Anna Skrine, custodian
You may recall that I had the pleasure of paying a visit upon Tamzin Griffin recently, the last tenant to depart from 27 Fournier St, the exceptional eighteenth century silk merchants’ house that was sold recently.
I never expected to go back, but then I had a call to meet Anna Skrine who was instrumental in saving the house when she worked for the Spitalfields Trust and who has been its custodian ever since. It was Anna’s last day clearing out the final bits and pieces of crockery and glass, putting them in boxes that she was going to place on Fournier St later, to allow people to help themselves. Two weeks ago, there was still a little furniture left but now I was surprised to find the place entirely bare and the house sits empty this weekend before the new owner arrives to claim it on Monday morning.
A direct woman with an attractive bright energy, Anna fished two old cups from boxes and made us tea with a few leaves straight in the cups. Then we walked upstairs with cushions tucked under our arms and found a corner of the expansive first floor drawing room to settle upon the polished boards in a pool of February sunlight. Thirty years ago, Anna worked as an assistant at the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust, founded by Douglas Blain, Mark Girouard and Dan Cruickshank to save the old houses that were under threat. As well as secretarial duties, Anna organised a petition save the buildings in Cheshire St and before long her role evolved into direct action too. “I was the one who said, ‘The bulldozers are coming!’ so we all piled into the Board School in Spital Sq.” volunteered Anna enthusiastically, describing how she and other members of the trust staged a sit-in, occupying the place with sleeping bags in winter, locking themselves into the condemned building to draw attention to its importance. The story became front page news and the building was saved. But most importantly, this event became the tipping point when national opinion altered and the preservation of old buildings became a greater priority in the face of the thoughtless demolition and redevelopment that had become the rule.
It was due to the actions of these few pioneering individuals that the historic houses survived to be cherished in Spitalfields today. Talking with Anna, I began to get a sense of the excitement of that moment when there was so much potential to reclaim the beauty of these neglected edifices that went unappreciated, and a vigorous social life engendered by this shared enterprise undertaken by a colourful bunch of personalities.
“Dennis Severs‘ Christmas parties at his house in Folgate St were the most beautiful, magical events that I ever knew. It wasn’t only how it looked which was magic – but also the smells, because he used to clean the floor with lavender, so you had that mixed in with the other wonderful Christmassy smells of cinnamon and oranges with cloves. He was a master at it. It was just so beautiful.” remembered Anna with pleasure.
Anna’s sister Fiona bought an eighteenth century silk merchant’s house at 14 Wilkes St. “Only two or three houses in the street were inhabited at that time and the locals thought we were completely mad. We lived in it and did most of the work we could to renovate it ourselves,” said Anna.
“After a few years, 27 Fournier St came up for sale. It was full of workshops, people working in indescribably bad conditions – with water coming through the roof. The trust bought workshops in Heneage St and created workplaces with decent conditions, moving the remaining tenants there.” Explaining the modus operandi of the Spitalfields Trust, Anna continued, “The trust created these back-to-back deals, buying property and selling it under covenant to a new owner – and I managed to find someone who would buy the house, Henry Barlow, which is how we were able to save it.”
Anna looked around the magnificent panelled room, absorbing the familiar space and reminding herself of its place in her life, because, although she is distinguished by her placid composure, it was apparent that this was somewhere for which Anna has great emotional attachment.
“I met my husband here, he was the head builder, Jim Brunton.” she revealed. “He did the houses in Elder St that were the first to be renovated. Jim was brought here by Mark Girouard. He could put back panelling where it was missing and you wouldn’t know. Douglas (Blain) and Jim would investigate houses and decide how they should be saved.”
Anna’s thoughts flitted around the neighbouring streets as she described how Jim and Douglas explored the house of a bird dealer in Hanbury St that had a floor entirely full of exotic birds in cages and a cellar full of guano, and how they were also the first to enter the abandoned synagogue at 19 Princelet St, discovering the locked top floor where the occupant Mr Rodinsky had departed never to return, leaving his cereal bowl on the table.
