Isabelle Barker’s hat
Even though I took this photograph of the hat in question, when I examined the image later it became ambiguous to my eyes. If I did not know it was a hat, I might mistake it for a black cabbage, a truffle, or an exotic dried fruit, or maybe even a sinister medical specimen of a brain preserved in a hospital museum.
Did you notice this hat when you visited the Smoking Room at Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St? You will be forgiven if you did not, because there is so much detail everywhere in this extraordinary house and by candlelight the hat’s faded velvet tones merge unobtrusively into the surroundings. It feels entirely natural to find this hat in the same room as the painting of the gambling scene from William Hogarth’s “The Rake’s Progress” because it is almost identical to the hat Hogarth wore in his famous self-portrait, of the style commonly worn by men when they were not bewigged.
Yet, as with so much in this house of paradoxes, the hat is not what it appears to be upon first glance. If it even caught your eye at all because it is so at home in its chosen spot that the gloom contrives to conjure virtual invisibility for this modestly austere piece of headgear – if it caught your eye, would you give it a second glance?
It was Fay Cattini who brought me to Dennis Severs’ house in the search for Isabelle Barker’s hat. Fay and her husband Jim befriended the redoubtable Miss Barker, as an elderly spinster, in the last years of her life until her death in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight. To this day, Fay keeps a copy of Isabelle’s grandparents’ marriage certificate dated 14th June 1853. Daniel Barker was a milkman who lived with his wife Ann in Fieldgate St, Whitechapel and the next generation of the family ran Barker’s Dairy in Shepherd St (now Toynbee St), Spitalfields. Isabelle grew up there as one of three sisters before she moved to her flat in Barnet House round the corner in Bell Lane where she lived out her years – her whole life encompassing a century within a quarter-mile at the heart of Spitalfields.
“I was born in Tenterground (now the site of the nineteen thirties Holland Estate), known as the Dutch Tenter because there were so many Jews of Dutch origins living there. My family were Christians but we always got on so well with the Jews – wonderful people they were. We had a dairy. The cows came in by train from Essex to Liverpool St and we kept them while they were in milk. Then they went to the butchers. The children would buy a cake at Oswins the baker around the corner and then come and buy milk from us.” wrote Isabelle in the Friends of Christ Church, Spitalfields, magazine in 1996 when she was a mere eighty-seven years old.
Fay Cattini first became aware of Isabelle when in her teens she joined the church choir which was enhanced by Isabelle’s sweet soprano voice. Isabelle played the piano for church meetings and tried to teach Fay to play too, using an old-fashioned technique that required balancing matchboxes on your hand to keep them in the right place. “I grew up with Isobel,” admitted Fay,“I think Isobel was one of the respectable poor whose life revolved around home and church. She had very thin ankles because she loved to walk, in her youth she joined the Campaigners (a church youth movement) and one of the things they did was to march up to the West End and back. She enjoyed walking, and she and her best friend Gladys Smith would get the bus and walk around Oxford St and down to the Embankment. Even when she was old, I never had to walk slowly with her.”
Years later, Fay and Jim Cattini shared the task of walking Isabelle over to The Market Cafe in Fournier St for lunch six days a week. In those days the cafe was the social focus of Spitalfields, as Fay told me,“Isabelle was quite deaf, so she liked to talk rather than listen. At The Market Cafe where she ate lunch every day, Isabelle met Dennis Severs – Dennis, Gilbert & George, and Rodney Archer were all very sweet to her. I don’t think she cooked or was very domestic but walking to The Market Cafe every day – good food and good company – then walking back again to her small flat on the second floor of Barnet House, that’s what kept her going.”
In fact, Fay remembered that Isobel gave her hat to her friend Dennis Severs, who called her his “Queen Mother” in fond acknowledgement of her innate dignity and threw an elaborate eightieth birthday party for her at his house in 1989. But although nothing ever gets thrown away at 18 Folgate St, when we asked curator David Milne about Isobelle Barker’s hat, he knew of no woman’s hat fitting the description – which was clear in Fay’s mind because Isabelle took great pride in her appearance and never went out without a hat, handbag and gloves.
