The Boat Club photographic collection
Inspired by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies’ photo essay on the Victoria Model Steam Boat Club, I walked over to Victoria Park yesterday to meet Keith Reynolds, the secretary, a sympathetic man with an appealingly straggly moustache, who had agreed to let me take a look at the club’s photographic collection. So, as the members got steam up on the lakeside, I sat inside the club house and sifted through the archive, listening to all the variously enigmatic whistling and chugging sounds coming from the shore. Keith told me that the club existed even before the founding of the Model Steam Boat Club in 1904, preceded by a Model Sailing Boat Club that he believes was founded in 1875. The venerable club house dates from this period and Keith showed me where the lockers once were, custom-built to store huge model sail boats, before the age of steam took over.
There are just a handful of early black and white pictures, donated years ago by member Olive Cotman. The photograph above is from January 3rd 1937, but the earlier one at the top is tantalizingly undated. As well as the impressive display of model boats in both photographs, the members display a fine selection of hats, and in the top picture, if you look closely, you can see the pennant-shaped club badge pinned onto many of the caps. The dignity of these men, so serious with their moustaches and caps yet so proud to be photographed with their fleet of model steam boats, is very touching. I presume these boats were miniature versions of the vessels that you might see a mile away on the Thames at that time. By contrast, the diversity of the 1937 picture draws you into a relationship with individuals in the crowd, who braved the chill wind of Victoria Park in January to watch the model boats. The anonymous schoolboy in his cap is more interested in the camera than the boats, he gazes towards us and into eternity.
As I looked through the many thousands of photographs from the modern era taken by Janet Reynolds, Keith’s wife, over the thirty-five Summers since their marriage, I became fascinated by these idyllically beautiful colour pictures which tenderly evoke so many long happy Sunday afternoons. I realised that I was looking at images of the younger selves of those same members of the club who I had been introduced to that morning. Keith has been sailing steam boats for fifty years – since he was ten, although he had to wait until he was fourteen to become a full-fledged member in his own right, in 1964.
One day Keith’s father stopped by the lake to speak with the father of the current chairman Norman Lara, and that was how it began for the Reynolds family, which has now been involved for four generations. “She married into the Boating Club,” admitted Keith affectionately, referring to the induction of his wife Jan, “She took photographs because she didn’t want to boat, but then she decided it was more fun to get involved, and now my daughter and my grandson of fourteen are also members.” I was intrigued by Keith’s statement, revealing the narrative behind these lyrical images, which were taken by a photographer who became seduced by this diminutive nautical sport, embracing it as a family endeavour to entertain successive generations.
Out on the shore, Keith introduced me to the engineer Phil Abbott who showed me the oldest vessel still in use, a steam-powered straight-racing boat with the chic melancholic name of “All alone” from 1920, beside it sat “Yvonne” a high-speed steam-powered straight-racing boat from 1947. These boats speak of the different eras of their manufacture,“All alone,” with its brass funnels and tones of brown with an eau-de-nil interior, possesses a quiet twenties elegance in direct contrast to the snazzy red and beige forties colour scheme of the speed boat, that raises its prow arrogantly in the water as it roars along.
“All alone” was made by Arthur Perkins, who offered it to the club, as many members do, before his demise. “Yvonne” has a similar provenance. And when Keith explained that he had acquired half of the thirty-seven boats he possessed, making the others himself, I began to wonder if perhaps the focus of the club was the boats rather than the members. They are in effect mere custodians, providing maintenance for these vessels, enabling them to sail on, across Victoria Park Boating Lake, over decades and through generations.
Keith pinned a blue and white pennant-shaped enamel club badge on my shirt, just like those in the photo at the very top, and confessed that the club is eager for new members. It does not matter if you do not have a boat, anyone is welcome to join the conversation at the lakeside, and guidance is offered if you want to buy or make your own vessel, he explained courteously. It would be the perfect excuse to spend every Sunday boating for the rest of your life and you would be joining the honoured ranks of men and women who have pursued this noble passtime since 1904 on the lake in Victoria Park. These treasured photographs speak for themselves.
