Truman's returns to Spitalfields
Ever since Truman’s closed the brewery in 1988 after more than three centuries of brewing in Brick Lane, their absence has been felt throughout East London, emphasised by all the ex-Truman’s pubs that are still emblazoned with the name as part of their architecture. Meanwhile, the venerable history and resonant name of Truman’s – which remains synonymous with beer in East London – got lost in series of corporate takeovers at the end of the last century. They were sorely missed. And it looked like it was all over, the barrel was empty, the last glass had been drunk and the dregs had been drained. But now, in an entirely unexpected joyous development, two fearless young men are bringing Truman’s back.
“It was apparent that everyone referred to Truman’s, but you couldn’t taste it – so it was a sad story,” explained Michael-George Hemus who, with his business partner James Morgan, has embraced the audacious challenge to re-establish Truman’s Brewery, working from an attic in Elder St. “There is a legacy of Truman’s that has to be taken up by a brewery of a certain size.” said James with an impressive clear-eyed confidence, declaring his ambition to open a brewery in East London, on a scale than can employ a significant number of people, within two years from now.
If Michael-George & James are successful they will become one more chapter in the long history that has seen many re-inventions for Truman’s Brewery. As Michael-George reminded me, Joseph Truman who gave his name to the brewery was not the one who started it, but an employee who worked his way up and took over the business. Joseph’s son Ben was in charge during the porter boom, building the business to become the largest brewer in East London, exporting overseas, supplying the army, the royal family and creating an imperial stout for the Tsar. When Ben Truman died without an heir, Sampson Hanbury bought up all the shares and took control. Industrialising the process, he was one of the first to use canals for distribution and bought a boat to ship his own exports. His successor Thomas Buxton was William Wilberforce’s right hand man in the campaign for abolition of slavery, who worked altruistically for the people of the East End, insisting all his employees learn to read on company time.
So Michael-George & James are following in the footsteps of some remarkable men, and last December, after two years of wrangling, they signed an agreement to buy the celebrated yet neglected name of Truman’s from the corporate owners. But since November, they had already been stealing a march in the London Metropolitan Archive which houses all Truman’s records, researching the history of their illustrious predecessors, poring through the photographic collection and most significantly studying the “gyle books” which contain the recipes for beer. Stretching from 1812 until the nineteen twenties, these volumes specify the crucial factors, namely the time of day, the weather and the ingredients for every brew. Before it was possible to store hops or malted barley, as it is today, achieving a consistent brew was almost impossible, so brewers blended beers – creating large vats of strong barley wine and carefully blending it proportionally with something weaker to produce a consistency of taste.
Michael-George & James boldly decided to launch their first beer at once, as a means to build up a sales volume that would allow them to open a brewery that matches their ambitions. “We thought about recreating an old recipe, but decided against it because we don’t want this to be a nostalgic project, it’s Truman’s for the twenty-first century.” said Michael-George, emphasising that they do not wish to wind the clock backwards. “We wanted a beer that everyone can drink, because that’s what Truman’s is about,” added James optimistically, stressing the nature of Truman’s as a popular beer, not just for real ale drinkers.
Working with esteemed brewer Tom Knox of Nethergate brewery and in consultation with former Truman’s employees, such as Derek Prentice who was a junior brewer from 1968 until 1989 in Brick Lane, they set to work. The beers brewed in Spitalfields tended to be darker, and so, in opposition to the current fashion for lighter beers, they chose to create a darker beer in the best bitter style, christened “Runner,” meaning the staple brew. A decision that informed the choice of malts, which were Maris Otter pale malt, chocolate malt, crystal rye, wheat and a little dark crystal rye, complimented by a blend of two traditional British hop varieties Fuggles and Goldings.