“Although she was an East End person,” explained Fay affectionately,“she always looked very smart, quite refined, and she spoke correctly, definitely not a cockney. She had a pension from her job at the Post Office as a telephonist supervisor, but everything in her flat was shabby because she wouldn’t spend any money. As long as she had what she needed that was sufficient for her. She respected men more than women and refused to be served by a female cashier at the bank. Her philosophy of life was that you didn’t dwell on anything. When Dennis died of aids she wouldn’t talk about it and when her best friend Gladys had dementia she didn’t want to visit her. It was an old-fashioned way of dealing with things, but I think anyone that lives to ninety-eight is impressive. You had to soldier on, that was her attitude, she was a Victorian.”
When Fay produced the photo you can see below, of Isabelle with Dennis Severs at her eightieth birthday party, David realised at once which hat once belonged to Isabelle Barker. Even though it looks spectacularly undistinguished in this picture, David saw the hat in the background of the photo on the stand in the corner of the Smoking Room – which explains why the photo was taken in this room that was otherwise an exclusive male enclave.
At once, David removed the hat from the stand in the Smoking Room where it sat all these years and confirmed that, although it is the perfect doppelganger of an eighteenth century man’s hat, inside it has a tell-tale label from a mid-twentieth century producer of ladies’ hats. It was Isabelle Barker’s hat! The masquerade of Isabelle Barker’s hat fooled everyone for more than twenty years and, while we were triumphant to have discovered Isabelle’s hat and uncovered the visual pun that it manifests so successfully, we were also delighted to have stumbled upon an unlikely yet enduring memorial to a remarkable woman of Spitalfields.
Dennis Severs & Isabelle Barker at her eightieth birthday party with the hat in the background.
William Hogarth wearing his famous hat.
Barker’s Dairy as advertised in the Spitalfields Parish Magazine in 1923.
Fay and Isabelle in 2001
Albert Stratton, pigeon flyer
With the pigeon racing season commencing on 10th April, I took the opportunity of an introduction to the sport kindly extended to me by Albert Stratton, secretary and clock setter of the Kingsland Racing Pigeon Club, which has been established for over a century. Ever since I read Dickens’ description of the pigeon lofts in Spitalfields in 1851, I have been curious to discover whether anyone keeps pigeons here today. So I was delighted to find Albert in the garden of his house beside Weavers Fields in Bethnal Green, where he has two sheds filled with pigeons, and learn that the venerable East End culture of keeping homing pigeons is alive, nurtured by a small group of fanciers.
Albert is a powerfully built man with a generous spirit, who becomes lyrical in his enthusiasm when talking about these familiar birds that are as mysterious as they are mundane. Commonly considered pests, pigeons are so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet if they were rare maybe we would prize them for their fine plumage and astounding navigational abilities – just as Albert does.
“When I was fourteen, growing up in Shoreditch, I was walking through the flats one day and there was a pigeon on the floor, as skinny as you can get. He had a ring round his foot, so I took him home and my dad said, ‘It’s a racing pigeon, you’ve got to let it go because it belongs to someone.’ Then we found it couldn’t fly, so he said, ‘We’ll keep it on the balcony and build it up until it can fly.’ But when we did let it go, it flew up in the air and back into the box – and after that I became fascinated with pigeons and how they will stay with you.
We moved to the Delta Estate and had a flat on the top floor with a big balcony, and when I found four Tippler pigeons (which are fancy pigeons not racers) abandoned, I took them home and kept them on the balcony in crates with wire netting on the front. I used to let them go out and fly, and they’d come back. Then, when we bought the house in Bethnal Green, we decided to keep racing pigeons. We built two sheds and had six babies delivered by courier from the Maserella stud in Leicester.
In 1983, I joined the Kingsland Pigeon Racing Club and my first year’s racing with them was 1985 and I won fourth place in the club which gets you into the prize money. And you think to yourself, anyone can do this – but you find out later, it’s hard. You’ve got to keep your pigeons healthy and fit – spot on. Sick pigeons can’t race. You’ve got to train them to build up the muscle and the fitness. Pigeon racing is like horse racing – the money is in the breeding not the racing. You pay to breed from the winners, studs buy up the winning pigeons and then sell off their young ones.
We start the season on 10th April at Peterborough, from there to my house is seventy-one and half miles. After that first race, we carry on in stages of thirty miles between each race point, moving up the country. Newark at one hundred and twelve and a half miles is the second race point, and after fifteen weeks we end up in Thurso at five hundred and seven miles North of here.