Contact Keith Reynolds of the Victoria Model Steam Boat Club by email vmscvictoriapark@aol.com
Columbia Road Market 42
It is not my custom, on the whole, to buy cut flowers – but they are in such profusion now at the market, at such low prices, that I could not resist. In these baking days of high Summer there is something quite magical about walking from the blinding sunlight of the day into the cool of the dark rooms in the old house where flowers glow in the half-light. Last week, I bought three bunches of lush Peonies for just £5 that I replaced this morning with these Larkspur, two bunches for a fiver.
Like last week, I was on the lookout for plants that will thrive in a dry sunny location under my window. This week, I bought a white Scabious for £4 and a Geranium (cinerum Ballerina) for £6. Scabious reminds me of childhood holidays in Dorset where I first saw them growing wild on the chalky downs, and this white one will be an interesting compliment to the blue one I already have. The Geranium is of the evergreen perennial variety that grows close to the ground, again this will give an interesting contrast to the other Geraniums I have in pink and blue, and some with dark foliage. The delicate lilac pink flowers, with intricate dark veins and neat diminutive leaves, of this particular variety, appealed to me.
My East End Photography Competition
Spitalfields Life was one of the winners in the My East End Photography Competition – for this portrait of Gary Arber the third generation printer, that I took in February in the comp room of the printing works in Roman Rd, opened by Gary’s grandfather Walter Francis Arber in 1897, where once the Suffragettes’ handbills were printed. “I’m here under duress because I’m an airman,” Gary told me when I first met him, because he sacrificed a career flying Lincoln Bombers to take over the printing works when his father died in 1954. Presiding over this print shop of a century ago where the twentieth century passed through like a whirlwind, Gary still retains the nonchalant professionalism of a flying ace.
On Thursday night, I went over to meet Gary when he shut up shop at five thirty and we sauntered casually along together down the Roman Rd to the Four Corners centre for film and photography, for the opening of an exhibition of the winning photos, where at a small ceremony Gary graciously accepted the award on my behalf. Among over four hundred entries, there were a large number of interesting photographs that add up to an impressive panorama of the East End at this moment. After searching through all the entries, it is my pleasure to present this small personal selection of works that caught my eye. Other notable inclusions were pictures by Spitalfields Life contributing photographers Sarah Ainslie and Jeremy Freedman, Sarah’s portrait of John Wright in Shadwell and Jeremy’s picture of Sandys Row Synagogue at dawn.
The judges of the competition were Martin Parr, photographer, Steven Berkoff, actor, and Kate Edwards of the Guardian. Speaking for the judges, Steven Berkoff said, “The pictures that stuck out for me were the pictures that expressed the deepest humanity. There is something eternal about the East End – a toughness and sturdiness, a tremendous amount of tolerance to difficult times.”
Yilmaz the tailor, Leyla Guler
Ann & Kitty eating jellied eels at the Eid party, Micahel Jones
Family in Lounge, Mary Cavanagh
Meat Trolley, Ridley Rd Market, Dalston, Agnes Sanvito
Old Sailor in Brick Lane, Johnny Pitts
Hasidic jews blessing the sun at dawn in Clissold Park, Olivia Harris
East London Line workforce, Scott Cullen
Working Nights, Bella Felling
I worked on the locks at the docks for twenty years,Vince Felice
Looking East from Canary Wharf on a snowy day, Shamir Sangrajka
Scattered thoughts, Jourdan.
Victoria Park Model Steam Boat Club
Spitalfields Life contributing photographer, Lucinda Douglas-Menzies became fascinated by the Victoria Park Model Steam Boat Club while out walking in the park. Over successive Sundays, her interest grew as she went back to watch the regattas, meet the members and learn the story of the oldest model boat club in the world, founded in 1904. Her photographic essay records the life of this society of gentle enthusiasts, many of whom have been making and racing boats on this lake for generations, updating the designs and means of propulsion for their intricate craft in accordance with the evolution of maritime vessels over more than a century. Starting on Easter Sunday, the club holds as many as seventeen regattas annually.
“Meet you at ten o’clock Sunday morning at the boating lake!” was the eager response of Norman Lara, the chairman, when Lucinda rang to enquire about his club. “On the morning I arrived, a group of about a dozen model boat enthusiasts were already settled in chairs by the water’s edge with a variety of handmade boats on display.” explained Lucinda, who was treated to a tour of the clubhouse by Norman. “We are very lucky, one of the few clubs to have this. Tower Hamlets are very good to us, they keep the weeds down in the lake and last year we were given a loo.” he said, adding dryly, “It only took a hundred years to get one.”
