Justin Piers Gellatly, baker and pastry chef
One day last week, I took a walk through the empty streets of Spitalfields in the early morning before the schoolchildren were even about. I slipped in through the tall double doors of St John Bread & Wine in Commercial St to meet Mr Gellatly, my bakery hero – the towering genius responsible for the delicious sourdough bread that I have been enjoying daily for the last couple of years, not to mention the extraordinary custard tarts and doughnuts too.
Justin joined St John ten years ago as a chef under the tutelage of Fergus Henderson and discovered his aptitude for baking while covering when members of the baking team took holidays. As a result of his talent, he has now risen -in the manner of his own baking- to become Head Baker and Pastry Chef for both St John restaurants or, as he terms it, in charge of “all things sweet and yeasty.” He speaks of Fergus Henderson, the founder of St John, in glowing terms, explaining Fergus’ ability to create a dedicated team based upon mutual respect. At St John you will hear none of the angry people shouting and swearing common to many West End kitchens, and he ascribes the enduring success of the restaurant to the resulting high quotient of long-term permanent staff who are able to give of their best in an attitude-free environment.
The same cannot be said for the wild yeast that Justin uses for the sourdough bread – my particular favourite. Apparently, it is not cultivated and as a consequence can be problematic. “It doesn’t behave very well” admits Justin who is familiar with emergency phone calls in the middle of the night when the yeast doesn’t prove. “It is very sensitive to heat and cold,” he confides in defence of the capricious micro-organism. Though when I question him further about the alchemy of baking he reveals an unsentimental nature, emphasising the discipline of a process that requires scientific exactitude. Baking is clearly both an art and a science too.
In spite of his fresh features, Justin claims his working hours are midnight to midnight, sometimes working twenty four hours at a stretch. Moving back and forth between both restaurants, he has four pastry chefs and two bakers working under him to create the baking and all the desserts. “I love what I do” he declares and anyone who has read my review of his doughnuts will know this is a statement with which I concur, I love what he does too. In fact, I could not resist an invitation to spend a night reporting to you live on the bakers at work, early next year.
Justin confirmed a rumour that one of his colleagues was spotted making vast quantities of mincemeat in preparation for the festive season and agreed to set some aside for me from the very first batch on 1st December. Justin’s mum created the recipe and, in an act of pure altruism, I shall be writing up the mince pies in detail for you on 2nd December.
A sense of proportion
In “Mrs Dalloway” when an unhappy young woman takes her shell-shocked husband to a clinic, the psychiatrist declares that he is not mad, he just lacks a sense of proportion. Virginia Woolf is generally considered a grim heavyweight novelist but personally I have always found her work irresistably comic and full of exhilarating caustic irony, of which this incident I quote here is a prime example.
I bought this copper Roman coin in the Spitalfields Market in 1997 to remind me to keep a sense of proportion. It only cost £2.30 and, with the millenium approaching, I wanted a thousand-year-old item to give me a sense of chronological perspective. When I took it to the British Museum, they told me it was in fact fourth century, made here at the time of the Emperor Arcadius and of very little value. You can see Arcadius’ head on the coin in the picture above, he was among the earliest emperors to rule from Constantinople, a minor emperor. I was delighted to learn that on the reverse is Minerva, the goddess of wisdom – this suited my aspiration well.
Most interesting, was to discover that the piercing of the coin at the back of the head was original. The custom was for lovers to wear them as tokens of affection, keepsakes. Since then, I have worn it round my neck every day on a leather thong and never ceased to wonder who wore it here in Britain all those years ago and what was the story. This coin and I have now have innumerable stories that I would like to tell the original owner. I was wearing it in New York on 11th September 2001 and again in Holborn on 7th July 2005. There was the time I stepped from the ocean on a remote beach at the western end of Cuba in 1998 to discover the wallet containing my money, cards, passport and tickets was stolen. The only coin I had left was this one.
At the time I bought the coin in the market, they were excavating the Roman cemetery in Spitalfields that now lies beneath the new development. The antiquarian John Stow described how in 1576, in a brick-field near the Spital-churchyard, there were discovered Roman funeral urns, containing copper coins of Claudius, Vespasian, Antoninus Pius and Trajan. It is possible that my coin was from that cemetery.
In 2006, I added the two gold wedding rings that my mother had worn up until her death. One was her own wedding ring and the other was her mother’s. I have never worked out which is which but since my grandfather was a bank manager whereas my father was an engineer working on the shop floor, I assume that the thicker one was my grandmother’s and the other was my mother’s.
These rings are a powerful reminder of how I came to be, my personal relationship to the passage of time as I understand it, through the succession of generations in my family. Wearing the rings beside the Roman coin affords a broader perspective, setting family history against the span of history itself. The function of these keepsakes is to help me hold these thoughts in mind, to sustain me in the constant human struggle to maintain a sense of proportion.
The worshipful company of butchers
Here you see a happy bunch of butchers who had been let out from behind the counter for a day and were eager to set out on their annual bicycle tour around London as part of the Lord Mayor’s Parade last Saturday. The Worshipful Company of Butchers (first recorded in London 957 AD, arms granted 1540) were just one of an astounding array of guilds in the parade, dating back to medieval times, and representing all the trades and professions of the ancient City. And then you also have the City schools, various regimental bands and other parts of the armed services (including some just returned from Iraq), the Salvation Army, the Pearly Kings and Queens, Peter Blake’s Art Bus, the farmers of Bridgenorth, citizens of Kidwelly and the Two Fat Ladies on motorbikes – not the mention the Lord Mayor himself in his distinctly Disney carriage followed by all the other City dignitaries in smaller carriages.