Before the race, we all go round to the club headquarters in Mr Hamilton’s garden, where we mark each pigeon with a numbered rubber band. Then we synchronise our clocks. Once the pigeon arrives home, you take the number off the leg and put it in the clock which stops the timer. The timing runs from the moment when the pigeons are liberated.
Pigeons fly at fifty miles per hour with no wind. So, if they are liberating the pigeons at nine o ‘clock in Peterborough, you check the weather and, if the wind forecast is thirty-five miles per hour from the North, then you estimate it should take approximately two hours, which means the pigeons will arrive in Bethnal Green at eleven. Once you’ve worked out a time of arrival, you are waiting for them. I’ve stood at the back door looking to the North and everything that moves in the sky you go, “Come on, come on!” – if it’s yours or not. You look at your watch and then back at the sky.
There’s nothing better than seeing one of your birds come out of the sky, when it folds to make itself small to become as fast as possible, because it wants to get home. As soon as it arrives, you go in the garden with peanuts to get his attention, so you can get the rubber band off and put it in the clock.
Then you go round to the club, where the rubber bands are collected and all the clocks are struck off against the master timer to confirm they are all the same. We know the exact time they left and the exact time they arrived, so we divide the distance by the time to get velocity and the bird that has the greatest velocity wins. We record our first ten birds which means everyone gets their name published in The Racing Pigeon, which covers all the East End clubs.”
I followed Albert into the shed to take pictures while he cleaned out the shelves and tenderly checking on those birds hatching eggs or nursing chicks, even holding up a tiny blind newborn chick in his large hand to show me, replacing it gently under its mother’s breast before it got cold, and then chasing the other pigeons outside to get some exercise.
When Albert joined the Kingsland Club in 1983 there were thirty members but now there are eight, the others have died or moved East towards Clacton, Albert says, and Kingsland itself is the only proper club left in Hackney where there once four or five. Today, there is one in Stepney Green and another in Wood Green, that is distinguished by its multiracialism. “Polish people might be the only lifeblood to save pigeon racing in this country,” commented Albert absent-mindedly from within the shadows of the pigeon shed, “If people don’t mix there’ll be no peace in this world.”
It is truly remarkable how these modest birds can navigate over great distances, and I was touched to observe the passion they draw from Albert, whenever the miracle is repeated, each time they fly home to him. Through pigeons, Albert in his small garden in Bethnal Green is connected to the wide landscape that the pigeons traverse to fly home and through pigeons Albert also is connected to the intense social life of the Federation of Racing Clubs, as the average for every pigeon accumulates through the season to arrive at a prize bird that can deliver a substantial reward.
While we were talking in the living room, our conversation was interrupted when we saw a cat appear on the roof of the pigeon shed and Albert rolled his eyes, “Look at that creature! Where’s my rifle?” he growled.
The Kingsland Racing Pigeon Club welcomes new members, if you are interested contact Albert by emailing him at stratton123@btinternet.com
Columbia Road Market 29
Through the drizzle I heard the cockerell crowing at the Spitalfields City Farm as I walked up to Columbia Rd where this Easter morning there was a lively crowd at the flower market by eight o’ clock. I deliberated between Rhubarb and Clematis before buying a tray of eight Violas for a mere £2. I love Violas with their delicate deep violet and white petals, half and half, like butterfly wings. They remind me of happy days in the Outer Hebrides where on the Isle of Barra they grow wild on the machair, the bank of seaweed built up at the top of the beach to create a narrow strip of land, that in Summer is as rich with tiny flowers as an Alpine meadow.
There is a small window above the stove in my kitchen that I open to expel the steam when I am cooking, this is where I raise my eyes in contemplation while I am stirring the porridge. On the sill sits a nineteenth century Welsh lustreware creamer that I bought in Exeter many years ago, and these Violas in this tiny box will make an attractive background to my beloved cow for months to come.