“I lived in this house for a while as caretaker while the builders were working,” said Anna, returning the conversation to 27 Fournier St, before explaining that she left to live in Wales when she had her first child and subsequently moved to Ireland where she resides today. Through all this time, Anna has continued as custodian of 27 Fournier St, managing the tenants, fulfilling Henry Barlow’s notion that the house should be let to young artists and actors at rents they could afford. She talked fondly of those who became friends, including Marianna Kennedy, the very first tenant, who lives today at the other end of Fournier St. Now, I was meeting Anna on the final day of her duties as custodian after a quarter of a century and it was my privilege to be party to her emotions at this moment.
“I have all sorts of feelings – gratitude, that I’ve been allowed to be part of this amazing place, tinged with a little sadness too, but it’s time to move on. We had such fun here. The Market Cafe was the centre of everything because we all used to meet up there for lunch, and be in and out of each other’s houses – it was an incredible community.”
As we descended the crooked staircase, Anna invited me to help myself to any of the things that were left behind. But – as I abandoned deliberating over old cups – I realised that the real gift had been the opportunity to meet Anna herself, the worthy custodian of 27 Fournier St, and hear her evocations of those passionate young people, and the brave lively events that incarnated the moment when Spitalfields was saved.
Alan Hughes, Master Bellfounder
If I confide to you that my favourite sound in all the world is that of bells pealing, you will understand why the Whitechapel Bell Foundry has been such a source of fascination for me over all these years. Every time I walk past the ancient walls of the foundry (which is the oldest manufacturing company in the land – founded in 1570), I wonder about the alchemical mystery of bellfounding that is taking place inside. One summer’s day, as I passed on my way walking down from Spitalfields to the Thames, the steel doors at the rear of the foundry were open and, peeking in from the harsh sunlight outside, I was afforded a tantalising glimpse of huge bells glinting in the the gloom of the engineering shop.
You can imagine my excitement when I received the invitation to meet the current master bellfounder in an unbroken line of master bellfounders that stretches back to 1420. Stepping inside, out of the rain in Whitechapel Rd, I found myself in the foundry reception lined with old photographs and compelling artifacts, like the wooden template (displayed over the entrance as if it were the jaws of a whale) that was used when Big Ben was manufactured here. Among all the black and white photos, my eye was drawn by some recent colour pictures of a royal visit, with her majesty in a vivid shade of plum and Prince Philip looking uncharacteristically animated. I was just thinking that the bell foundry must work a very powerful magic upon its visitors indeed, when a figure emerged from the office and I turned to shake the hand of Alan Hughes, the master bellfounder. Alan’s great-grandfather Arthur Hughes bought the business in 1884, which makes Alan a fourth generation bellfounder.
The sense of awe that filled me as I shook hands with this unassuming man in a natty blue suit can only be compared to that when I was first taken to meet Father Christmas in a department store grotto. I composed myself as best I could, as Alan led me through a modest office where two people worked behind neat desks and one of those fake cats dozed eternally in front of the stove, to arrive in the boardroom where a long table with a red cloth upon it occupied the centre of a modest but elegantly proportioned Georgian dining room. We drew up chairs and commenced our conversation as the Whitechapel drizzle turned to dusk outside.
I was immediately beguiled by Alan’s fine manners and elegant light tone, which kept me guessing whether everything he said might actually be a proposal, contingent, as if he was simply trying out thoughts to see how I would react. I took this as an indicator of his relaxed courtly assurance. Alan wears his role with the greatest of ease, as only someone born into the fourth generation of an arcane profession could do, and it did occur to me that maybe the royal visit had actually been an occasion for mutual recognition between those born into family businesses.
Up above, I could hear music. It was Alan’s daughter and her friend, both music students, practising the piano and the trumpet. The prevailing atmosphere was that of a work place but yet it was domestic too. When Alan’s predecessors set up the business on this site, before the industrial revolution, they attached the factory to the house so they could walk from the dining room into the foundry at their convenience. The feeling today is akin to that of the quiet living quarters of an old public school or an Oxford college or Bishop’s Palace.
