman. Once, he came home at one in the morning when I was in bed and said ‘Ronnie wants you on the phone at Esmerelda’s bar. You’d better phone him up because you know what he’s like, he’ll come round and smash the place up.’ So I got a cab all the way to Knightsbridge to Esmerelda’s in Wilton Place and asked the cab driver to wait.
I went in and walked upstairs. All the gambling tables were closed down and there were seven or eight people standing on either side. They told me to go in the kitchen and when I opened the door Ronnie Kray was standing opposite. He said, ‘Nothing to worry about, Lenny.’ He had a big armchair next to the cooker and he invited me to sit down, asking ‘What’s going on Lenny? You caused a bit of trouble in the Regal. We get protection money from them.’ I sat down.
He said, ‘Alright, you can go now.’ I stood up again and, as I turned to leave, I was wondering what was going on, when he said, ‘Get hold of him.’ Two geezers grabbed hold of me and then I saw it. I thought they were pokers but there were steels that are used to sharpen knives, Ronnie had them on the gas and they were white-hot. They had wooden handles and the first one Ronnie picked up he dropped because it was so hot, so he went and got an oven glove. Then he picked one up and came over to me, to frighten me, I imagined. He singed my black curly hair. I pissed myself. I was terrified. Next he started setting fire to my suit that I only had made two weeks before.
Then he went back and got another hot poker, and dabbed it on my cheeks and held it across my eyebrows and burnt my eyebrows off. I’m half-blind in this eye because of it. Then he went back and got another poker and, as he came back, he said, ‘Now I’m going to burn your eyes out.’ and he really meant it. As he came towards me, Limehouse Willy called out from the crowd, ‘No Ron, don’t do that!’ (A nice fellow he was.) Ronnie switched, he turned and walked away.
They let me go and I hurried out, and the cab driver was still waiting outside. When he saw the state of me, he wanted to take me to Scotland Yard but I said, ‘No mate, don’t do that, just take me home.’ Then as we were driving along, he said, ‘I think there’s a car following us,’ and it was one of the Krays’ cars. They were following to see where I as going, so I went round to my friend Harry Abrahams’ house. When he came home with his friend Albert Donahue, he said, ‘There’s only one person who would do that.’ So he and Albert went round the twins home with guns next morning, and the twins told him they did it because I got too flash – too big for my boots.
About two days later, my protector from Billingsgate, Georgie Cornell, came round and gave Harry Abrahams’ wife two hundred pounds with instructions to take care of me, “Look after Lenny, take the expenses out of that.’ A day later, a big surprise, Charlie Kray came round and gave her a hundred pounds and said, ‘Don’t let my brothers know.’ Finally, Dr Blaskar, the Krays’ doctor came round – he liked to drink and gamble – he treated me, gave me stuff for the burns.
But then in 1967, when the police were after the Krays, I was in Wandsworth Prison and they got a message smuggled in to me. I was in a single cell and when I returned from the doctor one day there was an envelope on the table. (It’s in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard now) The note read, ‘If the Old Bill comes round, keep your mouth shut or we are going to shoot your kids.’ My children were six and seven years old and living with their mother in Poplar. I’m not a grass but I couldn’t risk my kids being shot, so I went to see the governor and gave him the letter. Within two hours, the police were round, they said, ‘Look Lenny, if you help us, we’ll help you. We’ll give your children twenty-four hour police protection.’ which they did. They moved me to Eastchurch prison on the Isle of Sheppey and then to Bow St to give evidence against Ronnie Kray. On my evidence, he got committed to the Old Bailey.”
We were all alone in the empty barroom and, when Lenny told the part about the poker, he fixed me eye to eye and, extending a single finger, pushed his fingertip into my face. I was speechless. It was extraordinary to hear a first hand account of the reality of characters that have become mythical. I think it is easier to accept the East End’s history of violence as mere fiction, even when you know the truth. Ironically, Lenny’s volatile experiences have fused his emotional story into a powerful narrative with an effective literary structure.
Lenny has no patience with those who seek to romanticise the Krays as working class heroes,“They were scum. The lowest of the low. You never robbed or hurt your own people, that was the old East End code. The Krays controlled people through fear. They hurt so many people. I’ve been in a saloon bar when they were there and people would arrive, order a drink, then go out to the toilet and walk straight out the back door to escape.”