Let me confess, these were mysterious terms to me, but it was a parching afternoon and I could sense a certain relish in the cadences that Michael-George adopted as he rolled these names off his tongue.“We tried about thirty until we worked out what we liked,” he admitted, in explanation of their research process, exchanging a glance of barely concealed glee with James.“It is a four per cent alcohol best bitter, darker than fashionable, though traditionally well bodied, full rounded, and which drinks stronger than it is.” announced James authoritatively, looking thirsty suddenly as he let these words overcome him, in the process of summing up their debut beer with the precise rhetoric of a professional brewer.
You may be assured that I shall follow this story of the return of Truman’s closely over the coming years, but in the meantime you can try a glass of Truman’s Runner for yourself – because it is already available in the East End. I must admit to having enjoyed a few pints of this delicious bitter myself last week at The Carpenter’s Arms in Cheshire St. You can also find it at The Water Poet in Folgate St, The Griffin in Leonard St, The Haggerston in Dalston, Indo in Whitechapel, The Scolt Head in De Beauvoir Town and The Wenlock Arms in Hoxton, with many more others to follow in time. Cheers!
Truman’s cooperage.
Truman’s draymen.
Setting out for on inter-brewery football tournament.
Truman’s directors’ drawing room.
Truman’s workers’ football match.
The Golden Heart, Commercial St, Spitalfields, in its previous incarnation.
Portrait copyright © Jeremy Freedman Brewery photographs copyright © Truman’s Beer
George Cossington, Steeplejack
This is George Cossington in the top left of this picture, photographed in the pursuit of his trade as a steeplejack & steel erector, perched at the very top of a one hundred and fifty foot jib during the construction of Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s Cathedral in 1958. Seeing this vertiginous image, you will no doubt be relieved to know that George survives to tell the tales of his daring aerial adventures, still fit and full of swagger today at seventy-seven. ” In my day, you weren’t called a steel erector, you were called a spider man. I used to run up a sixty rung ladder in less than a minute and come down in less than twenty seconds – you just put your hands and feet on the sides and slid down! ” he bragged, with a modest smile that confirmed it was the truth.
George’s father was a steeplejack who once climbed Big Ben to fix the hands on the clock face and worked as chargehand on the construction on the Bank of England. So in 1947, when George left school at fourteen, there was no question about his future career, “All my friends were going into the Merchant Navy but when I came home with the form, my dad said, ‘No. You’re going into my trade so you get a pension.'” In fact, three out of the five boys in George’s family became steeplejacks, a significant measure of George’s father’s confidence in his own profession.
“My father, uncle and my brothers, we all loved it! There was none of this Health & Safety shit then, you learnt to be careful. What started coming in was the safety harness, a big belt with a hook on it attached to a rope – we hardly used them. There was no such thing as a crash helmet. Me and my brothers, we used to watch each other to check we put the bolts in correctly. It was all done properly, even without today’s safeguards.
I was apprenticed to Freddie Waite of Stratford. I started off as a tea boy. You learn as the months by, and then someone else becomes the tea boy and you learn how to adjust swivel bolts, rigging up steel beams, and how to sling a beam for the crane to lift. It takes well over a year before you start going off the ground. You had to learn rigging, slinging, welding, acetylene burning, and rope splicing. It takes five years to become a steeplejack. We used to walk the purlins that were four inches wide, you can’t do that today. Before scaffolding, we used wooden poles held together with wire bands, like they still do in the Far East. You had to know how to tie the wire bands securely, because it wasn’t an easy job going up to forty feet.
I enjoyed it, but I didn’t enjoy it when it was wet or cold. The crane used to take us in a bucket and put us on top of the steel work. In the Winter you could freeze. If it was a frosty night, we had a big fire in an oil drum and wrapped the chain around the fire to get the frost out of it, because if you didn’t it could snap like a carrot – a fifteen ton chain.
The day I fell, I was cutting some steelwork at Beckton Gas Works and it pissed down with rain, so they called us down. When I went back up again later, I cut one end of a beam without realising I had already cut the other end. I was seventeen years old. I was very lucky – my dad couldn’t believe it – a corrugated iron roof broke my fall. I had a few bruises, and a scar to this day. They called an ambulance but I was standing up by the time it came. I think I was only off work for a week, but I knew a couple of fellows that fell to their deaths.