You may wonder why I chose to photograph the butchers when I had so many guilds to choose from. The truth is that they came to me – as I was freezing at the kerbside – with hot sausages that I could not resist. Then I was captivated by the strangely realistic inflatable rack of lamb that you see below, for which four squaddies had been assigned to prevent it sailing away through the City in the gale force winds anticipated that afternoon.
From henceforth, I shall make a point to photograph all the other Guilds for you systematically over the next twenty six Lord Mayor’s Parades, so you may now expect this as a regular feature of the third week in November each year, for the next quarter century at least.
Seen at the Lord Mayor's parade
After the heavy overnight downpour following by the early morning thunderstorm on Saturday, it seemed miraculous when the clouds parted, the rain ceased and the sky appeared, enabling me to walk over from Spitalfields to the City of London to catch the Lord Mayor’s Parade as it assembled. As I turned the corner into Gresham St, I met Jacqueline Brown and Liz Jarman with their coach and horses waiting to pick up some City worthies from the Guildhall. When I admired the fine pair of horses with their attractive mottled coats, Liz explained that the mottling is because they are still young, these horses are born entirely black and gradually turn completely white.
Further down Gresham St where it meets Lothbury at the back of the Bank of England, I encountered the gentlemen of the Portsoken Militia founded to protect the City of London in 1798. Today they were here to guard the Mayor but John Mead and Matthew Ring did me the honour of posing to show off their dashing uniforms for the photograph below. I learnt that the cloth for these uniforms came from the same company who supplied it in Napoleonic times.
Then, as the parade moved off, the downpour began again and I ran home to Spitalfields for a hot cup of tea, grateful that I did not have to spend the day parading around the city in the pouring rain. Later, as the torrent outside my window increased ridiculously, I could not help but think of those more than six thousand hardy participants in the parade which by the end must have resembled a sad procession of drowned rats.
Columbia Road Market 12
The clouds were clearing from the sky this morning and there was even a rainbow as I negotiated the puddles and fallen leaves on my way to the market. There was an especially deep puddle under the railway bridge which sent a shower of dirty water onto the narrow pavement every time a car passed. So I had to wait my moment and make a quick dash to avoid getting my feet wet.
This is now the season of the year when trading becomes roulette with the weather for the stall holders. They pack up their plants in the dark, drive through the rain and stand for hours outdoors in the cold, all in the hope that the weather will not drive away the customers and send them home empty-handed after their hard work. It must be soul destroying, and there are always a few empty places in the market at this time, where stall holders just cannot countenance the risk of a wasted day at the expense of so much effort.
Today I found these autumn flowering lilies in a delicate barely perceptible shade of shell pink. Schizostylis (Pink Princess) is a perennial and shade tolerant, so I bought two pots for five pounds and I should like them to take over a corner of my garden. Plants that manage to flower and thrive, putting forward flowers in the bare garden of autumn and winter, are particularly close to my heart. There is a poignancy about them that gets me and it tells me that at heart I am a winter gardener.
A cat on wheels in Whitechapel
As I was on my way back to Spitalfields after chatting with Tyrone at the Genesis Cinema, I came across Oscar the Russian Blue outside Budgens in Whitechapel while his owner had stepped inside to get a few things. Never before have I seen a cat in a buggy like this, but it was a miserable wet day and as I stood shivering in my damp clothes, I could not help thinking that Oscar looked quite comfortable in his red Santa suit trimmed with white – lounging there in a decorated carriage like an over-indulged Turkish sultan. After a few moments, Anne Smith, his adoring owner, came out of the shop and we enjoyed a brief conversation as we made our way together through Whitechapel Market. That is when I learnt he is a thoroughbred and she explained that he got his name, Oscar, because it was apparent early on that he was a natural winner. A piece of logic which I could hardly contradict from the visible facts. Then she asked me the name of my cat, Mr Pussy, and when I told her she shivered with disappointment, stopping in her tracks. “Oh poor thing!” she exclaimed, “Couldn’t you think of anything better than that?” Chastened by her remark, I did not know how to reply. So to cover the silence, Anne told me of her other cat Cruella, equally named for its natural tendency and which she had wisely left at home.
St Pauls Cathedral graffiti
Often I step into the porch at St Pauls Cathedral to pause for a moment when I am passing on my way, walking between Spitalfields and the West End. Sometimes I am sheltering from the rain, sometimes I stand and recall the birdseed seller in the magnificent opening shot of “Mary Poppins”, sitting on the steps of St Pauls singing “Tuppence a bag” – but mostly the reason I take a pause here is to marvel at the eighteenth century graffiti.
It can take thirty years or so for marble from a quarry to harden to its final consistency, and this explains how the graffiti of eighteenth century London has become preserved in the marble surround to the central door of Wren’s cathedral. Here you will find innumerable names overlaid upon each other with dates from the latter half of the eighteenth century, many inscribed in an elegant flowing cursive script. It reminds me of the work of Cy Twombly.
Some inscriptions are higher than the human arm could naturally reach and so I surmise that people must have stood upon boxes or each other’s shoulders to incise these names with iron nails or pocket knives, up above the rest. My particular favourite piece of graffiti is the bird with the bald human head pictured below. I like to think this might be an apprentice’s caricature of some pompous overweight employer.
Mostly, people go in and out of the cathedral through the smaller doors on the either side of the porch. The tall central door is only open on special occasions, so few ever notice this hidden graffiti, written all those years ago with such grace by Londoners long-forgotten. It takes a while to accustom your eye to deciphering these feint calligraphic lines that are almost unphotographable. For nearly twenty years now, I have been going back to look and each time some new detail becomes apparent. There is much more than I have been able to show you in these two pictures, so next time you are passing, be sure to take a moment to pause in the porch, take look for yourself and wonder.