Today, after plastic surgery, and many years on the straight and narrow since doing time, Lenny is a different man. Though, even walking with a stick, he retains a powerful physical presence as a legacy of his boxing years. Yet, behind this assured facade, I sensed something else, an intensity in his eyes, his “snake eyes” he calls them, that indicates a spirit forged in a dark world of violence.
Lenny doesn’t pretend to be a saint. “I’m not proud of what I done,” he admitted openly, speaking of his days blowing safes and thieving jewels. “I used to have a friend in Hatton Garden who bought all the gear off me and gave me good deal. I took him a £680,000 job one day and, after he’d melted down the gold and recut the diamonds, I got £100,000. He asked me to push my finger through a card, and then he made me this,” revealed Lenny with relish, displaying the dazzling ring upon his finger with its single glittering diamond. Always keen to emphasise that he only stole from those with insurance, Lenny even managed to make it sound like he was doing a favour for people sometimes. “There was a man whose business was going under. He came to me and said ‘There’s nothing in the safe but if you blow it up, I can claim there was.’ I felt sorry for him so I blew the safe while he was away for the weekend. Then he took the insurance payment and moved to Brighton.”
Lenny could have talked all day but after three double Corvoisiers and lemonade, I called a taxi to take him on to a pub in the Roman Rd where his pals were waiting to continue the long afternoon of storytelling. When I enquired about some recent scars on his head, he explained that he had been beaten up on the street by muggers, but he shrugged it off lightly. You have to credit Lenny for his resilience, he still possesses undaunted enthusiasm and appetite for life.
Standing up to leave, Lenny caught sight for the first time of the painting of Ronnie and Reggie Kray that hangs on the barroom wall in The Carpenters and brandished his stick in a flash of emotion. For a moment, I was expecting the sound of broken glass, but Lenny quickly relented, turning away with a grin and a wave to me, because the taxi was waiting outside and he had better things to do.
You may also like to read my interview with Billy Frost, the Krays driver at The Carpenters Arms
Rob Ryan, papercut artist
In a quiet street off the Old Bethnal Green Rd, there is a large wooden door. If you go through a smaller door within this large one, you enter a passage, under an arch, that leads to a courtyard where there is another door. Go through this door, climb up a staircase and you will find the secret den of Rob Ryan, the internationally famous papercut artist. With his luxuriant curls and thick beard, working here in this old loft, intent upon his creations, Rob Ryan might appear as a Romantic nineteenth century figure – like “The Tailor of Gloucester” – if it were not for the hoodie and Raybans that bring him bang up to date.
“I am not a connoisseur of papercutting” Rob declares in characteristic, self-deprecating style, when I ask him of the origins of his work, as we cosy up on a couch upholstered in denim jeans. Years ago, before the seismic shift in cultural hierarchies that happened at the end of the last century, Rob was a painter who included words in his paintings and got a lot of flak for it. “Cheating” was the particular crime levelled at him at the Royal College of Art, where Rob was studying printmaking. Rob produces a scruffy old Thames & Hudson paperback of Tyrolean papercuts – if there was a eureka moment, it was the discovery of this book. Making papercuts, he explains was a natural extension of the screenprint stencils that he was already cutting and the symmetrical nature of these papercuts did not allow for the inclusion of words. So papercutting was the “cure” for the “malaise” of sticking words in his pictures.
Rob’s story is a startling reminder of how the hegemony of the art world has changed now, but it does not begin to account for the extraordinary flair that he brings to everything he touches. This is work of immense appeal that celebrates life and the complex emotions that colour our daily experience. Obviously, the “cure” was completely ineffectual because his work is full of words that provide an important dynamic to the images. “I love the work of William Blake, and those very English twentieth century artists like Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Eric Fraser,” Rob explains, and his work is an honourable inheritor of this lively graphic tradition. There is an emotional fullness and attractive energy to all of Rob’s work that speaks of an artist who has found his perfect medium. Quickly, he saw the limitations of entirely symmetrical papercuts and that is when the words came back in again. Getting passionate, he gestures rhetorically and, in delight, declares of papercutting “There is no cheating! There is no right! There is no wrong!”