My dad was still working up high until he was sixty-six. When he was the family foreman, he looked the business in a bowler hat. He taught me splicing and slinging, and he knew every sort of knot there was. He wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t do. He could throw a three-quarter inch bolt forty feet up for me to catch from a beam. Our last job together was on John Lewis in Oxford St. We were a hundred feet up in the air and he walked along beams as if they were on the ground.
I’ve never had a problem with heights. I’ve stood on the spider plate at the very top of a crane, three hundred and fifty feet up without a rope. I did it just for a laugh, but if my dad had seen me he’d have shot me…”
George retired at forty-five when he was required to wear a helmet on site, because he belonged to an earlier world that put more trust in human skill than safety procedures. When he spoke of pegging his own ladder to scale a factory chimney, I recognised a continuum with those that once climbed the spires of cathedrals, trusting their lives in the application of a skill which now exists only in the strictly controlled conditions of sport. Thankfully, with the advent of modern cranes and cherry pickers, men are no longer required to risk their lives in this way, but it only serves to increase my respect for the unacknowledged heroism of George Cossington, his brothers, his father, uncle and all of those in this city who fearlessly undertook these death-defying challenges as part of their daily routine. When you meet a steeplejack at the fine age of seventy-seven, his very existence confirms his skill and proficiency in his former profession.
Because Freddie Waite bought a camera in 1958 to record the construction of Paternoster House, we have the privilege to see these rare images today, photographed by those working on the site. And while Paternoster House may already be history – demolished for a subsequent development – in the meantime there are enough monumental structures still standing that George worked on, like Shell House, the Chiswick Flyover, the Edmonton Incinerator towers and the chimney at the Bryant & May Factory, to remind him of his thirty year career as a steeplejack & steel erector.
George (on the left) with the team, Kenny the master electrician, Ron the crane driver, then two slewmen and the foreman standing at the end, with Freddie (the master steeplejack that George was apprenticed to) standing at the back.
George is to be seen at top of the lower jib on the left, between the steel structure and St Paul’s.
George & Freddie at the end of the jib, as viewed from the boom.
George Cossington
portrait © copyright Jeremy Freedman
The Cossington boys, George (back left) pictured with his brothers Brian, Sid and Bob (front row, left to right) and Joey (back right) outside the family home in Rochester Avenue, Upton Park, E8. George, Brian and Joey all became steeplejacks like their father, while Sid and Bob became master bricklayers.
Spitalfields Antiques Market 17
This is the stylish Sarah Ovans – just arrived from West London – an ex-teacher now turned dealer in antique glass. “I am trying it out to see what happens” she declared recklessly, twirling her twisted glass walking stick, liberated from the schoolroom by this new adventure that began with a stall at a charity fair in Kensington. Dressed for the part in an alice band and floral gown adorned with blue cabbage roses, “It’s a tonic meeting all these different people!” she admitted to me in a hushed whisper of excitement, as her eyes roved around the bohemian East End crowd in Spitalfields.
This is Sharon Williams, a happy ex-prisonwarder, minding the stall for her pal Dan while he is on holiday. “In the prison service I was stressed to the max – I thought, ‘This job is killing me!’ so I left to trade in Airstream trailers. I live and breathe them actually, everything else is just to make a living because my love is with the Airstreams.” she confessed, revealing that it all started with seeing one in a Marilyn Monroe movie. Today Sharon is the accredited importer of these gleaming curvy beauties of which there are now four hundred in this country, and you can get one to serve as your own personal getaway vehicle from her website www.maybricks.co.uk.
This is the celebrated George Cossington, an ex-steeplejack, now putting his feet up at ground level after thirty years above the roof tops.“I fell once but a corrugated iron roof saved my fall, that was in Beckton Gas Works,” he recalled in relief, grateful to be here today. “I’ve always loved old tools, but I thought,’If you sell ’em, who’s going to buy ’em?’ So I bought a polishing machine and I bring them back to life.” George told me, accounting for his gleaming stock of antique iron and brassware – including an especially covetable military issue pruning saw dated 1945, still in perfect condition. Just one of the myriad delights of utilitarian metalwork to be discovered at George’s stall.