Alan has worked here for forty-four years and, describing the changes he has seen, he glanced over my shoulder to the window several times, as if each time he glanced upon a different memory of the Whitechapel Road. The East End was a busy place in the nineteen fifties, as Alan first recalled it, not only because of the docks but because of all the factories and the manufacturing that happened here. “Whichever way it was blowing, you got this lovely smell of beer on the wind – from Trumans or Watneys or Charringtons or Courage or Whitbread…” Alan told me, explaining the locations of the breweries at each point of the compass. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, when the docks and factories had closed, Alan found the place desolate, he peered from the window and there was no-one in the street. “And then things started getting trendy. Instead of closing they started opening – and now, suddenly, it’s ok to be in Whitechapel!” said Alan, clasping his hands thoughtfully on the table and looking around the room with a philosophical grin, “But this place hasn’t changed at all. I always find it vaguely amusing.”
Tentatively, I asked Alan what it meant to him, being part of this long line of bellfounders. Alan searched his mind and then said, “I don’t think about it very often. I would like to meet some of those people, Thomas Mears (master bellfounder from 1787) who would know the place today and Thomas Lester (master bellfounder from 1738) who had this part built. It would be nice to have a conversation with him. He would recognise most of it.” Then the gentle reverie was gone and Alan returned to the present moment, adding, “It’s a business,” in phlegmatic summation.
“Our business runs counter to the national economy,” he continued, “If the economy goes down and unemployment rises, we start to get busy. Last year was our busiest in thirty years, an increase of 27% on the previous year. Similarly, the nineteen twenties were very busy.” I was mystified by this equation, but Alan has a plausible theory.
“Bell projects take a long time, so churches commit to new bells when the economy is strong and then there is no turning back. We are just commencing work on a new peal of bells for St Albans after forty-three years of negotiation. That’s an example of the time scale we are working on – at least ten years between order and delivery is normal. My great-grandfather visited the church in Langley in the eighteen nineties and told them the bells needed rehanging in a new frame. They patched them. My grandfather said the same thing in the nineteen twenties. They patched them. My father told them again in the nineteen fifties and I quoted for the job in the nineteen seventies. We completed the order in 1998.”
Alan broke into a huge smile of wonderment at the nature of his world and it made me realise how important the continuity between the generations must be, so I asked him if there was pressure exerted between father and son to keep the foundry going.
“My great-grandfather never expected the business would outlive him. He had three sons and the sale of the business was arranged, but my grandfather refused to sign the contract, so the other brothers left and he took over. My grandfather ensured his sons had good jobs and even my father wasn’t convinced the business could succeed, so he studied foundry technology for four years at every foundry in the south – thinking he could work for them – but every single one of those has now closed.” Then Alan looked out the window again, gazing forward into time. “As a master bellfounder, you never retire. We go on until we die. My grandfather, my father and my uncle all died of a heart attack at eighty.”
The implications of Alan’s conclusion are startling for him personally, even though he has many years to go before eighty. “You’re a very eloquent man,” I said in sober recognition, “No, I’m not!” he retorted cheekily. “You have such interesting things to say,” I replied lamely, “No, I don’t!” he persisted gamely, obstinately raising his eyebrows. Nevertheless, Alan’s life as a bellfounder is remarkable to me and maybe to you too. Seeing his life in comparison to his predecessors, Alan embraces the patterns that prescribe his existence, for better or worse, and his personal mindset is the result of particular circumstances, the outcome of four generations of bellfounding. Even if it is his nature to maintain a stubborn levity, Alan is entirely for real and he has my greatest respect for his immodest devotion to bells.
Now, it was time to take a picture of Alan, the master bellfounder, so I followed him with rising excitement through old doors, along passages, crossing a courtyard stacked with bells and into the vast workshop where the bells are made. There were huge bells and moulds for bells, bells-in-progress and bells completed, and piles of metal dust everywhere and pieces of heavy lifting equipment lowering over us. This is where the sound of bells pealing originates, I thought. I felt like an astronaut on the moon, it was dusty and wondrous yet strange, but this was Alan’s home planet. He strolled happily around the filthy workshop in his neat blue suit, scrutinising progress on the bells and proud to be photographed among his sublime creations that will be pealing to delight the ear of generations yet unborn, when we are all gone.