Things start to get exciting now, as he offers me an apple, and moves over to his work table to commence a papercut. His energy changes and a serene Rob Ryan emerges as he opens a notebook and begins purposefully to copy a sketch in pencil onto a sheet of paper on a light box. Then he transfers the paper to a green cutting board and begins to cut it out with a scalpel in swift confident strokes. There is a different, more intense, atmosphere in the room now, everything focussed to the quick movement of the blade between Rob’s nimble fingers, and I reach over to capture the moment with my camera. Then it has passed, Rob inscribes the papercut and kindly presents it to me with as a souvenir. It is an image of a mother and child playing together. As I examine the treasured scrap, when I get back to my desk, I am conscious of the sinuous subtle lines of this delicate cut that give these figures life and movement, and capture an ephemeral moment of intimate affection between parent and child.
In a papercut, all the elements have to be connected, human figures have to hold hands or touch, and as result of this technical requirement, this sense of connection has become a defining element in Rob Ryan’s work, both as technique and as subject matter too. The breathtaking skill on display brings an audience to these works, but it is the language that gives depth in the exposure of ambivalent or raw emotion, and this emotionalism, whether light or dark, creates an exciting counterpoint to the control required to make them.
Years ago, Rob had a studio in the Bishopsgate end of the Spitalfields Market, until it was demolished. He regularly used to eat a huge roast lunch at the Market Cafe in Fournier St before it shut at eleven in the morning, to set him up for a day’s work. Now he has become one of the most popular artists, both in our neighbourhood and far beyond, and I like to think that in his use of familiar domestic images, he captures something of the essence of the life of this place as it is lived now.
You may also like to read about Rob Ryan at Somerset House
Discover Rob Ryan’s papercuts at Ryantown in Columbia Rd and in two forthcoming exhibitions at The Air Gallery, Dover St, London W1, 1st-20th November and at The Shire Hall Gallery, Market Square, Stafford, 13th November-9th January 2011.
One Hundred Penguin Books
I found these first hundred Penguin books in my attic over the weekend, as I was unpacking a box that has been sealed since I moved in. With their faded orange, indigo, green, violet and pink spines they make a fine display and I am fond of this collection that took me so many years to amass.
When I left college, I wrote to companies all over the country seeking work and asking if they would give me an interview if I came to see them. Then I travelled around on the cheap, through a combination of buses, trains and hitchhiking, to visit all these places – the industrial towns of the North and the Cathedral cities of the South – staying in bus stations, youth hostels and seedy B&Bs, and going along filled with hope to interviews that were almost all fruitless. It was the first time I encountered the distinctive regional qualities of Britain and in each city, to ameliorate the day of my interview, I took the opportunity to visit the museums, civic art galleries, cathedrals and castles that distinguish these places. Arriving at each destination, I would consult the directory and make a list of the second-hand booksellers, then mark them on a tourist map and, after the job interview, I would visit every one. There were hundreds of these scruffy dusty old shops with proprietors who were commonly more interested in the book they were reading behind the counter than in any customer. Many were simply junk shops with a few books piled in disorder on some shelves in the back or stacked in cardboard boxes on the pavement outside.
In these shabby old shops, I sometimes came upon Penguin books with a podgy penguin on the cover, quite in contrast to the streamlined bird familiar from modern editions. These early titles, dating from 1935 had a clean bold typography using Eric Gill’s classic sans typeface and could be bought for just twenty or thirty pence. So, in the manner of those cards you get in bubblegum packets, I began to collect any with numbers up to one hundred. In doing so, I discovered a whole library of novelists from the nineteen thirties and reading these copies passed the time pleasantly on my endless journeys. In particular, I liked the work of Eric Linklater whose playful novel “Poet’s Pub” was number two, Compton Mackenzie whose novel of the Edwardian vaudeville “Carnival” was ten, Vita Sackville-West whose novel “The Edwardians” was sixteen, T.F.Powys whose “Mr Weston’s Good Wine” was seventy-three and Sylvia Townsend Warner whose novel “Lolly Willowes” was eighty-four. After these, I read all the other works of these skillful and unjustly neglected novelists.