This is the graceful Juliette, an ex-socialworker from the South Coast, who deals in luggage, handbags and vanity cases – ask and she will show you the “handbag” from Worthing. We shared an idle half hour, studying the labels, peeking into the cases, peering at the fine linings and speculating about the mysteries of who? and where? and when? Juliette has made it her mission to match these exquisite handmade pieces with new owners to cherish and wax them. “I always liked handbags, I inherited my aunt’s snakeskin one,” Juliette proposed, by way of understated explanation, surrounded by all her glorious old baggage, enough to fill the left luggage office at Liverpool St Station.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
The Return of Aubrey Silkoff
Today Aubrey Silkoff returned to Navarre St, Arnold Circus, to see the brick where he incised his name on the nineteenth of April 1950, when he was eleven years old – you can see it just to the left of his upper arm in the photo above. When I first spoke with Aubrey over the phone, he admitted that he had no memory of carving it, although he confirmed that he grew up here in Laleham Buildings on the Boundary Estate and Navarre St was where he played football as a child.
Fortunately for us, 1950 was also the year of the photo craze when Aubrey and his pals acquired cameras and were able develop their pictures at the Boys Club at Virginia Rd School. As a consequence, we have a photographic record to show us some of the children who wrote their names on the wall of Wargrave Buildings at that time. Capturing the spirit and energy of a fleeting moment, these pictures allow us to put faces to the names incised on the bricks, vividly evoking the childhood world of over half a century ago which produced graffiti of such unlikely longevity. Recalling Bert Hardy’s photographs of East End children on the street, what makes these exuberant images special is that they were taken by the children themselves.
As we walked down Navarre St together, I had the strange experience of introducing Aubrey to his long forgotten graffiti. “It was something to do while we talked,” said Aubrey, explaining that he and his pals used nails from the wooden scooters they constructed to roam as far as the bombsites in the City and around St Pauls. Yet although Aubrey recognised a few names when he saw them on the wall and even matched some up to the pictures, together we confronted the limit of his fragmentary memory after so many years.“I wonder what life held for them?” he said quietly, contemplating the names on the wall, as we stood in the empty street lined with parked cars, that once echoed to the noise and shouting of children playing.
“The streets were clear of vehicles, except maybe the odd coal wagon or a fruiterer with a horse and cart. There were few cars because no-one could afford one and, if someone bought one, they took all the kids for a ride in it as a novelty.” Aubrey told me, explaining how, as children, they had possession of the streets for their playground, using cans, or laying down jumpers or coats in the road, to create goalposts.
“We were a group of kids that used to know each other and spend all our time together in the streets because the flats were not conducive to living in. There was no space for us inside, so we used to be outside, swinging on the railings at the corner of Navarre St and Arnold Circus. We didn’t know anything about girls. The boys had nothing to do with girls. Half the kids were Jewish but there was no conscious decision to mix with your own kind, although I think we gravitated together because we considered ourselves outsiders. Many kids had lost their fathers in the war, and they had background problems.
You didn’t know that you don’t have much money, because it was just not to be found. I had new clothes once a year. I used to have a new suit at Passover. My mother took me down to a place off Brick Lane. There were schleppers everywhere on the street – touts for tailors. I remember going back for fittings, there wasn’t much ready-made clothing available then. I was ashamed of my parents because I was born late and I thought they were old. On the day of the V.E celebrations we came down into the yard with our food on plates and our chipped enamel cups, we didn’t have china. And when the people saw them, they asked in disapproval, ‘Can we replace them?’ That was embarrassing.
I took the eleven plus exam which decided whether I would go to Grammar School or Secondary Modern which was inferior. I don’t know what happened but I never passed or failed, I went to a Central School instead. At the end of term we were called onto the stage and divided up between which schools we were going to. I cried because I didn’t go to Grammar School. It was cruel because it split friendships up. ‘What are you doing today? We’re doing Latin and logarithmic equations,’ they said, and I felt a failure because I didn’t do any of those things.