Meanwhile, the members had pulled on their waders and were preparing their vessels at the water’s edge, before launching them onto the sparkling lake. Here Norman introduced Lucinda to Keith Reynolds, the club secretary, who outlined the specific classes of model boat racing with the precision of an authority, “There are five categories of “straight running” boats. These include functional, scale boats (fishing boats, cabin cruisers, etc), scale ships (warships, cruise boats, liners,merchant ships, liners, merchant ships – boats on which you could sustain life for more than seven days), metre boats (with strict rules of engine size and length) and – we had to create a special category for this one – called “the wedge,” basically a boat made of three pieces of wood with no keel, ideal for children to start on.” In confirmation of this, as Lucinda looked around, she saw children accompanied by their parents and grandparents, each generation with their boats of varying sophistication and period design, according to their owners’ experience and age.
Readers of Model Engineering Magazine were informed in 1907 that “the Victoria Park Model Steam Boat Club were performing on a Saturday afternoon before an enormous public of small boys who asked, ‘What’s it go by mister?'” It is a question that passersby still ask today, now that additional racing classes have been introduced for radio controlled boats with petrol engines and even hydroplanes.
“We have around sixty members,” continued Keith enthusiastically, “but we could with some more, as a lot don’t sail their boats any longer, they just enjoy turning up for a chat. It’s quiet today, but you should come back next Sunday to our steam rally when the bank will be thick with owners who bring their boats from all over. Some are so big they run on lawn mower engines!”
It was an invitation that Lucinda could not resist and she was rewarded with a spectacle revealing more of the finer points of model boat racing. She discovered that “straight running,” which Keith had referred to, is when one person launches a boat with a fixed rudder along a course (usually sixty yards long) where another waits at the scoring gates to catch the vessel. The closer to a straight course your boat can follow, the more points you win, defined by a series of gates around a central white gate, which scores a bull’s-eye of ten points if you can sail your boat through it. On either side of the white gate are red, yellow and orange gates each with a diminishing score, because the point of the competition is to discover whose boat can follow the truest course.
Witnessing this contest, Lucinda realised that – just like still water concealing deep currents – as well as having extraordinary patience to construct these beautiful working models, the members of the boat club also possess fiercely competitive natures. This is the paradox of sailing model boats, which appears such a lyrical pastime undertaken in the peace and quiet of the boating lake, yet when so much investment of work and ingenuity is at stake (not to mention hierarchies of individual experience and different generations in competition), it can easily transform into a drama that is as intense as any sport has to offer.
Lucinda’s eloquent pictures capture this subtle theatre adroitly, of a social group with a shared purpose and similar concerns, both mutually supportive and mutually competitive, who all share a love of the magic of launching their boats upon the lake on Sundays in Summer. It is an activity that conjures a relaxed atmosphere – as, for over a century, walkers have paused at the lakeside to chat in the sunshine, watching as boats are put through their paces on the water and scrutinising the detail of vessels laid upon the shore, before continuing on their way.
Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Spitalfields Antiques Market 13
Although Nana Jan (pictured here with her loyal assistant Daniel Almeida) is selling everything because she has cancer and wants to divest herself of possessions before she dies, she continues to live a life that is as far beyond self-pity as you could imagine. “I never expected to see my grandchildren and now I have great-grandchildren!” she whispered excitedly, before proudly revealing the huge tattoo of an angel filling her chest – that she had done when a double mastectomy left her unable to look at her body. Sometimes adversity can bring out extraordinary qualities in people and the joyous Nana Jan possesses an inspirational strength of character that is a bold example to us all.
This is the supremely graceful Adrienne Harris, holding this exquisite tile for an Italian woman who asked to buy the entire set of forty and then mysteriously disappeared. I was deeply impressed when another customer asked Adrienne how to discern real tortoiseshell from reproduction, and with consummate professionalism, Adrienne simply held contrasting examples up to the light and distinguished the authentic from the fake in a moment, demonstrating the knowledge that comes with experience. If you are the woman who wants the tiles please get in touch, because you obviously have great taste and you would not want to disappoint the lovely Adrienne would you?