Below you can see Arthur Hughes (master bellfounder from 1904), Albert Hughes (master bellfounder from 1916), William Hughes (master bellfounder from 1945) and Alan Hughes (master bellfounder from 1972).
Photographs of Alan Hughes by Sarah Ainslie.
Rochelle Cole, Poulterer
It never crossed my mind that being a poulterer might be a glamorous profession until I met Rochelle Cole at Liverpool St Chickens in Leyden St. When Rochelle bounced into her shop from the rain outside (wearing wellingtons and a flat cap at a jaunty angle), she appeared through the chain link curtain to greet me with a confident smile. Taking me in with a single glance of her huge eyes, as she pulled the cap from her head allowing her dark flowing locks to fall in a cascade around her shoulders, I was completely mesmerised. Rochelle has presence, she is the top bird at Liverpool St Chickens and a fourth generation poulterer too.
I was grateful for the excuse to walk over and explore the web of little streets where the Petticoat Lane Market happens on Sunday. This is the hidden, more utilitarian side of Spitalfields where I commonly go to admire the African shops with their colourful displays of Batik fabrics, when I am taking a shortcut down towards London Bridge. My instinct is that these streets are among the oldest parts of Spitalfields but they do not declare their history readily in the way that the silk merchants’ houses do on the other side of the market.
I was fascinated to learn that it was Rochelle’s great-grandmother Janie Cohen who established the poulterer’s around 1890. An exceptional undertaking for a woman at that time, an exceptional undertaking for any woman that had six children at any time. On her death in 1920, the business passed to her two sons Isaac and Sydney who adopted the name Cole. They passed it to Rochelle’s father Joe Cole and, after Joe died, Rochelle took sole responsibility two years ago. Coles have always bought their bags from Gardners, the paper bag sellers in Spitalfields and Paul Gardner remembers Joe Cole paying with banknotes stained in chicken blood with feathers attached.
As a child, Rochelle often came to the shop with her dad Joe, “My memory of coming to the East End is sleeping all the way in the car and when we arrived I’d wake to ‘cock-a-doodle-do!’ The shop was like a farm, you’d be surrounded by chickens and it stank to high heaven! When I was a little girl, I used to come in and stroke a chicken and then my dad would pick it up and slaughter it in front of me. Once I was eight or nine, he’d say ‘You go and get one’ and then I held the chicken for him to kill it. In our house we only ate chicken, it was – eat chicken or starve. After that I went vegetarian for seven years.” Considering Rochelle’s emotional disclosure, I began to wonder how it was she had come to embrace her profession in the way she has now.
In the 1890s, Cohens was one of many kosher butchers among a plethora of Jewish food stores in the heart of the East End ghetto. Those original customers bought the hard chicken (Cohen’s/Cole’s speciality) to make chicken soup. As the Jewish people moved out, Muslims arrived to buy halal chicken, often taking the chickens alive to bless them at home. Today, Rochelle has many African customers who prefer the hard chickens she sells that are the basis of their cuisine. Rochelle told me the African clientele love chickens’ feet, “‘Can we have extra feet for the children?’ they ask.” she said. It is curious how this humblest of chicken, the boiler, bred primarily to lay eggs, has been adopted by different cultures in the same location through different times. A trick of fate that has ensured the survival of Coles’ poulterers when all the other Jewish food stores that once defined these particular streets have long gone.
“They couldn’t wait to leave,” said Rochelle, commenting on the exodus of people who wanted to escape the poverty and struggle that the place characterised for them. Indeed, Rochelle’s mother never wanted to come from the family home in North London to visit and, two years after Joe’s death, she consented to the sale of the original premises (at the junction of Cobb St and Leyden St) fifty yards down the road from the current shop. This was the catalyst for Rochelle’s change of heart. “I said, ‘You cannot close this business.’ I was the only one who was passionate. I couldn’t let the family business die. We had customers who been coming for forty or fifty years. My father had a horrible time when the animal rights protestors came on the scene. We had death threats! It contributed to his early death at sixty-one.” And so, like the loving daughter that she is, Rochelle started up the business again in these new premises driven by her mission to keep alive her family’s enterprise for another generation. Rochelle recognised that if her great-grandmother, Janie, could it in 1890 with six children, she could do it now.