Nothing has been easy for me, exams were always hard. But I was never at the bottom and never excelled either, I was always in the heap. I was fortunate that in those post-war years there were expanding opportunities open to me, giving me an education and a career – because I had no ambition, I never looked further than my nose. Though I knew I wanted to get out of the East End because I did not want to work in a tailoring sweatshop as my father and all his friends did. As a greeting they, always asked each other, “Are you working?” because the work was seasonal, and people were out of work for long periods of time.
In 1958 I moved out to a bedsitter in Stoke Newington on my own. I learnt to look out for myself and be wary of what people are trying to put over you, and as a consequence I’ve been known as a cynical person throughout my life. But I have no regrets about any of it today because it gave me a sense of looking at the glass as half empty. I never expected anything wonderful to happen and it has. I have progressed over the years and I feel very lucky indeed.
I was interested in classical music from a very early age. One day I went over to Sadler’s Wells Theatre and offered money to buy a ticket but the kiosk person said ‘You haven’t got enough’, so this couple behind me in the queue said, ‘Do you really want to see it?’ and they bought me a ticket. That was ‘La Boheme’ – I wish I could repay that couple today.”
Contemplating the photo of himself at eleven, a crucial moment in his childhood, Aubrey pointed out the spilt food on the “scruffy” jacket and interpreted his expression as “sardonic,” while I saw self-possession and humour in his youthful visage. “I’m thinking ‘Why am I here?'” he said, rolling his eyes with a droll grin.“Now I look at all these photographs and I wonder,’Did it actually happen?'” continued Aubrey, thinking out loud. Today, when he returned to Arnold Circus, he encountered the evidence that it did happen, because sixty years later, Aubrey found his name graven into the wall on Navarre St. Aubrey Silkoff, Wed 19th April 1950.
Read my first story about the Graffiti at Arnold Circus
Aubrey Silkoff at the time he wrote his name on the wall of Wargrave Buildings.
At the photographic club
At Arnold Circus, with the bandstand visible in the background
A stunt at the corner of Navarre St.
The trick revealed – this is the same pillarbox that Aubrey and his pals used in their photograph.
Aubrey Silkoff – with his brick in the top left corner.
Jim Howett, Designer
In my opinion, Jim Howett is the best dressed man in Spitalfields – pictured here with a characteristically shy smile – sitting on a seventeen twenties staircase in one of the houses in Fournier St he is currently restoring for the Spitalfields Trust. He looks entirely at home in this shabby yet elegantly proportioned old house, a specifically localised environment that over time has become his natural habitat and is now the place you are most likely to find him in East London.
For years, I admired Jim’s fine artisan clothing whenever I caught glimpses of him, always crossing Commercial St and disappearing through the market, or off down Folgate St preoccupied with some enigmatic intent. Then, last Winter we were introduced and I discovered that Jim sleeps each night in the attic at Dennis Severs’ House and crosses the market every day to work at 3 Fournier St with Marianna Kennedy, designing the furniture and lamps that are so distinctive and have become ubiquitous in the houses around Spitalfields. I also learnt Jim is responsible for a significant number of the most appealing shopfronts in the neighbourhood – though I should have guessed that the modest twill clothing he wears from head to toe and which suits him so snugly is made by Marie & Will at Old Town.
At first, I assumed Jim was Irish on account of his soft vowels and quietly spoken manner, almost whispering sometimes, even swallowing his words before he utters them, and thereby drawing your attention to listen, concentrating to gather both what is said and what is unspoken. Such is the nature of his mind that Jim will begin a sentence and then pursue a digression that leads to another and yet another – though such is the intelligence of the man, that when he leads you back to the resolution of the original thought, it acquires a more precise import on account of all the qualifications and counter arguments. Without a doubt, Jim is a consummate prose talker.