Clive Murphy, Oral Historian & Writer of Ribald Rhymes
Above a curry house in Brick Lane lives Clive Murphy, like a wise owl snug in the nest he has constructed of books and lined with pictures, photographs, postcards and cuttings, over the thirty six years that he has occupied his tiny flat. Originally from Dublin, Clive has not a shred of an Irish accent. Instead he revels in a well-educated vocabulary, a spectacular gift for rhetoric and a dry taste for savouring life’s ironies. He possesses a certain delicious arcane tone that you would recognise if you have heard his fellow-countryman Francis Bacon talking. In fact, Clive is a raconteur of the highest order and I was a willing audience, happy merely to sit at his feet and chuckle appreciatively at his colourful and sometimes raucous observations.
I was especially thrilled to meet Clive because he is a writer after my own heart who has made it his business to seek out people and record their stories. At first in Pimlico and then here in Spitalfields through the sixties and seventies, Clive worked as a “modern Mayhew, publishing the lives of ordinary people who had lived through the extraordinary upheavals and social changes of the first three-quarters of the century before they left the stage.” He led me to a bookshelf in his front room and showed me a line of nine books of oral history that he edited, entitled Ordinary Lives, as well as his three novels and six volumes of ribald verse, all of which are available through his own publishing company Brick Lane Books. I was astonished to be confronted with the achievements of this self-effacing man living here in two rooms in such beautiful extravagant chaos.
Naturally, I was immediately curious of Clive’s books of oral history. Each volume is an autobiography of one person recorded and edited by Clive, “ordinary” people whose lives were revealed in the telling to be compelling and extraordinary. They are A Funny Old Quist, memoirs of a gamekeeper, Oiky, memoirs of a pigman, The Good Deeds of a Good Woman, memoirs of an East End hostel dweller, A Stranger in Gloucester, memoirs of an Austrian refugee, Endsleigh, memoirs of a riverkeeper, At the Dog in Dulwich, memoirs of a struggling poet, Four Acres and a Donkey, memoirs of a lavatory attendant, Love, Dears! memoirs of a chorus girl and Born to Sing, memoirs of a Jewish East End mantle presser. The variety of subjects was intriguing and bizarre, and Clive explained his personal vision of creating a social panorama, “to begin with the humblest lavatory attendant and then work my way up in the world until I got to Princess Margaret.”
Much to Clive’s frustration, the project foundered when he got to the middle classes, and he coloured visibly as he explained, “I found the middle classes had an image of themselves they wanted to project and they asked to correct what they had said, afterwards, or they told downright lies, whereas the common people didn’t have an image of themselves and they had a natural gift of language.” I was curious to understand the origin of Clive’s curiousity, and learn how and why he came to edit all these books. And when he told me the story, I discovered the reasons were part of what brought Clive to England in the first place.
“I lived a sheltered life in Dublin in a suburb and qualified as a solicitor before I came to England in 1958. My mother wanted me to be solicitor to Trinity College where her father was Vice-Provost but I had been on two holidays to London and I’d fallen in love with the bright lights. I wanted to see a wider variety of people. So as soon as I qualified I left Dublin, where I had been offered a job as a solicitor at £4 and ten shillings a week, and came to London, where I got a job at once as a liftman at a Lyons Corner House for £8 a week and I have lived here ever since.
I was staying in Pimlico and there was a retired lavatory attendant and his wife who lived down below, and they invited me down for supper. He had such a natural gift for language and a quaint way of expressing himself, so I said ‘Let’s do a book!’ and that was ‘Four Acres and a Donkey’. Then I was living in another house and by complete chance there was another retired lavatory attendant, a woman who had once been a chorus girl, so I did another book with her, too, that was ‘Love Dears!’
At that time there was an organisation called Space which let out abandoned schools and warehouses to artists. In 1973 I answered their letter in The Times and they found me this empty building, it was the Old St Patrick’s School in Buxton St. I lived in the former headmaster’s study and that’s where I recorded my first East End book. I had nothing but a tea chest, a camp bed and a hurricane lamp. There was no electricity but there was running cold water. Meths drinkers used to sit on the doorstep night and day, and at night they would hammer on the door trying to get in. I was a bit frightened because I had never met meths drinkers before and I was all alone but gradually three artists came to live in the school with me.