“It was a big struggle to get the new shop up and running”, Rochelle declared, getting emotional again describing an experience her great-grandmother would recognise. Only this time Rochelle’s emotion was triumphant because all the loyal customers followed her to her shiny yellow shop where she sells fresh chicken six days a week (closed Saturdays and Yom Kippur). Now Rochelle is positively glowing with pride at the thriving poulterer’s business and her only regret is that she has no old photos to tell the story – just the painting you see below. But after our conversation, I had the feeling that I had encountered in Rochelle the living spirit of Janie, that bold woman who started out on her own in 1890.
Gary Arber, printer
On Monday morning, I set out early from Spitalfields, crossing the freshly fallen snow in Weavers’ Fields, and walking due East until I came to the premises of Arber & Co Ltd at 459 Roman Rd. Once I rang the bell, Gary Arber appeared from the warren of boxes inside, explaining that he did not have much time because he had to do his accounts. So, without delay, I took the photo above and Gary told to me that his grandfather Walter Francis Arber first opened the shop in 1897, as a printer and stationer that also sold toys. The business was continued by Gary’s father who was also called Walter Francis Arber and it is this name that remains on the stationery today.
“I’m here under duress because I’m an airman,” said Gary, explaining that he took over the business, sacrificing his career as a pilot flying Lincoln Bombers when his father died, because his mother relied upon the income of the printing works. “I left the beautiful Air Force forever in 1954,” he revealed wistfully. It is not hard to envisage Gary as a handsome flying ace, he has that charismatically nonchalant professionalism. You can see it in the picture above, Gary retains the Air Force moustache over half a century later, so you only have to imagine a flight suit in place of the overall to complete the picture. There is no doubt Gary saw life before he swapped the flight suit for an overall and vanished into the print shop. He was there at Christmas Island in 1946 to witness one of the first nuclear tests (see it here), though thankfully Gary was not one of those pilots who flew through the dust cloud to collect samples. “We were guests of the day, watching from a boat, we had bits of dark glass and they told us to shut our eyes when the countdown reached two and open our eyes to look through the glass when it reached minus five – but you saw it through your eyelids. Then you felt the shock, the turbulence and the heat. It was great fun.” Mercifully, Gary appears to have suffered no ill-effects, still running the shop today at seventy-eight, driving daily from his home in Romford.
These days, Gary’s shop has become something of a magnet for artists who love his old-school letterpress printing but, as a sole operator, Gary now only undertakes these jobs “under pressure.” “The quality is rubbish,” he says, grabbing a pad of taxi receipts and turning one over to reveal the impress of the type, embossed into the paper – the only way he can get a clear print from the worn type now. “It should be smooth, like a baby’s bottom,” he sighs, running a single finger across the reverse of the page before tossing it back onto the pile. I was concerned upon Gary’s behalf until he disarmed me, “I don’t make any money, I’m just pottering about and enjoying myself!” he confided gleefully. Owning his premises, Gary enjoys complete security and the freedom to carry on in his own sweet way.
I heard a rumour that the Suffragettes’ handbills were printed here and Gary confirms this. “My grandmother, Emily Arber, was a friend of Mrs Pankhurst and she wouldn’t let my grandfather charge for the printing. A ferocious woman, she ruled everyone – the women, my grandmother and aunt, ran the toys’ side of the business.” And although the toys side was wrapped up long ago when Gary’s aunt (also called Emily) died, the signs remain. Lift your eyes above the suspended fluorescents and you discover there are beautifully coloured posters produced by toy manufacturers pasted to the ceiling. “If I removed those the roof would probably collapse!” quipped Gary with a grin. Then, indicating the glass-fronted cases that were used to display dolls, “All the shopfittings are a hundred years old, nothing’s been touched.” he said proudly, and pointed to an enigmatic line with scruffy ends of string hanging down, each carrying more dust than you would have thought possible, “Those bits of string had board games hanging from them once.”