Eventually I found a job in Perthshire and then subsequently in Inverness, and from here I made frequent trips to Glasgow, which has the best second-hand bookshops in Scotland, to continue my collection. And whenever I made the long rail journey down South, I commonly stopped off to spend a day wandering round Liverpool or Durham or any of the places I had never been, all for the purpose of seeking old Penguins.
The collection was finally completed when I moved back to London and discovered that my next door neighbour Christine was the daughter of Allen Lane who founded Penguin books. She was astonished to see my collection and I was amazed to see the same editions scattered around her house. From Christine, I learnt how her father Allen was bored one day on Exeter St David’s Station (a place familiar to me), changing trains on the way to visit his godmother Agatha Christie. When he searched the bookstall, he could not find anything to read and decided to start his own company publishing cheap editions of good quality books. I presume he did not know that, if he had been there half a century earlier, he could have bought a copy of Thomas Hardy’s first published novel “Desperate Remedies”, because Exeter St David’s was where Hardy experienced that moment no writer can ever forget, of first seeing their book on sale.
I do not think my collection of Penguins is of any great value because they are of highly variable condition and not all are first editions, though every one predates World War II and they are of the uniform early design before the bird slimmed down. While I was collecting these, I thought that I was on a quest to build my career – a fancy that I walked away from, years later. Now these hundred Penguin books are the only evidence of my innocent tenacity to create a life for myself at that time.
Allen Lane’s idealistic conception, to use the mass market to promulgate good writing to the widest readership in cheap editions that anyone could afford, is one that I admire. And these first hundred are a fascinating range of titles, a snapshot of the British public’s reading tastes in the late thirties. Looking back, the search for all these books led me on a wonderful journey through Britain. If you bear in mind that I only found a couple in each city, then you will realise that my complete collection represents a ridiculously large number of failed job interviews in every corner of these islands. It was a job search than became a cultural tour and resulted in a stack of lovely old paperbacks. Now they sit on my shelf here in Spitalfields as souvenirs of all the curious places I never would have visited if it were not my wayward notion to scour the entire country to collect all the first hundred Penguins.
How Raymond’s Shop became Leila’s Shop
The top photograph of 15 Calvert Avenue is believed to have been taken one Sunday in 1902 around the time Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra came to open the Boundary Estate, and I snapped the lower photograph last December, more than a century later. One day, Joan Rose visited Leila’s Cafe next door at 17 Calvert Avenue and brought out the old photograph (which she always carries in her purse) to show Leila McAlister, explaining that the little boy standing in the doorway was her father. A copy now hangs proudly in Leila’s Shop, and served as the inspiration for our escapade last year when a class from Virginia Rd School in Arnold Circus turned out to assist and we stopped the traffic to take the new picture.
Joan (unmarried name Raymond) told me that her father Alfred was born in 1896 and is approximately six years old in the picture. The woman beside him in the doorway is Phoebe Raymond his mother, Joan’s grandmother, and the man on the left is his father, Joan’s grandfather Albert Alfred Raymond (known as Alf), the first proprietor of the newly built shop. They all lived in the flat up above and you can see their songbird in the cage, a cock linnet.
Phoebe has her smart apron with frills and everyone is wearing their Sunday best – remarkably for the time, everyone has good quality boots. I like the sacks with “Spitalfields” printed on them, indicating produce from the fruit and vegetable market half a mile away, and the porters’ baskets which Leila still uses today. You can see the awning has been taken up to permit enough light for the photograph and then it has rained. We had the same problem with the weather, but were blessed with a few hours between a sleet shower and a blizzard to snatch our picture.
Joan Rose told me she believes her family are of French Huguenot origin and the original surname was Raymond de Foir, which means the people you see in the old photograph are probably descended from the Huguenot immigrants that came here in the eighteenth century. What touched me most was to learn from Joan that Alfred her father (pictured here eternally six years old in his Sunday best on the threshold of his father’s shop), went off to fight in the First World War and, aged twenty-two, was there at the battle of the Somme when so many died, but returned to run the shop in Calvert Avenue carrying on his father’s business in the same premises until his death in 1966. Joan grew up here and attended both Virginia Rd School and Rochelle School on either side of Arnold Circus. Although she now lives in West London, she remains involved with her old neighbourhood today as Honorary Patron of the Friends of Arnold Circus and cut the cake on the day of the celebration of the centenary of the bandstand.