Jim’s origins lie in Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachians, where he grew up in Salem. But Jim’s father worked in international development and in the nineteen sixties the family moved to the Congo and then his father was transferred Vietnam, with the family ending up in London in 1967. Jim studied at the Architectural Association under the tutelage of Dan Cruickshank, subsequently working for a few years in prehistoric archaeology, before deciding to study at the London College of Furniture,which was then in Commercial Rd.
Renting a room on Brick Lane, Jim dropped a card to his former tutor who wrote back to say he had just bought a house in Elder St full of broken furniture, so Jim set up a workbench in Dan’s basement to undertake the repairs. As a charismatic bachelor lacking domesticity and living in a romantically shambolic old house, Dan became a magnet for the attentions of women who always arrived bearing hampers of food – an occurrence of such regularity that as the attractive female benefactors walked through the door, Dan would simply yell down the cellar stairs, “Jim, dinner’s come!”
“Dennis Severs knocked upon the door one day, looking for Dan.” said Jim. “He said he’d just bought a house round the corner and wanted to do tours, and we thought he was crazy but we helped him set it up. I made the shutters, the partition with the arch in the dining room and I copied the fireplace from one in Princelet St.” he added, revealing the origin of his own involvement with 18 Folgate St, where today he is the sole resident. Before long, Jim was sharing a workshop with Marianna Kennedy and ceramicist Simon Pettet in Gibraltar Walk, sharing aspirations to create new work inspired by historical models and applying traditional craft skills. They found themselves at the centre of a community focussed around the restoration of the eighteenth century houses, dubbed “Neo-Georgians” by the media – a moment recorded today in the collection of magazines and photo features, illustrating the renaissance of Spitalfields, that Jim keeps in a box in his workshop.
Jim taught himself furniture making by copying a Hepplewhite chair – constructing four versions until he could get the proportion right – before he discovered that there was no market for them because dealers considered them too dangerously close to the originals as to approach fakes. Yet this irony, which was to hamper Jim’s early career as a furniture maker, served as a lesson in the significance of proportion in engaging with historical designs.
When Jim won a commission to design an armoire for Julie Christie, he thought he had found the path to success. “She gave me tip of half the value of my commission fee and I thought ‘This is as good as it gets’, but she remains the best client I ever had.” admitted Jim, wistfully recognising the severely limited market for custom-built new furniture in antique styles. “I used to make these pieces and have no money left over to buy coffee afterwards”, he declared with a shrug, even though today he has a client list that includes Bono, Paul Smith, Liv Tyler, Jeanette Winterson and Tilda Swinton – and has created an impressive range of bespoke tables, turned lamps and bronze mirrors produced in collaboration with Marianna Kennedy.
Instead, the renovation of Spitalfields gave Jim the opportunity to become one of those who has created the visual language of our streets, through his subtle approach to restoring the integrity of old shopfronts that have been damaged or altered. Perhaps the most famous are Verde & Co and A.Gold in Brushfield St, 1 & 3 Fournier St and Bedell Coram, Andrew Coram’s shop in Commercial St. In these and numerous other examples, through conscientious archival research, Jim has been responsible for retaining the quality of vernacular detail and proportion that makes this Spitalfields, rather than any other place. The beauty of Jim’s work is that these buildings now look as if they had always been like they are today.
Yet Jim is quick to emphasise that he is not an architect, explaining that his work requires both more detailed knowledge of traditional building techniques and less ego, resisting the urge to add personal embellishments. “The difference between me and architects, working on historic buildings is that I restrict myself to organising the space. I believe if a building has survived for two hundred years, it has survived because it has certain qualities. The reason, I don’t put my finger in the pie is because I can express myself in other things.”
While Jim spoke, he produced file after file of photographs, plans and maps, spreading them out upon the table in his workshop to create a huge collage of Spitalfields, whilst maintaining an extraordinary monologue of interwoven stories about the people, the place and the buildings. I was fascinated by Jim’s collection of maps, spanning the last five hundred years in Spitalfields and I realised that he carries in his mind a concrete picture of how the place has evolved. When I have seen him walking around, he is walking in awareness of all the incarnations of this small parish, the buildings that have come and gone through past centuries.