Moving a stack of boxes to one side, Gary uncovered some printing samples for customers to select their preferred options. What a selection! There was a ration card from a butcher round the corner, a dance ticket for December 30th 1939 at Wilmot St School, Bethnal Green, and one for an ATS Social with the helpful text “You will be informed in the event of an air raid,” just in case you get seduced by Glenn Miller and do not hear the siren. There is a crazy humour about these things being here. I turned to confront an advert for a Chopper bicycle portraying a winsome lady with big hair, exhorting me to “Be a trendy shopper.” I turned back to Gary, “This is a shop not a museum,” he said sternly. You could have fooled me.
Aware that I was keeping Gary from his chores, I was on the brink of taking my leave, when Gary confessed that he was no longer in the mood for doing accounts. Instead he took me down to the cellar where six printers worked once. “This is where it used to happen,” he announced with bathos, as we descended the wooden staircase into a subterranean space where six oily black beasts of printing presses crouched, artfully camouflaged beneath a morass of waste paper, old boxes and packets with the occasional antique tin toy, left over from stock, to complete the mix. Here was a printing shop from a century ago, an untidy time capsule – where the twentieth century passed through like a furious whirlwind, demanding printing for the Suffragettes and printing for the Government through two World Wars, and whisking Gary away to Christmas Island to witness a nuclear explosion. And this what was what was left. I was completely overawed at the spectacle, as Gary began removing boxes to reveal more of the machines, enthusiastically explaining their different qualities, capabilities and operating systems. He pointed out the two that were used for the Suffragettes’ handbills and I stood in a moment of silent reverence to register the historical significance of these old hulks, a Wharfdale and a Golding Jobber.
Gary made a beeline for the Heidelberg, the only one that still works, and began tinkering with the type that he used to print the taxi receipt I saw earlier. This was the heart of it all. I joined him and, standing together in the quiet, we both became absorbed by the magic of the press. Gary was explaining the technical names for the parts of the printer’s pie, when an unexpected wave of emotion overcame me there in this gloomy cellar, on a cold morning in February, up to my ankles in rubbish surrounded by historic printing presses. “Will you print something for me?” I blurted out, and although he claimed he only did this “under pressure,” Gary kindly consented to my heartfelt request at once.
I need some correspondence cards and I am honoured that Gary will print them for me (in Perpetua, my favourite typeface) as a momento of his wonderful printing shop. Once we agreed on the nature of the job, another customer arrived. So I said my goodbyes, secure in the knowledge that I now have reason to go back and continue our conversation, once the proofs are ready.
I doubt very much that Gary did his accounts that day, but Gary is a sociable man with a generous spirit (even if he strikes an unconvincingly gruff posture occasionally) and if you choose to pay a visit yourself, then it is highly possible that you will learn (as I did) about the Roman sarcophagus that was discovered in the Roman Rd, or the woman who was the inspiration for the character of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, or Gary’s adventures on steam trains in India, or when Gary was invited to the National Physics Laboratory in the fifties see an early computer, as big as four houses, that could play chess.
One word of caution,“Printers are either highly religious or wicked,” says Gary, adding “- and I don’t go to church!” with melodramatic irony. So if you decide to go round, be sure to pay Gary due respect by buying something, even if it is only a modest thing. Bear in mind, as you purchase your box of paperclips, that Gary is there under duress – he would rather be flying Lincoln Bombers – and then, once this subterfuge is achieved, it is appropriate to widen the nature of discourse.
This picture shows the garden at the rear of Arber’s printing works in the Roman Rd photographed in 1930. I was going to photograph the same view today but, once I saw it for myself, I decided that you would rather not know.