I am very grateful to Leila McAlister and to Robert Bradshaw, manager of Leila’s Shop (pictured on the left of the new photograph in the same spot as his predecessor a century ago), for kindly organising the picture last Winter and also to the school pupils for participating with such enthusiasm (their teacher stands in the shop doorway). Leila and Robert handed out chocolate brownies and tangerines on the pavement after the photograph was taken and a spontaneous Christmas party ensued, demonstrating that the exuberant energy of children remains a constant across the span of history defined by these two pictures.
You may like to read these other stories about Joan Rose:
Joan Rose at Gardner’s Market Sundriesmen
Alf & Phoebe Raymond, Joan’s grandparents outside their shop in 1900.
Joan Rose presides over the cutting of the cake at the celebration of the centenary of the Arnold Circus bandstand last Summer.
Paul Gardner, paper bag seller
Recently, I have taken to dropping in to the premises of my new friend Paul Gardner, the paper bag seller at 149 Commercial St, to observe the constant parade of long-standing customers that pass through, creating the life of this distinctive business. One morning, I called round at six thirty, opening time, to enjoy a quiet chat before the rush and Paul explained that his great-grandfather James Gardner began trading here in this same building as a Scalemaker when it was built in 1870 – which means Paul is a fourth generation Market Sundriesman and makes Gardners the longest established family business in Spitalfields.
Paul still has his great-grandfather’s accounts from the end of the nineteenth century, when as Scalemakers they serviced the scales for all the traders in the fruit and vegetable market on a regular basis. Turning the pages and scanning the lines of James’ fine copperplate handwriting your eye alights upon the names, Isaac, Isaiah and Ezekiel, indicative of the Jewish population that once defined the identity of Spitalfields. There is an ancient block of wood with three scoops carved out that are smoothed with wear, it has been in use since the days of Paul’s great-grandfather. Then his son Bertie (Paul’s grandfather) used it, then Bertie’s son Roy (Paul’s father) used it and Paul still keeps his cash in it today. As the twentieth century wore on, each of the successive Mr Gardners found that customers began to expect to buy their produce in a paper bag (a trend which is now reversed) and so the trade of dealing in bags supplanted the supply of scales entirely over four generations.
Turn your back on the traffic rattling down Commercial St and stand for a moment to contemplate the dignified Brunswick green frontage of Gardners Market Sundriesman. An old glass signs reads “Paper & Polythene Bag Merchant” and, sure enough, a variety of different coloured bags are festooned on strings like bunting, below them are some scales hinting at the origins of the business and then your attention is distracted by a mysterious wooden sieve, a memento of Paul’s grandfather. Enter the shop to be confronted by piles of bags of every variety in packets stacked up on either side and leaving barely any room to stand. Only two routes are possible, straight ahead leading into the dark recesses where the stacks grow taller and closer together in the gloom or turn right to the makeshift counter, improvised from an old counter-top supported upon yet more packets of bags. Beneath the fluorescent glow, the dust of ages is settling upon everything. You think you have entered a storeroom, but you are wrong because you neglected to notice Paul sitting at the counter in a cosy corner, partly concealed by a stack of bags. You turn to greet him and a vista appears with a colourful display of bags and tags and tapes and those old green-grocers’ signs that say “Today’s price 2/8” and “Morning Gathered” – which creates a pleasant backdrop to the figure of Paul Gardner as he stands to greet you with a genial “Hello!”
With his wavy grey locks, gentle face, sociable manner and innate decency, Paul could have stepped from another age and it is a joy to meet someone who has successfully resisted the relentless imperative to haste and efficiency at any cost, that tyrannises our age and threatens to enslave us all. When you enter the shop, you enter Paul’s world and you discover it is a better place than the one outside.
Paul was thirteen when his father Roy died unexpectedly in 1968, creating a brief inter-regnum when his mother took over for four years until he came of age. “I came here the first day after I left school at seventeen,” said Paul, “It was what I wanted to do. After the first year, my mother stopped coming, though my nan used to live above the shop then. I haven’t had a day off since 1972. I don’t make much money, I will never become a millionaire. To be honest, I try to sell things as cheap as I can while others try to sell them as expensive as they can. I do it because I have done it all my life. I do it because it is like a family heirloom.”