This is Lottie Muir & Amanda Bluglass who met on Guardian Soulmates seeking romance and discovered instead a shared passion for “Thames treasures and coastal coterie”. ” I am a mudlarker and a letterpress fanatic,” explained Lottie, “so I collect Roman glass and Medieval pottery from the Thames, which washes up against my flat in Rotherhithe, and arrange my discoveries in type cases.” Lottie’s finds are complimented by things selected by Amanda who is a sculptor from Buckfastleigh, “All are chosen for shape or some kind of sculptural beauty,” she added with calm authority, in contrast to Lottie’s giddy excitement on this first day of their new venture.
This is Jessica Hazel & Markus Maverick, who have been dealing in vintage clothes and fabric each Sunday for over a year but have chosen to branch out into antiques and bric-a-brac now. “I’m not interested in modern things,” announced Jessica, London correspondent for www.mooks.com, who developed her passion for dressing up in old clothes as a child in her grandmother’s attic. With their playful outfits, Jessica & Markus are superlative ambassadors for their business – and Markus, famous for rocking his swanky Victorian dandy look with exuberant theatricality, admitted that he recently got talent-spotted in Brick Lane to play Jack the Ripper on the History Channel.
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Mama Thai, The Noodles Of Spitalfields
Pam & Raj Chawla, proprietors of “Mama Thai,” began selling noodles from a wooden hut in the Spitalfields Market on the very first day it reopened after the wholesale Fruit & Vegetable Market moved out in 1991. In those days, I used to go every Sunday and buy my week’s supply of vegetables from the stalls, and then perch on a bench in the cavernous empty market to wolf a steaming plate of Mama Thai’s spicy noodles with chilli sauce. Before the renovations, there was a train set that gave rides around the market, football pitches and all kinds of community events, of which the dog show was most notable, and, sitting amongst all this chaotic life, Thai noodles were the perfect meal to warm my body and raise my spirits after hours of trudging around Columbia Rd and Brick Lane in the frost.
Today Pam & Raj have a shop at the corner of Toynbee St and Brune St, fifty yards down a side street from Christ Church, Spitalfields, where hordes of office workers come every day with long lists of orders to carry off dishes of their delicious and keenly priced noodles and curry for lunch. A cooked meal for under five pounds is rare now – especially in Spitalfields – yet at Mama Thai you can buy good quality food prepared daily in the kitchen from fresh ingredients, with a drink to accompany it too, and get change from five pounds – vegetarian dishes are £3.50 and meat dishes £4.50. There is a touching egalitarianism about this welcoming brightly coloured restaurant, run with pride by Pam & Raj for a loyal coterie of over five hundred regular customers, who keep coming back to show their appreciation every week.
In these sweltering temperatures of midsummer, I find it as restorative as in the chills of midwinter to enjoy a plate of spicy noodles with chilli sauce – so, photographer Jeremy Freedman and I have enjoyed memorable lunches at Mama Thai’s twice this week. Jeremy likes mild curry while hot noodles are my penchant. Over the nearly twenty years I have been eating Mama Thai’s noodles, I have learnt the fine art of applying the chilli sauce sparingly – enough to make the mouth sing, not so much as to burn my tongue. It is a lesson I acquired haphazardly through ceaseless experimentation, which taught me always to keep a glass of water to hand in the early years, though readers with a delicate palate can be reassured that a range of milder flavoured dishes are also available.
Although, in the last twenty years, Mama Thai has only moved a few hundred yards from the Spitalfields Market to Toynbee St, this story began far away on another continent. It is a saga that involves a lot of hard work, and romance too, culminating in this present happy moment, the apogee of Mama Thai.
Raj Chawla, our hero, is a restless spirit with perceptive dark eyes, who won a scholarship from India to study in Germany and, upon his return in 1971, decided to seek a life in Thailand. There he learnt to cook in an American grill and managed a German restaurant in Bangkok, living above the shop. It was there that the demure Pam, our heroine, caught his attention when she came to sit in the restaurant, engendering a tender romance which continues to this very day, as the picture above testifies. Together, the couple came to London in 1975 on a work permit to study hotel management, starting a stall at Camden Lock each weekend selling noodles cooked by Pam, who like many great cooks is self-taught, improvising her dishes and learning through experience.