Dickens in Spitalfields 2, the silk warehouse
You may recall reading in last week’s opening installment of Charles Dickens’ feature “Spitalfields” published in his weekly journal “Household Words” on 5th April 1851, how he and his sub-editor W.H.Wills climbed the stair to enter a silk warehouse in Spital Sq. As soon as they had introduced themselves to the manager, another character entered the scene…
Somebody mounts the stairs, and enters the apartment with the deliberate air of a man who has nothing whatever to do, but to walk about in a beautifully brushed hat, a nicely fitting coat admirably buttoned, symmetrical boots, and a stock of amazing satin; to crush his gloves tightly between his hands, and to call on his friends, to ask them – as this gentleman asks our friend (the manager) – how he is getting on; and whether he has been down “yonder” lately (a jerk eastward of the glossy hat); and, if he hasn’t whether he means to go down next Sunday, because if he does, he (the visitor) means to go too, and will take him down in his “trap”. He then, in a parenthetical, post-scriptum sort of way, alludes to a certain “assorted Glaces, ” and indicates the pile of silks he means by the merest motion of his ring finger.
“The figure is – ? “ says he.
“Two and seven,” replies the vendor; “How many pieces shall I put aside?”
“Well- fifty. By the bye, have you heard?” – Mr Broadelle (our friend) has not heard, and the visitor proceeds to announce, from impeachably authority, that the match between Mr Crumpley of Howell’s, and Miss Lammy of Swan’s, is to come off at last: in fact, next Thursday. Cordial “good bye;” graceful elevation of the polished hat to myself; and the departure of, as Mr Broadelle informs us, one of his best customers.
“Customer?”
“Yes? You heard? He has just bought fifty pieces of silk of various or ‘assorted’ colours.”
“At two shillings and seven-pence per yard?”
“Just so. And there are eighty four yards in a piece.”
Our organs of calculation are instantly wound up, and set a-going. The result brought out when these phrenological works have run down, is, that this short, easy jaunty gossip began and ended in a transaction involving a sum of five hundred and forty-two pounds ten shillings. No haggling about the price; no puffing of quality, on one side, or deprecation of it on the other. The silks are not even looked at.
How is this?
“Our trade,” says our friend, in explanation, ” has been reduced to a system that enables us to transact business with the fewest possible words, and in the easiest possible way. The gentleman who has just left, is Messrs. Treacy and McIntyre’s silk-buyer. In like manner, the different branches of large houses are placed under the control of similar buyers. At the end of every half-year, an account is taken of the stewardship of each of these heads of department. If the Buyer have narrowly watched the public taste, and fed it successfully, – if he have been vigilant in getting early possession of the most attractive patterns, or in the pouncing on cheap markets, by taking advantage, for instance, of the embarrassments of a ‘shaky’ manufacturer or a French revolution ( for he scours the country at home and abroad in all directions), and if his department come out at the six-monthly settlement with marked profit – his salary is possibly raised. Should this success be repeated, he is usually taken into the firm as a partner.”
“But no judgement was exercised in the bargain just made. The Buyer did not even look at your goods.”
“That is the result of previous study and experience. It is the art that conceals art. He need not examine the goods. He has learnt the characteristics of our dyes to a shade, and the qualities of our fabrics to a thread.”
“Then, as to price. I suppose your friend is lounging about in other Spitalfields warehouses at this moment. Perhaps by this time he has run his firm into debt for a few thousand pounds more?”
“Very likely.”
“Well; suppose a neighbour of yours were to offer him the same sort of silks as those he has just chosen here, for less money, could he not – as no writing has passed between you – be off his bargain with you?”
” Too late. The thing is done, and cannot be undone,” answers Mr Broadelle, made a little serious by the bare notion of such a breach of faith. “Our bargain is as tight as if it had been written on parchment and attested by a dozen witnesses. His very existence as a Buyer, and mine as Manufacturer, depend upon this scrupulous performance of the contract. I shall send in the silks this afternoon. And I feel as certain of a check for the cash, at our periodical settlement, as I do of death and quarter-day.”