Paul Gardner’s customers are the stallholders and small businessmen and women of East London, many of whom have been coming for more than twenty years, especially loyal are the Ghanaian and Nigerian people who prefer to trade with a family business. Paul will sell small numbers of bags while other suppliers only deal in bulk, and he offers the same price per bag for ten as for a hundred. Even then, most of his customers expect to negotiate the price down, unable to resist their innate natures as traders. Paul explained to me that some have such small turnovers they can only afford to buy ten carrier bags at a time.
In his endeavours, Paul supports and nurtures an enormous network of tiny businesses that are a key part of the economy of our city. Many have grown and come back with bigger and bigger orders, selling their products to supermarkets, while others simply sustain themselves, like the Nigerian woman who has a stall in Brixton market and has been coming regularly on the bus for twenty-three years to buy her paper bags here. “I try to do favours for people,” says Paul and, in spontaneous confirmation of this, a customer rings with the joyous news that they have finally scraped enough money together to pay their account for the last seven years. Sharing in the moment of triumph, Paul laughs down the phone, “What happened, did you win the lottery or something?”
Paul has the greatest respect for his customers and they hold him in affection too. In fact, Paul’s approach could serve as a model if we wish to move forward from the ugliness of the current business ethos. Paul only wants to make enough to live and builds mutually supportive relationships with his customers over the longterm based upon trust. His is a more equitable version of capitalism tempered by mutual respect, anchored in a belief in the essential goodness rather than the essential greediness of people. As a fourth generation trader, Paul has no business plan, he is guided by his beliefs about people and how he wants to live in the world. His integrity and self-respect are his most precious possessions.“I have never advertised,” says Paul, “All my customers come because they have been recommended by friends who are already my customers.”
However, after Gardners survived two World Wars and the closure of the market, there is now a new threat as the landlord’s agents’ Tarn & Tarn seek to increase the annual rent from £15,000 to £25,000. “I earn two hundred and fifty pounds a week,” reveals Paul with frank humility, “If I earned five hundred pounds a week, I could give an extra two hundred and fifty towards the rent but at two hundred and fifty pounds a week, the cupboard is bare.”
Ruminating upon the problem,“They’ve dollied-up the place round here!” says Paul quietly, in an eloquently caustic verdict upon this current situation in which his venerable family business finds itself now, after a hundred and forty years, in a fashionable shopping district with a landlord seeking to maximize profits. Paul needs to renegotiate his rent increase and we must support Paul by sending more business his way (at the very least, everyone go round and buy your bin bags from him), because Paul is a Spitalfields legend we cannot lose. But more important than the history itself, is the political philosophy that has evolved over four generations of experience. It is the sum of what has been learnt. In all his many transactions, Paul unselfconsciously espouses a practical step-by-step approach towards a more sustainable mode of society. Who would have expected that the oldest traders in Spitalfields might also turn out to be the model of an ethical business pointing the way to the future?
You may also like to read about Paul Gardner’s Collection and When Paul Gardner met Joan Rose
Paul’s grandfather Bertie Gardner, standing with Paul’s father Roy Gardner as child outside the shop around 1930.
Roy Gardner, now a grown man, standing outside the shop after World War II, around 1947.
First Annual Report
One year has passed since I wrote the first post here at Spitalfields Life and now, reaching three hundred and sixty-five, I hope you will permit me a moment of reflection. Let me confess to you that writing Spitalfields Life daily has become a compulsion, an ecstatic project driven by the desire to communicate my sense of wonder at the people I meet in the East End.
How quickly this first year has gone! Yet I feel I have hardly begun, because three hundred and sixty-five stories merely scratches the surface of the subject. And I fear I shall barely have time to blink before I will be writing the twenty-seventh annual report, with less than four months left to run before the ten thousandth post that is my ultimate target.
People ask me all the time,“What are you going to do when you run out?” but it is evident to me at the end of this first year that there will be no problem in finding enough subjects for the pen portraits which are the core of Spitalfields Life. My frequent experience is that each interviewee tells me of others I should write about. Readers write in with suggestions too, and the endlessly expanding possibilities give me a sense of vertigo sometimes.