Thinking back to when I used to buy noodles from Mama Thai in the Spitalfields Market to warm myself in the Winter years ago, I wonder what it can have been like cooking and selling noodles all day in a freezing wooden hut, with a large serving hatch open to the air. Yet the scrupulous cleanliness of Mama Thai’s restaurant reveals that Pam is a hardy spirit, who works from nine until nine each day, scouring the entire place top to bottom at the end of service to create the immaculate environment she requires to cook her subtly spiced dishes and present them beautifully next day.
On the first day trading in Spitalfields, Mama Thai took just twenty pounds, but over time business grew to capacity. Then, in spite of Pam & Raj’s perseverance, Mama Thai had to leave the market when the renovations replaced the wooden huts with steel and glass spaces – now occupied by franchised chain restaurants – which command a rent far beyond the turnover of a small independent trader. It took Pam & Raj a year to find the current premises, but it is a credit to their tenacity (assisted by long-term collaborators Ooma and Peter) that today while those homogenous restaurants are closing in their expensive central locations, Mama Thai is deservedly thriving in this side street where discerning thrifty diners seek it out.
Last year, Raj took retirement after nineteen years at his day job at the post office and now Pam is teaching him to cook vegetarian dishes. “She’s the boss,” declared Raj with the cheeky grin of the student on a scholarship in a foreign land, indicating Pam, who glides around concealing her deep concentration with effortless poise and an easy smile. Possessing the perfect hair, make-up and inscrutable grace of a forties screen goddess and ruling the kitchen with unspoken authority, Pam is capable of speaking volumes simply by raising a single eyebrow, which was exactly what she did at that moment, eloquently confirming Raj’s statement.
I was putting away my notebook, ready to order lunch, when a passing office worker, shovelling noodles into his mouth with clownish delight as he walked out the door, announced spontaneously to the world, “This is where I come when I’m hungry!” Pam & Raj laughed, because he proved their point – out of their intelligence and talent they have created a beautiful situation offering good food that everyone can afford and we love them for it.
Ooma
Peter
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Joan Rose at Arnold Circus
Joan Rose last walked through this gate at the Rochelle School in 1936 when she was ten years old. “I was quite happy at this school, though I turned rebel at eleven when I crossed Arnold Circus to Virginia Rd School, and I don’t know why.” declared the redoubtable Joan, with the casual recklessness that is her privilege at the fine age of eighty-four, now that (as far as we know) her teachers Miss Bell, Miss Faulkner, Miss Danielle and Miss Rees are not waiting on the other side of the gate to give her a good hiding.
“I was ‘plainy plainy’ – ‘plain Joan'”, whispered Joan, revealing her childhood nickname. “Not a very nice person,” she confided, in amusement at her former self. Making up for lack of conventional good looks by demonstrating the independence of thought, the character and wit that have carried her through life with such buoyant spirits, “I got the cane a number of times for answering back,” she confided with a smirk.
Now that sufficient time has passed, we can safely reveal the disgraceful incident with Miss Beany, the science teacher at Virginia Rd School. “After six weeks, I said, ‘Do you know Miss Beany, you bore me to tears? Every time I come to your class it’s the same thing with the bunsen burner and the flask which nobody understands.’ Then I turned to class and said ‘All put your pens down.’ My mother made me take a bunch of flowers to Miss Beany. And Miss Beany said, ‘Thankyou so much, sit down. Your parents are very nicely spoken – I don’t know where they got you from.” confessed Joan, still smarting from this putdown of seventy years ago though, pertinently, she herself grew up to enjoy a long and successful career as a teacher.
This novel anecdote serves to illustrate how the class terror at eleven can become the most charming octogenarian you could wish to take a stroll around Arnold Circus with today. Brought up on the Boundary Estate until she was evacuated in 1939 at the age of thirteen, Joan is blessed with an astounding memory for names and details of her childhood, and she will cheerfully run through the list of every single one of her contemporaries in her class at the Rochelle School in 1936 if you ask – the neatest party trick I know.