It is difficult to reconcile the immense amount of capital which flows through such a house as this – the rich stores of satin, velvets, lutestrings, brocades, damasks, and other silk textures, which Mr Broadelle brings to light from the quaint cupboards and drawers – with the poignant and often-repeated cry of poverty that proceeds from this quarter.
What says Mr Broadelle to it? He says this :
“Although most masters make this locality their head-quarters, and employ the neighbouring weavers, yet they nearly all have factories in the provinces: chiefly in Lancashire. The Spitalfields weaver of plain silks and velvets, therefore, keeps up a hopeless contest against machinery and cheap labour, and struggles against overwhelming odds. Will you step round and see a family engaged in this desperate encounter?”
“Is there a remedy?” we ask, as we go out together…
Let us conclude this installment with Dickens’ understated appeal to the reader’s political sympathy, knowing that next time we shall be able to accompany Dickens as he sets out ,with Mr Broadelle as his guide through the streets of Spitalfields, to learn at first hand of the living conditions of the weavers who manufactured these luxurious fabrics for the rich the enjoy. In the meantime, please do not try to trace the silk warehouse in question through the archives, because “broad ell” is a measure of cloth, Dickens invented this moniker, Mr Broadelle, for the manager of the business in his article.
Sarah Ainslie, photographer
When I met Sarah Ainslie at The Pride of Spitalfields last week, she told me she had some photographs of the market in Brick Lane that she had taken in the nineteen eighties. So two days later, my curiosity led me round to her studio in Ezra St, where she produced a box of large prints to show me. As she spread them out on the table, I was rapt by her pictures and we spent an enjoyable, absorbing hour shuffling them around to create this photo feature for you of Brick Lane in 1987-8.
This was exactly the time I first visited Spitalfields with Joshua Compston and Sarah’s pictures allowed me to recognise how fundamentally the texture of the market has altered in the intervening years. Here you see more old people than you do today and a smaller variety of people, with barely any of the fashionable young people who descend upon Brick Lane every Sunday these days. In 1987, Brick Lane was not the place to be seen that it is now.
The market portrayed here was a more insular, less structured affair with many stalls merely consisting of piles on the ground – a surreal environment in which stallholders commonly dumped what was unsold and people enjoyed scrabbled through the rubbish, seeking anything of value. Sarah told me she was fascinated by the chaos and energy of the market, and the sense of people bringing their lives out onto the street when they displayed their personal possessions for sale.
Sarah’s pictures convey a wonderfully immediate panoramic sense of the life and atmosphere of the market, but a closer inspection reveals more. Like all good photography, her photos get more interesting the longer you look. Spot the man with plastic elephant nose standing on the corner of Cheshire St, spot the lady with the bag on her head in the rain, spot the pair of disembodied legs reclining on a bench, spot the reflection of the man with the bad false teeth caught in the circular mirror. These eye-catching fractures in the surface of reality lead us to scrutinise these pictures, searching for the significance in this compelling spectacle of humanity and all the wonderful arbitrary old junk we trash, we trade and we treasure all over again in an endless cycle.
It is my great pleasure to welcome Sarah Ainslie as a contributing photographer to Spitalfields Life, Sarah will be accompanying me on some of my interviews in future and you can look forward to seeing more of her distinguished photography alongside stories here in these pages over coming months. The Spitalfields Life header for the month of February is a detail of another photograph by Sarah from this same set of pictures.
Columbia Road Market 21
As I walked up and down the market this morning in the pale sunlight, weaving my way between the trolleys of plants where the stallholders were still setting up in the sub-zero temperatures, I came upon these Irises. I recalled that Joan Rose told me, when I met her recently, that the original planting of the flower beds around the bandstand in Arnold Circus was entirely Irises in honour of the Huguenot people, some of whose descendants, including Joan herself, lived there. Apparently, blue was the colour of the Huguenot cross, composed of a four-petalled Iris, a symbol created in 1688. In Joan’s childhood, there was a gardener who took care of the gardens of St Leonard’s church, that were outstanding for their quality of cultivation. He also tended the Irises at Arnold Circus which Joan told me were sublime when they were all in bloom and the entire park turned blue.