Then I had to leave the school house because I was flooded out and, after a stint on Quaker St, I saw an ad in Harry’s Confectioners and moved here to Brick Lane in 1974. The building was owned by a Jewish lady who let the rooms to me and a professor from Rochester University who only came to use his place in vacations, so it was wonderfully quiet. There was a cloth warehouse on the ground floor then which is now the Aladin Restaurant. Every shopfront was a different trade, we had an ironmonger, an electrician and a wine merchant with a sign that said ‘purveyors to the diplomatic service.’ The wine merchant also had a concoction she sold exclusively to the meths drinkers but that wasn’t advertised.
I thought when I came here to Spitalfields I was going to be solely a writer, I had taught at a primary school in Islington but very soon I became a teacher of children with special needs here. Occasionally, I used to go in the middle of the night to buy food from a night stall outside Christ Church, Spitalfields called ‘The Silver Gloves.’ I had no money hardly and I used to live off the fruit and veg thrown out by the market onto Brushfield St. But I found it exciting to be here because I found lots of people to interview. I had already written two novels and I was busy recording Alexander Hartog and Beatrice Ali, and I was happy to be learning about them, because I did lead a very restrictive life before I came to England.”
It interested me that Clive now writes poetry because I think he is a poet at heart and there is an unsentimental appreciation of the poetry of the human condition that runs through all his work. He chose his subjects because he saw the poetry in them when no-one else did and the books, recording the unexpected eloquence of these “ordinary” people telling their stories, bear witness to his compassionate insight.
As a writer still in the early days of writing my pen portraits, I was curious to ask Clive what he had learnt from all his interviews with such a variety of people. “The gamekeeper said to me, ‘You mean you don’t know how to skin a mole?'” Clive recalled with relish, evoking the gamekeeper in question vividly, before returning to his own voice to explain himself, “I am amazed that we are all stuck in our little worlds – he really thought everyone would know that. It wasn’t just the knowledge that I learnt from people, it was their outlooks and personalities.”
Clive gave me copies of his two East End books and, as we sliced open a box I was delighted to discover “new” copies of books from 1975, beautifully printed in letterpress with fresh unfaded covers and some with a vinyl record inside to allow the reader to hear the voice of the protagonist. I could not wait to go home and read them, and listen. Now I will never be able to walk down Brick Lane again without thinking of Clive Murphy, living there above the Aladin Restaurant, as a beacon of inspiration to me while I am running around Spitalfields pursuing my interviews.
With Clive’s kind permission, I shall be publishing an extract from each of his two East End books, The Good Deeds of a Good Woman by Beatrice Ali (An account of a mixed-race marriage) and Born to Sing by Alexander Hartog (A picture of Jewish life by a failed tenor who believes in re-incarnation), over the next fortnight to give you a flavour of his remarkable work.
Clive Murphy’s oral histories are now available at Labour and Wait and his ribald rhymes can be purchased from Rough Trade East.
Danny Tabi, furrier
At six yesterday morning, Brick Lane was empty of people but Danny Tabi, the last furrier in Spitalfields was already at work when I arrived at Gale Furs. When Danny started in 1963, hundreds worked in the fur trade and the streets thronged with workers from all the different garment industries making their way to work at six, but now there is just Danny. Others who merely import furs call themselves furriers, but Danny is the only one still working here with a lifetime’s expertise, at an occupation that must surely rate as one of the oldest known to mankind. I sat alone with Danny in the empty workshop at Gale Furs as the sun rose over Whitechapel and he told me his story.
“I was walking down Fournier St looking for a job one day and above the Market Cafe was a furrier, he interviewed me and said could I start on Monday. So I got a job starting the next week. Then, as I came out of there and walked back towards Brick Lane along Fournier St, when I got to Gale furs at number 8, I asked if they had any vacancies. The proprietor, Solly Shamroth, said “yes” and I could start the following day. So I went there rather than the other place and this was how my association started with Gale Furs. If I had turned left rather than right that day in Fournier St, my life would have been different.
I started at the firm, working with a guy called Max Ross, as a nailer. That’s a person that used to shape the furs by stretching them when they were wet. I picked up the nails off the floor and dampened the skins for him, then I used to go downstairs and pick up the needles from between the cracks in the floorboards with a magnet – nothing was wasted. In those days when you started in a firm like that you did everything, swept floors, did errands and got the cheese rolls too. Also on Friday my job was to clean three cars!
I could tell you a million stories of the street and the customers, and all the characters. Everyone had their special way of doing things. Morrie Klass, who taught me how to cut, he turned up for work in detachable collars, immaculately turned out, dapper like a city gent. He read The Guardian and The Times and spoke perfect Queen’s English. Maxie Ross, the nailer, he was a chain smoker always with a cigarette or a cigar. He used to leave a pint of milk on the window sill until it had congealed for a week and drank it sour because he loved it that way. He picked up nails and pieces of string and made use of it. He couldn’t walk past something he could use. One time, he had to go to a funeral but he had no proper black tie, so he wore a bow tie! Maxie was champion ballroom dancer, and he and Morrie won competitions in the ballrooms. That’s where Maxie met his wife, and his son used to play drums for Joe Loss. That was how I got to go to West End clubs because he got complimentary tickets and passed them onto me as a young lad of sixteen and seventeen.
Along the way I learnt all my skills and, as the factory started dwindling in workers, I found myself taking the places of the people who had left. People just retired but no-one came in to the trade, instead they were encouraged to go into office work.When you couldn’t replace them, you had to do certain things yourself. I found myself doing more cutting, making and sewing too. I learnt my trade during the sixties and seventies, then I started using my skills in the late seventies and eighties. During the sixties when there were eighteen people working in the furriers – it was a beautiful thing – turning out coats, collars, cuffs, stoles and hats, you name it we made it. It wasn’t just the work, it was the atmosphere.
Every single time you make a garment, it’s different because fur is a living thing. You work from scratch, one skin at a time, every time – when you match up pieces, the fur has to be same length. It’s definitely an art, you can’t explain what you did from arriving in the morning to going home at night. I’ve enjoyed my work over the years. I made a white collar from fake fur for Princess Diana. I’ve worked for lords and ladies. Katy Price is wearing one of my coats at present, and Kate Moss and Jemima Khan both have pieces of my work. They go to the West End stores to buy stuff but we make them here.
I was born in 136 Brick Lane in the attic in a one room flat, my mother lived there with me and my brother Ray. We weren’t brought up in luxury. At one point we lived in a hostel in Cable St because housing wasn’t available to mixed race families. I’ve worked since I left school, I never claimed benefits and I can count on my two hands the days off. I must be one of the longest-serving people in Brick Lane, I’ve always worked here.
I love walking down Brick Lane at five thirty in the morning, I can hear echoes from the past of when I walked down there suited and booted. I get emotional. People have moved away but I have always been drawn to the area. This used to be the dregs here, but here’s nothing wrong with Brick Lane. I’m pleased to see lots of young people come now. I pop out to get something and there’s crowds of young people. It’s incredible.”
Danny worked for Gale Furs for thirty years before he took it over, and now he is the proprietor and sole employee. Leaving the factory premises at 8 Fournier St in 1994 (it has become a private house now), today Danny works from a small nondescript second floor space on Whitechapel High St. On one side are the rails of coats and other pieces that have come in for renovation and repair, with prime garments displayed upon stands as superlative examples of the furrier’s art, and on the opposite side is the work table, pierced with infinite lines of little holes created when Danny transfers the pattern to the skins. Everywhere, scraps of fur are piled and paper patterns hang in sheaves from the wall.
Danny is justifiably proud of his skill and accomplishments and retains an appealing enthusiasm, shrewd yet bright. I was fascinated to watch Danny work at his cutting table, displaying natural dexterity, confidence and love of what he does, using all the tools that have always been with the company, many of which are a hundred years old or more, but still serviceable and in fact perfectly suited to the job. I felt privileged to be there in this sanctum and to understand that Danny extended his trust and welcome to me.
“It’s going to die a death” he declared without any regret, explaining that the Chinese are now the whole world’s furriers, as he took me through all the various tools of his trade demonstrating the purpose and telling the story for each one. A new world opened to me as Danny outlined the enormous number of processes and techniques that meet in the creation of garments of fur. We kept eye contact, like teacher and pupil, as he took me through what it takes to make a fur coat that might require seven weeks work. Picking up the tools, he mimed how he used them, specifying each of the distinctive requirements of the job and sometimes losing words when there were none to describe the methods of how you work with fur, and I had simply to follow his expert demonstration.