It fired my imagination when Jim took me into the cellar of 15 Fournier St, and pointed out the path across the yard belonging to the sixteenth century building that stood there before the eighteenth century house was built, telling me about the pieces of charred wood they found, because this was a site where debris was dumped after the Fire of London in 1666. Converted into a mission hall in the nineteenth century, this house is Jim’s current project, restoring it to its original ground-plan and recreating a lost eighteenth century staircase.
Simon Pettet portrayed Jim on one of his tiles as a fly on the wall, reflecting Jim’s omnipresence in Spitalfields. “I think if my father had not taken us to the Congo, I should still be there in Salem, Ohio,” confessed Jim with a weary smile, “because at heart I am a localist.” Jim showed me the missing finger on his left hand, sliced off while cutting a mitre from left to right, a mark that today he regards as the proud badge of his carpenter’s trade. In his work and through his modest personal presence, Jim has become an inextricable part of the identity of Spitalfields – after more than thirty years, I hope we may now describe him as a local.
Over coming weeks, I look forward to showing you a selection of Jim’s exemplary work, both his shopfronts and in the restoration of old buildings here in Spitalfields.
Jim at Jocasta Innes’ house in Heneage St, 1990
Jim with Dennis Severs and Simon Pettet, pictured in a magazine feature of 1991
Jim modelling his calfskin apron, 1991
Jim pictured in the penurious weavers’ garret at Dennis Severs’ House that today is his bedroom.
In the Victorian Parlour at Dennis Severs’ House.
Hoisting up the new cornice at Bedell Coram in Commercial St.
Norman Phelps, Model Boat Club President
This is Norman Phelps, President of the Victoria Steam Boat Club, proudly displaying his ratchet lubricator that he made recently – just the latest example of an enthusiasm that began in 1935 when, at the age of five years, he fell into the boating lake in Victoria Park. It might have been a tragedy but instead it was the beginning of a lifetime’s involvement with model boats, and seventy-five years later, you can still find him at the lakeside on Sundays, giving the benefit of his experience to the junior members of the club.
Norman was understandably wary of speaking to me because the last time he gave an interview in 1951, he got taken for a ride by the News Chronicle. Although Norman spoke at length about the venerable club, all that got published was a souped-up account of how he courted his wife at the lake over the model boats. Seizing the opportunity to set the record straight, Norman generously sat down with me next to the boating lake last Sunday and spoke with lyrical ease.
“I was always known, not by my father’s name of Phelps, but as Watson – because my mother was famous as “Dolly Watson” on account of running the sweetshop in Rockmead Rd, where I grew up. I stayed in London all through the blitz and I saw the city burning and I saw this park blown apart, and our house was destroyed by a rocket in early 1945. Because of the bombing everyone knew everyone else. I saw neighbours dead on the pavement and I heard people crying out from beneath the wreckage of buildings where we could never dig them out. I saw the Home Guard practising with wooden rifles because we didn’t have real ones. It was crazy!
Funnily enough, I married a girl from Seweston Rd, on the other side of the park. I met her dancing at the Hackney Town Hall and because we were keen dancers and won prizes, we decided we would race model boats and see if we could win. We joined separately, but we did our courting through the club, and she won a lot of prizes and ruffled a few feathers. She’s been running boats her whole life and she still is at seventy-eight.
We got married in 1956, had our reception in the clubhouse and I was made secretary of the club at the same time. They gave us a presentation box of cutlery as a wedding present that we have today. In the early days, I supported my wife because she had such an enormous predilection to compete. She’s won so many prizes, we’ve got boxes full. If we turned up to compete, other people would say, ‘Let’s give up now!’ It was the art of straight-running. I did the designing, and she did the maintenance and cleaning. My wife was the talent, and I tended to stay in the background and be the club secretary and that was enough.