Yet, extrapolating twenty-six times from what I have already written, I already recognise that space is going to be limited. Looking back over the Bakers, Nuns, Poulterers, Paper Bag Sellers, Bell Founders, Jewel Thieves, Artists, Publicans, Novelists, Gangsters, Paper Cutters, Songwriters, Aesthetes, Cloth Merchants, Machinists, Bellringers, Steeplekeepers, Designers, Furriers, Dairymen, Nursery Rhyme Collectors, Antique Dealers, Chefs, Strippers, Sheep-shearers, Farmers, Weavers, Photographers, Shoe-shiners, Barbers, Ostrich Feather Sellers, Grocers, Playwrights, Letterpress Printers, Street Dancers, Architects, Pearlies, Steeplejacks, Rag Dealers, Trendsetters, Model Boat Enthusiasts, Priests, Sculptors, Head-dress Makers, Beekeepers, Milkmen, Ostlers, Swagmen, Mudlarks, Tailors, Laundrette Attendants, Mechanics, Beigel Sellers, Bunny Girls, Pigeon Fliers, Bankers, Dockers, Junk Dealers, Gardeners, Restauranteurs, Ceramicists and Mapmakers, I can imagine how Noah must have felt, thinking, ”How am I going to fit everyone in?” But, also like Noah, I am equally eager not to miss anyone out that should be included and so I rely upon you, my gentle readers, to direct my footsteps by informing me of other individuals that I must write about.
Walking through Spitalfields, in streets and lanes that were once familiar to William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, and more recently to Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Beatrix Potter and J.K.Rowling – among other literary luminaries – I am constantly reminded of my predecessors. As a writer of modest ambition, I am commonly filled with awe at the nature of what I have taken on, but the truth is that it comes down to writing one story each day. This is how I keep a sense of proportion, by concentrating on the task in front of me.
I often worry about what would happen if I became sick, yet the for the first time in my life I have lived through a whole year without being ill at all. This has been the year of writing constantly – an unforgettable year, unforgettable not simply because of everything that has happened and all the people I have met, but unforgettable because – writing every single day – all the posts now exist as a reminder of what I did. They are the substance of my activity over this past twelve months.
Once I was concerned that writing was an overly solitary activity to pursue as a lifetime’s occupation, yet this year writing has led me out into the world and drawn me closer to life. I have never met more people than I have recently. When I get home from an interview and open my notebook to look at my notes, I always think “How can I do justice to this person?” Without all these generous individuals who have opened their hearts to me, these stories could not exist and the success of Spitalfields Life must be attributed to their qualities alone.
Some kind of miracle has happened. The internet gave the means of printing and distribution for free, enabling me to begin. Then, out of nowhere, from London and across the globe, more and more readers appeared to read Spitalfields Life each day, giving me the confidence to continue and encouraging me to write better stories to delight and intrigue. “You are obviously a big-hearted woman.” one esteemed reader commented, which is perhaps the best compliment anyone every paid my writing.
So many have joined along the way, that I am taking this opportunity of the first anniversary to look back over some of the prime posts which you may not have seen. During the next week, I shall be publishing a selection of my favourites from the first three hundred and sixty-five, while I take this brief opportunity to enjoy a few drinks with Sandra Esqulant at The Golden Heart, tidy my desk and make preparations for next year.
One day, I shall throw a big party for all the subjects of my pen portraits in one of Spitalfields’ finest old houses and invite you, my readers, to come and meet them. But in the meantime, as I gather my thoughts, steel myself and sharpen my pencil to commence the second year, I hope, through the practice of my work to become better at this endeavour, in order to be more worthy of my subjects – since there are so many marvellous things I must show you and more people I want to introduce.
And now I must run, because I am off to spend all night at the New Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market in Stratford and in one week’s time you will discover why…
Thus, with all these thoughts in mind, I come to the end of this first year of Spitalfields Life.
I am your loyal servant
The Gentle Author
Take a close look at this character because you are going to see a lot more of him. In a previous life in Devon, he used to catch rabbits and even moorhens but now he is learning the ways of the alley in Spitalfields. A small creature with a large personality. (It started with a black cat named Mr Pussy – the first post, 26th August 20o9)