Joan Rose’s grandfather Albert Raymond opened Raymond’s greengrocers in Calvert Avenue (in the space that is now Leila’s Shop) in 1899 when the Boundary Estate was first built, and Joan’s father Alfred ran it until the nineteen sixties. Joan is now patron of the Friends of Arnold Circus and – drawing a discreet curtain over her school record – she has been invited to cut the cake on the day of the centenary celebrations on July 18th.
Through these snapshots published here, you are invited to join our stroll around Arnold Circus on a golden Summer’s evening – as seventy years fell away to reveal many of the cherished landmarks of Joan’s childhood as full of vivid meaning for her as ever they were.
Joan Rose last bought fish and chips at this shop in Club Row in 1939. “Tuppence for a fish, a penny for chips, and a penny for a wally cucumber!” announced Joan, declaring her regular order to the closed door, and getting excited as the memory resurfaced of innumerable fish suppers she enjoyed here.
Above this shop lived Kaplan the cobbler, who had a tiny premises round the corner in Old Nichol St. “If they were shut, you knocked and he brought your boots down to you,” explained Joan, recalling that this corner shop always sold groceries, a fact to which her father turned a blind eye, even though they were not a member of the Fruit & Vegetable Federation (that ensured grocers where evenly spaced), as he was.
“This is where I celebrated the Silver Jubilee of Queen Mary and King George V in 1935. “ Joan told me proudly, “We had one long table the length of the yard and everybody brought food.” Joan lived with her family in the building to the right, Laleham Buildings, until she was evacuated in 1939 – which was fortunate because the flat took a direct hit. All the family managed to salvage from the rubble was their three-piece suite (“We had it recovered”) and their bedroom suite which Joan still uses today.
This shop in Calvert Avenue, which has been boarded up for years, is the site of Kossoff’s legendary bakery run by the uncle and father of Leon Kossoff the painter – Joan’s father signed the naturalization papers for the uncle. Joan remains full of wonder at the unforgettable quality of Kossoff’s baking, and the first bread slicing machine to be installed here, a fierce miracle of technology that cut off the finger of one of the assistants. The shop was so narrow that the bakers required an extension at the rear, and Joan and I walked round the back to discover the mark on the wall, revealing where the bakehouse once stood.
Joan remembers the Magnet Laundry, run in her time by Mrs Andrews, that occupied the left half of this trading space when she was five years old in 1931, because that was her very first bedroom window up above to the left in Cookham Buildings – before her family economised, moving round the corner to a flat with lower rent in Laleham Buildings. At the Magnet Laundry, dirty linen was differentiated into “best wash” and “bag wash,” the former being her father’s shirts and the latter being everything else. On Joan’s left was Lil’s delicatessen that sold delicious pickled herrings and beyond that the Rent Office (now the Community Laundrette) then Dr Murphy’s surgery before Kossoff’s the bakers.
Phoebe Hannah Raymond, Joan’s grandmother, and grandfather Albert Raymond outside the shop in Calvert Avenue in 1899. At Phoebe’s funeral in 1936, Joan saw the first motor cortege (when horse-drawn hearses were still the norm), and every boy and girl from Virginia Rd and Rochelle school lined up on the bandstand to pay respects.
Calvert Avenue was Joan’s first street and she knows every one of the premises and their occupants, seeing it all clearly in her mind. On one side of Raymond’s, the space that is now Leila’s Cafe was a confectioner. On the other side was a Welsh dairy (Lewis then Thomas then Jones), next Mendelbourn who made wicker furniture, next Feldman the tailor (now Ally Capellino) and Usiskins the furrier (now Guven Newsagent).
One day after the end of World War II, a roasted peanut salesman pulled up in a van in Calvert Avenue outside Raymond’s shop and although Joan’s canny grandparents preferred to invest in a machine to roast their own, Joan was sold – because she married the handsome young salesman Ron Rose and left Arnold Circus with him to have her own family.
It was only in this century that Joan returned to discover her grandparents’ shop had been reopened selling groceries again. This was the catalyst that brought back all the memories for Joan and a new friendship too, with Leila McAlister. “When you get to know places they become bigger, that’s what has happened to me as I have got to know Arnold Circus all over again, even though it seemed small when I first returned.” said Joan, delighted to rediscover her spiritual home after all this time.
You may like to read these other stories about Joan Rose:
