Alf Morris, tube disaster survivor
Yesterday, I met with Alf Morris at Nico’s Cafe next to Bethnal Green Tube Station. Alf is one of the few remaining survivors of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster, when one hundred and seventy-three people died in the single worst civilian calamity of World War II in Britain. No bombs fell, the casualties were the result of a series of tragic circumstances, when a crowd of three hundred people mistook the sound of anti-aircraft rockets for bombs dropping and stampeded into the narrow stairwell at the tube entrance, falling over each other in panic like helpless human dominos.
For over fifty years, Alf carried his story without even telling his wife or children, but in 2007, when he was approached by the people who want to create a memorial to this forgotten calamity, Alf broke his silence. The result is an extraordinary eye witness testimony which he dictated to me and it is my privilege to publish Alf’s compelling story here in his own words.
“On 3rd March 1943 at a quarter to eight, in our home at 106 Old Ford Rd, the radio went off, as it did every time there was an air raid. My father, Alfred George Morris, insisted that me and my aunt, Lilian Hall, go to the tube to shelter. As we crossed Victoria Park Sq, the air-raid siren sounded. In Bethnal Green Gardens, between the Toy Museum and St John’s Church, there was a radio controlled searchlight that came on. This meant the searchlight had found an aircraft, me and my aunt knew this from other nights. So we ran across Victoria Park Sq to reach Roman Rd (which was then called Green St), then across the road to the entrance to Bethnal Green Tube and started down the steps.
There was a wooden hoarding and a narrow entrance with just a twenty-five watt bulb, but we knew where we were going because we had been there many times and there were handrails at each side. Me and Lilian, we started walking down the centre of the staircase and everything was as normal. The air-raid had stopped. We continued on down and as we got halfway down, the rocket guns in Victoria Park fired at the aircraft above. There was a deafening noise as they flew over. At that time, two buses arrived at the number eight bus stop and they were full of people. Above the noise, somebody shouted ‘There’s bombs! There’s bombs! There’s bombs! They’re bombing us!’ And as they did everybody ran to the entrance.
The rush of people separated me and my aunt. I was pushed to the left and my aunt was pushed to the right. I was thirteen years old. As I was pushed downwards, I was carried down. I got to the third step from the bottom and I was pushed up against the rail with people falling from above. They fell on top of one another. They were all screaming for their mothers and fathers. I couldn’t see my aunt and I couldn’t move my legs because the people were all pushed up against them. I was calling for my aunt but she had her own problems, she was stuck too.
And then, on the landing at the bottom of the staircase, there was a lady air raid warden, her name was Mrs Chumbley. She could see me calling and crying. She put her arms across the people who were down and the first thing she did was grab my hair, and I screamed because the pain was tremendous, but she could not move me. So she reached further over the people and put her hands under my arms and pulled me out like I was a bag of rubbish, and I started to move and I came out.
When she pulled me, I must have stepped on several of the bodies, she pulled me over these people. Then she stood me on the landing, grabbed my collar and said, ‘You go downstairs and you say nothing of what has happened here.’ She had a very dominating voice. Then I walked away from her and descended the escalator, which was not working because the station was still under construction and when the war began they ceased working on it.
At the bottom of the escalator, there was a big steel door. They pulled the door open and as I went in they asked why I was crying but I said nothing. I walked down to my bunk, and I sat there and cried. Ten minutes later, my aunt came down. They pulled her out, and she had left her coat and shoes in the crush. Her stockings were torn, and she was black and blue down one side. We got some tea in the canteen and settled down but we were worried about my mum, who had gone to another shelter with my sister who was a babe in arms at the time.
Around nine thirty, three people came walking along the tunnel, a policeman, an air raid warden and a fireman who had climbed down the shaft at Carpenters Sq next to Bancroft Rd. You could hear their footsteps approaching and people were asking why they came through the tunnel. But no-one said anything because there were fifteen hundred people in the shelter and we didn’t want panic. It quietened down at ten thirty when we went to bed but I didn’t sleep much because I was so worried.
The next morning I came up around seven o’ clock and when I walked up the stairs there were piles of shoes and all the steps had been washed down. I got home at seven thirty but no-one knew how bad the tragedy was at this time. I was very pleased to see my mum and sister, my mum told me when she heard the guns she thought it was bombs so she ran into the shelter under the catholic church and when the all clear sounded at eight thirty in the evening she went home.
Just before I went to school, Lilian Trotter used to bring her seven year old daughter Vera round and Vera and me would go to school together. But that morning Lilian Trotter didn’t show. I waited till nine before I left for school. At school, there were so many children missing out of the class. The teachers asked, ‘Where are they?’ I said, ‘There’s been something happened at Bethnal Green Tube.’ When school finished at four, I went home but Lilian and Vera had still not arrived. Their uncle asked my dad where they were. They’d all heard rumours. You wasn’t allowed to talk about what happened.
My dad was very level-headed. I thought a lot of my dad. He said to my mother, ‘I’m going to look round the hospitals.’ He went to the Bethnal Green Hospital, then the Hackney Rd Children’s Hospital and the Marmaid Hospital. They was all laid in the different mortuaries. So then he realised there had been a terrible tragedy. He found Lilian and Vera. Vera could not be recognised she was so mutilated, her face was crushed. The way he recognised her was because he had taken a nail out of her shoe two weeks before the accident. She was unrecognisable. That went for most of the bodies that were pulled out from there. All those people I heard crying for their mothers and fathers, gradually getting less and less and no-one could help them. It was terrible.
When my father came home and told my mother Elizabeth, he sat on the kitchen steps and cried like a baby. That was the only time I ever saw my father break down. We accepted that Lil and Vera were dead, and then we carried on as best we could because we thought there might be another raid that night. When we went to line up for the shelter, newspaper reporters were asking us what happened but we were instructed to say nothing. This is how it was covered up.
And we went down into the shelter and gradually it got around that one hundred and seventy-three people had died, sixty-two of whom were children.”
As Alf dictated to me in Nico’s Cafe, one sentence at a time, I could see he was reliving the events and describing what he saw precisely. Paradoxically, since Alf never spoke of it for over fifty years, the story retains absolute clarity in his telling. He has carried the experience itself and it has not become supplanted in his mind by the repeated narrative of the events. I was touched to be there with him having our private conversation (learning of these big events that once happened so close at hand in Bethnal Green), amid the banal public clamour of the steamy cafe. I found it impossible not to warm to this open-hearted man still struggling with the experience today. Time breeds indifference amongst the general populace yet brings Alf no solace. He is the solitary guardian of his story, lucky to survive but deeply unlucky to become part of a tragedy he can never escape. Watching him bring the events into the present tense, as we sat with our faces just inches apart, I could see the thirteen year old boy of 1943 still present in Alf today.
Now he has unburdened his lonely secret, the troubled emotions Alf carried all these years have come to the surface, “Inside me I am bitter because all these people died and no-one recognises it even after all this time.” he reveals. Alf wants a memorial to those who were killed that night in those unforgettable minutes while he was trapped under the bodies before he was rescued, this is the moral cause he has embraced to channel his grief. He is a passionate man, carrying raw feelings, yet although he describes himself as bitter, Alf revealed a warm human nature to me. Telling me how a recent newspaper feature brought him to meet Suzanne Lane, the grand-daughter of his saviour (who knew nothing of her grandmother’s heroism until she learnt it from Alf ), he remembers Mrs Chumbley, the air raid warden, with great respect and affection.
“She stood at the top of the escalator in a blue smock. She was a tall woman and she’d point at you and say ‘Stop running!’ or ‘Shut Up!’ and you’d do it. She scared everyone but when it came to this incident, she was a true godsend.”
Mrs Chumbley, heroine of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster.
Lilian Trotter and her daughter Vera.
Alf is one of the prime movers in the Stairway to Heaven project to raise money for the memorial to the victims of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster. In the next month, there is the launch of a book of survivors’ testimonies, a play reading and service of remembrance on 3rd March in Bethnal Green. Alf asked me to publish his phone number here, so anyone who would like to help may call him direct 07767402781
Paul Gardner’s collection
You will recall that I wrote about Paul Gardner, the fourth generation paper bag seller, recently. Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen is the longest established family business in Spitalfields, trading in the same building for one hundred and forty years. Yesterday, I went back to Paul’s shop at 149 Commercial St to photograph some of the unique collection of artifacts that have accumulated there since his great-grandfather James Gardner first opened in 1870, trading as scalemakers. We took down some things from the walls and photographed them on the floor, we arranged other items on the worn counter-top and I stood upon Paul’s chair to take my pictures. Let me say, both Paul and his customers were extremely gracious, continuing their transactions and buying their bags as usual, politely disregarding the morning’s photographic mayhem.
Paul told me that if he were a paper bag, he would be a brown paper bag because they are his bestsellers – multi-purpose bags, and the ones he has made most money out of over the years. So it is entirely appropriate that when Lucinda Rogers drew this portrait of Paul in his shop a few years back, she drew it on brown paper. Now it hangs in pride of place high up on the wall behind the counter.
Coming upon the artifacts pictured below in a museum would be intriguing but not surprising. In a museum they would be removed from life and arranged. But the only arrangement you see below was created for these photos. Discovering these items still remaining in the living working place where they belong is enthralling in a different way. In Paul’s shop they retain their full functional quality as objects that were once in use here (the coin tray and Oxo tin are still in use), now acquiring an intoxicating poetic meaning as the relics of the three antecedents who pursued the same trade in this place where Paul works today. Quite simply, these are the things that James, Bertie and Roy left behind, and their presence lingers in these everyday possessions as the evidence of their working lives and as evocations of the world they knew. Today, Paul is his predecessors’ unselfconscious living representative and the custodian of their stuff. I do not think Paul thinks twice about his wooden coin tray that is worn by four generations of use, unless someone points it out to him. And there is something profoundly beautiful about this.
You will recognise the style of the price labels from the one which Paul was holding up in my portrait of him. I love the varieties of apples and pears specified here, Comice, Ripe Williams, Dunn’s Seedlings, Choice Worcesters and Ellison’s Orange, names as lyrical as a Betjeman verse. Equally, there is a powerful magic to the simple phrase “morning gathered” that fills my mind with images of dawn in the orchards, though I do wonder what kind of world it was that could be enticed by the pale allure of “Worthing grown”.
Most fascinating to me was the Day Book begun by James Gardner on 1st January 1892 with some bold calligraphic flourishes. We all recognise that auspicious sense of possibility when you write your name to inaugurate a new book, revealing the future as a sequence of blank pages, ripe with potential. James used this sturdy book with fine marbled endpapers to record all the different East End greengrocers where he serviced the scales on a regular basis. James’ elegant italic hand can readily be deciphered to read many familiar addresses in Spitalfields. It is remarkable that he could maintain such poised handwriting when you consider how many customers James visited in a single day sometimes, though as business increased through the life of this ledger, his handwriting becomes hastier and more excited.
There was so much more I could show you, the family bible “Won by the Bugler James Gardner of the 1st Tower Hamlets rifle Brigade for shooting. Presented by Lady Jane Taylor, December 21st 1882”, with the entire family tree over five generations (revealing James’ year of birth as 1847 and his origin as Thaxted in Essex), the catalogues of scales, the insurance certificates, various family military cards from the different wars, and the modern receipt books with their blue carbon pages that end in 1968 on the day Paul’s father Roy Gardner died – all the pamphlets and pieces of paper that add up to four generations of trading for Gardners.
As you know, Paul Gardner’s business is now under threat as the landlord threatens to raise his annual rent from £15000 to £25000 in June. For a business with a small turnover, this is an untenable increase. Meanwhile, hundreds of the smallest businesses and market traders, that are the basis of the economy in East London, rely upon Paul – because no-one else is prepared to sell such small quantities of bags at a time. I am relieved to report that he has commenced renegotiation of the increase and we have to hope that Messrs Tarn & Tarn, the managing agents, recognise their wider social responsibility to the neighbourhood in their handling of Gardners, because I am sure they would not wish to become responsible for sending Spitalfields’ oldest family business to the wall.
I never want to see Paul Gardner’s collection in a museum, I want to see it stay where it belongs in his shop, scattered among all the different stacks of coloured paper bags, and hidden among the tapes and tags, to be discovered on shelves and racks, behind the modest green facade of this celebrated business in Commercial St.
Dickens in Spitalfields 3, in the streets
In the first installments of Charles Dickens’ article “Spitalfields,” published in his weekly journal “Household Words” on 5th April 1851, we accompanied Dickens and his sub-editor W.H. Wills to a silk warehouse where they met Mr Broadelle, the manager. In this third installment, they set out with Mr Broadelle as their guide to explore the narrow streets of Spitalfields, illustrated by this engraving of Pelham St (now Woodseer St) off Brick Lane, lined with weavers’ cottages, distinguished by the long windows of the weaver’s lofts upon the top floor. Let us hurry to keep up with, Dickens, Wills and Broadelle as they make their way…
From fourteen to seventeen thousand looms are contained in from eleven to twelve thousand houses – although at the time at which we write, not more than nine to ten thousand are at work. The average number of houses per acre in the parish is seventeen; and the average per acre for all London being no more than five and a fifth, Spitalfields contains the densest population, perhaps, existing. Within its small boundaries, not less than eighty-five thousand human beings are huddled.
“They are,” says Mr Broadelle, “so interlaced, and bound together, by debt, marriage, and prejudice, that, despite many inducements to remove to the country establishments of the masters they already serve, they prefer dragging on a miserable existence in their present abodes. Spitalfields was the Necropolis of Roman London; the Registrar- General’s returns show that it is now the grave of modern Manufacturing London. The average mortality is higher in this Metropolitan district than in any other.”
“And what strange streets they are, Mr Broadelle! These high gaunt houses, all window on the upper story, and that window all small diamond panes, are like the houses in some foreign town, and have no trace of London in them – except its soot, which is indeed a large exception. It is as if the Huguenots had brought their streets along with them, and dropped them down here.
And what a number of strange shops, that seem to be open for no earthly reason, having nothing to sell! A few halfpenny bundles of firewood, a few halfpenny kites, halfpenny battledores, and farthing shuttle-cocks, form quite an extensive stock in trade here.
Eatables are so important in themselves, that there is no need to set them off. Be the loaves never so coarse in texture, and never so unattractively jumbled together in the baker’s dirty window, they are loaves and that is the main thing. Liver, lights, and sheep’s-heads, freckled sausages, and strong black puddings, are sufficiently enticing without decoration. The mouths of Spitalfields will water for them, howsoever raw and ugly they be.
Is its intellectual appetite sharp-set, I wonder, for that wolfish literature of highly-coloured show-bill and rampant wood-cut, filling the little shop-window over the way, and covering half the house?
Do the poor weavers, by the dim light of their lamps, unravel those villanous fabrics, and nourish their care-worn hearts on the last strainings of the foulest filth of France?”
“I can’t say,” replies Mr Broadelle; “we have but little intercourse with them in their domestic lives. They are jealous and suspicious. We have tried Mechanic’s Institutions, but they have not come to much.”
“Is there any school here?”
“Yes. Here it is.”
An old house, hastily adapted to the purpose, with too much darkness in it and too little air, but no want of scholars. An infant school on the ground floor, where the infants, as usual, drowsily rubbing their noses, or poking their fore-fingers into the features of other infants on exploratory surveys. Intermediate school above. At the top of it all, in a large long light room (occupying the width of two dwelling-houses, as the room made for the weaving, in the old style of building, does) the ‘Ragged School.’
“Heaven send that all these boys may not grow up to be weavers here, Mr Broadelle, nor all the girls grow up to marry them!”
“We don’t increase much, now” he says, “We go for soldiers, or we go to sea, or we take to something else, or we emigrate perhaps.”
Now, for a sample of the parents of these children…
It seems incredible to imagine eighty-five thousand people living in Spitalfields a hundred and fifty years ago, and surprising to recognise that our neighbourhood was a much more densely populated place in the past than it is today. “Ragged School” was the name given to primitive schools set up by private individuals and organisations to teach slum children. Dickens was passionate about the movement and wrote about it many times.