To be a great straight-runner you have to know a lot about the water and the wind, and the boat itself has to be considered too. The greatest talents in the world have competed here. So many people have gone now but I saw all the greatest exponents, like Stan Pillinger of Southampton, John Benson of Blackheath, Peter Lambert of St Albans, Jim King of Welwyn and Edgar Westbury, editor of Model Engineer. In this club we were lucky, we had pawnbrokers, jewellers, butchers, several tug skippers from the Thames – many of our members were skilled people. They didn’t have any money, so they built boats out of cocoa tins and orange boxes, producing some of the finest straight-running hulls in the club.”
Norman recognises that the flourishing of the boat club was in direct correlation with the heyday of skilled trades. He speaks passionately of the deference that existed between the members who all brought their different areas of experience and abilities to the boat club, and the culture of mutual respect that went with it, based never upon economic status but always upon skill. Tanned and lined from endless Summers on the lake, still with thick white hair and a scrawny energetic physique, he looks like a character drawn by Mervyn Peake. Possessing an eloquent tongue and a raucous laugh, Norman is engaging company too, with tender stories to tell of former members, especially his friend Bill, “even though he was a South London boy, we managed to see eye to eye.”
“So many have pegged out. I can’t get my head round it. I suppose I’m next for the chop.” he continued with a droll grimace, crossing his arms protectively. Yet Norman remains fiercely proud of the culture of the boat club and their marvellous vessels, honed to perfection over so many years. “This is still the home of straight-racing, we have the greatest talents here.” he said, indicating a pale young man in waders enjoying a quiet sandwich, who blushed readily as I was authoritatively informed he was the grandson of “a great talent”.”These skills are rare now. I spoke to the editor of Model World recently and he told me they have people ringing up because they can’t even put kits together today,” Norman declared in breathless amazement, before lowering his voice further and raising his brows to confide, “None of our members can give out their home addresses, because the boats have become too valuable and they don’t want to get turned over.”
“Who needs a computer?” asked Norman in derision, “I have a problem with the lubrication of my boat engine to solve.” But in spite of his disaffection, the contemporary world is affecting the boat club in ways that are not entirely disadvantageous, and even skills nurtured through computer games have their place here. “We have lowered the age limit for membership from twelve to ten, because nowadays ten-year olds are better with the radio controls than we are.” declared Norman proudly.
I can understand Norman’s ambivalence when he has lived through such big times, during which the Victoria Model Steamboat Club sailed on as a beacon of civility across troubled water. Its survival today as one of only two in existence (along with Blackheath), makes it all the more important as a reminder of the best of that other world, before the computer, when just a few people sat behind desks and most possessed a skilled trade that enabled them to earn their living and achieve self-respect too.
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Columbia Road Market 45
It was refreshing to walk through the early morning streets of Spitalfields in the gentle rain, which cleaned the air and the pavements, and brought out all the fragrances of the plants. I was the only customer at the market first thing and it was my privilege to have it to myself, with such breathtaking displays of colourful flowers solely for my pleasure at that time. There was a relaxed atmosphere, induced by the balmy temperatures and the arrival of the holiday season, which meant a few spaces in the market where traders had gone away, and also several sons and daughters helping out their parents on their stalls, getting inducted into the trade.
In spite of all the flowers, it was the fragrance of Sylvia’s herb stall at the corner of Ezra St that caught my attention with its delicate herbal scents released by the moisture. And upon a whim I bought these two purple herbs for just £3 the pair, a Purple Basil (Ocimum basilicum purpurascens) and a Purple Sage (Salvia officinalis purpurascens). Just brushing my finger over the leaves, sprinkled with soft rain, was sufficient to release their irresistible scents. The aesthetic of these purple herbs is exquisite, enough to convince me that they taste even more vivid than their green counterparts.
The Purple Basil will make a tasty and colourful addition to the green salads that are my staple diet at this season of the year, while I shall plant the Sage in a dry border next to a Heuchera and a Geranium with purple leaves, to add to a subtly contrasted purple patch that I am developing in a corner of my garden.