Today, Danny does all the different jobs and possesses all the skills of the eighteen staff that once worked for Gale Furs. He is widely respected for his talent and forty-seven years of experience at the high-end of an exclusive luxury trade. No-one is learning from Danny and, irrespective of your feelings about the origin of fur, there is an undeniable poignancy about the culture of the furrier which is an intricate refined expression of a certain vein of human ingenuity, with its own language, history and tools, and of which Danny is now the last exponent in a place where once so many people pursued this ancient trade.
The tool at the top is for stretching skins. Danny has used these scissors his entire career, they have a perfect balance and silken movement, and are over a hundred years old.
These irons which Danny uses as weights are over a century old too.
Newly acquired rolls of the highest quality silk lining, dated last day of December 1948.
Danny uses this machine from the Fournier St factory, the cloth with pins on it has been there since before he started in the trade. Note the Bishopsgate phone number carved into the wooden base on the right.
The tool on the left is a homemade device for snapping a razor into two triangular blades, it works perfectly. The other two are stretching blocks for stretching skins into shape, the one in the centre is marked with its owner’s initials.
An old weaver’s stool of traditional design that Danny uses when he sits at his sewing machine.
The magnet Danny used to pick up pins from the floor when he started work at Gale Furs in Fournier St in 1963.
Spitalfields Antiques Market 2
Continuing this occasional series, I am delighted to introduce four more traders from the antiques market held each Thursday in Spitalfields. With all kinds of drapes and flags hung up, antique carpets spread out, rails filled with old clothes and lines of stalls piled with antiques, bric-a-brac and curios spreading onto the floor, it is a breathtaking spectacle. And, since most of the traders are also collectors and are naturally curious to see what everyone else has for sale, they all go prowling around and the whole event spontaneously ignites into a great big party.
This debonair gentlemen with the intrinsically cool attitude goes by the name of Tem. As a photographer and theatre designer, he comes upon all kinds of interesting props that he uses in his work and sells them afterwards on his stall. Specialising in nineteen thirties and forties items, Tem cherishes a vintage pair of sunglasses with mirror-reflective lenses and gold-plated frames in mint condition with their original case, a movie star accessory that can be yours for the right price.
This friendly bearded fellow in the Guernsey is Steve Sorrell who has been buying and selling furniture from his home in West Sussex for thirty years, originally dealing in Art Deco, now he sells anything quirky. Steve became passionate when I asked him about the market, clearly relishing the social event as the highlight of his week, he broke into a big smile, waving his arms and declared with magnanimous enthusiasm “It’s the best antique market in London, without a doubt. There’s a great buzz here and it just keeps getting better and better!”
This flirty lady modelling her pink silk bag is Annie Curtis Jones who has enjoyed a distinguished career as a costume designer for films for over thirty years. A popular and highly respected figure among the traders, Annie confided, “I love the market, I like to bring different stuff every week. I come here when I’m not working on a project and you meet all sorts of remarkable people.” Recently Annie has been making cushions and bags using her vast collection of antique silk scarves. Every one is unique and they are exclusive to Paul Smith and Liberty but you can buy them direct from Annie at her stall.
This guy showing off his spiffy jacket is Jeremy Freedman, photographer, market trader and all round charismatic entrepreneur. Jeremy trawled the charity shops of the Lake District while he was there on assignment last month to top up his stock of “tut and tat, schmutter and antiques.” I was more interested in an early edition of Babar than the vintage soda syphon, complete with a stack of refill canisters that Jeremy wanted to sell me, but when he described it as “a Summer of soda” it suddenly became an enticing proposition.
All photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
Alex Preston, novelist & banker
Alex Preston is a natural writer who speaks in wonderful long sentences with all the profusion of his adverbs, adjectives and subclauses in their correct places, and as a result I found myself struggling to keep pace with his easy eloquence as I scribbled frantically in my scruffy little notebook during our conversation over coffee at St John. In his choice of dual professions, Alex presents something of Jekyll & Hyde identity because while our bankers are the pariahs of the age, our novelists have always been one of the glories of the nation. Consequently, I was thankful to be having a conversation with Alex Preston the novelist.
There are many noble precedents, including Kenneth Grahame author of “The Wind in the Willows” who was secretary to the Bank Of England and T.S.Eliot who worked for Lloyds Bank, while Alex also cites Wallace Stevens who was President of the Hertford Life Insurance Company and Franz Kafka who dealt in insurance too, though I am not sure that the life of Kafka, in spite of the brilliance of his vision, is one that many would choose to emulate.
Alex is enjoying a productive Spring with his first novel This Bleeding City published last month and his second baby born on the night of the publisher’s launch party. He looked sprightly in an extremely well-cut suit as he arrived at St John and I was flattered that someone might choose to take time out from the world of high finance to speak with me. Living in Spitalfields, the City of London is on my doorstep and yet the financial world remains a blank enigma that I witness whenever I walk over to the Borough Market and find myself wandering like a ghost among the men in suits hurrying with such inexplicable purpose between the glittering palaces.“The city is designed for the abstractions it pedals,” explained Alex, “When you walk out onto a trading floor, you are walking from the real world into an abstract world of numbers that is deliberately unknowable.”
I was not any wiser. So I asked Alex how, like Charlie the protagonist of his novel, he came to work in the City after studying English Literature at Oxford under the celebrated liberal critic and writer Tom Paulin. Ten years on, Alex can admit, “I had my head turned,” with the candid qualification,“It’s ridiculous to make these decisions at twenty.” Alex’s novel is a testament to the seductive power of the City, a tale of an intelligent young man from a middle class background encountering an elevated milieu at university and then following his peers into the ambivalent world of finance. Somehow I was expecting a glittering tale of ambition and greed like “American Psycho” or “Bright Lights, Big City,” but Charlie in “This Bleeding City” has more in common with Leonard Bast the young clerk in “Howards End,” with a fragile emotionalism that retains the reader’s sympathy even as you question the character’s choices.
For a few years, Alex lived in Wilkes St and worked for ABN Ambro in the glossy new building on the site of the old Spitalfields Market. Now that he lives in Kensal Green, he looks back to this time in Spitalfields when he and his housemates celebrated their birthdays in the private bar at The Golden Heart, “I loved living here so much, nowhere else in the city does the fun life come up against the work life so closely. From my office I could look down onto Spitalfields Market and see people coming out of The Golden Heart. It was galling to be here when the crash came.”
“Having things fall apart among people who were so overworked, and putting in such long hours yet who had so little vocation or feeling for their jobs, combined with the necessity to blank out all the finer things, no time for their friends or family, meant that the fragile self-fulfilling optimism which existed turned to panic and despair very quickly.” said Alex darkly, evoking the psychology of the crash that he witnessed at first hand, in one of his famously erudite sentences.
As we walked past the ABN Ambro building where Alex saw it happen, I reminded Alex that this is also where they filmed the car commercial in which a lost young man carries the contents of his desk out in a box that breaks scattering his possessions onto the pavement, prompting him to break into song affirming the power of positive thinking, before he gets into his shiny new car and drives off to the Highlands of Scotand. Whenever I see this commercial, I always wonder what he is going to do when he reaches the wilderness. In confirmation of this notion, Alex pointed out the two shops selling bicycles and camping gear that he always noticed, strategically positioned directly opposite the entrance of ABN Ambro in case any employees should require a quick escape.
Beneath the bright surface of Alex’s intellect I detect a quiet melancholy that feels a little strange to discern in someone who has achieved success early in life. I think Alex lived a lot between the ages of twenty and thirty, years coinciding with the disappointing first decade of this new century and colouring his vision with an elegiac tinge that belies his youthful nature. As we walked through the narrow streets from Spitalfields towards the Bank of England to take the photographs, Alex talked about Kenneth Grahame both as a very successful banker and equally as someone who needed to explore that other world of Ratty and the whimsical riverbank characters in Cookham, far from the city – contrasting Grahame’s career with Eliot as the poet forced to do something grubby. Hearing Alex’s internal debate dramatised in this way, I was compelled to ask the obvious question, “Are you a novelist or a banker?”
Graciously acceding to my impertinence with a shy grin, Alex replied, “At dinner parties I am a novelist rather than a banker.” In a city as expensive as London, it can be a struggle to make a living as a novelist unless you are bestselling author, especially when you have a wife, two babies and a family home in Kensal Green to support, but with “This Bleeding City” creeping up the WHSmith top ten in Liverpool St Station I hope it will not be too long before the Dr Jekyll can triumph over the Mr Hyde in Alex’s career, even if he spends the rest of his writing life exploring their struggle within his own psyche.