When I read of the coarse bread, liver, lights, sheep’s heads, freckled sausages and strong black puddings on sale, I thought Fergus Henderson might be quite fascinated to explore Spitalfields with Charles Dickens and would certainly contradict Dickens’ dismissal of these “raw and ugly “foods.
In the next installment, we shall follow Dickens and Wills further as they climb the steps to a weaver’s loft and learn at first hand of life of a family who support themselves through the weaving industry.
This engraving, kindly supplied by Tower Hamlets Local History Collection, shows the Ragged School in Georges Yard, St Jude’s, Whitechapel, as pictured by The Illustrated London News in 1859.
One Hundred Penguin Books
I found these first hundred Penguin books in my attic over the weekend, as I was unpacking a box that has been sealed since I moved in. With their faded orange, indigo, green, violet and pink spines they make a fine display and I am fond of this collection that took me so many years to amass.
When I left college, I wrote to companies all over the country seeking work and asking if they would give me an interview if I came to see them. Then I travelled around on the cheap, through a combination of buses, trains and hitchhiking, to visit all these places – the industrial towns of the North and the Cathedral cities of the South – staying in bus stations, youth hostels and seedy B&Bs, and going along filled with hope to interviews that were almost all fruitless. It was the first time I encountered the distinctive regional qualities of Britain and in each city, to ameliorate the day of my interview, I took the opportunity to visit the museums, civic art galleries, cathedrals and castles that distinguish these places. Arriving at each destination, I would consult the directory and make a list of the second-hand booksellers, then mark them on a tourist map and, after the job interview, I would visit every one. There were hundreds of these scruffy dusty old shops with proprietors who were commonly more interested in the book they were reading behind the counter than in any customer. Many were simply junk shops with a few books piled in disorder on some shelves in the back or stacked in cardboard boxes on the pavement outside.
In these shabby old shops, I sometimes came upon Penguin books with a podgy penguin on the cover, quite in contrast to the streamlined bird familiar from modern editions. These early titles, dating from 1935 had a clean bold typography using Eric Gill’s classic sans typeface and could be bought for just twenty or thirty pence. So, in the manner of those cards you get in bubblegum packets, I began to collect any with numbers up to one hundred. In doing so, I discovered a whole library of novelists from the nineteen thirties and reading these copies passed the time pleasantly on my endless journeys. In particular, I liked the work of Eric Linklater whose playful novel “Poet’s Pub” was number three, Compton Mackenzie whose novel of the Edwardian vaudeville “Carnival” was ten, Vita Sackville-West whose novel “The Edwardians” was sixteen, T.F.Powys whose “Mr Weston’s Good Wine” was seventy-three and Sylvia Townsend Warner whose novel “Lolly Willowes” was eighty-four. After these, I read all the other works of these skillful and unjustly neglected novelists.
Eventually I found a job in Perthshire and then subsequently in Inverness, and from here I made frequent trips to Glasgow, which has the best second-hand bookshops in Scotland, to continue my collection. And whenever I made the long rail journey down South, I commonly stopped off to spend a day wandering round Liverpool or Durham or any of the places I had never been, all for the purpose of seeking old Penguins.
The collection was finally completed when I moved back to London and discovered that my next door neighbour Christine was the daughter of Allen Lane who founded Penguin books. She was astonished to see my collection and I was amazed to see the same editions scattered around her house. From Christine, I learnt how her father Allen was bored one day on Exeter St David’s Station (a place familiar to me), changing trains on the way to visit his godmother Agatha Christie. When he searched the bookstall, he could not find anything to read and decided to start his own company publishing cheap editions of good quality books. I presume he did not know that, if he had been there half a century earlier, he could have bought a copy of Thomas Hardy’s first published novel “Desperate Remedies”, because Exeter St David’s was where Hardy experienced that moment no writer can ever forget, of first seeing their book on sale.
I do not think my collection of Penguins is of any great value because they are of highly variable condition and not all are first editions, though every one predates World War II and they are of the uniform early design before the bird slimmed down. While I was collecting these, I thought that I was on a quest to build my career – a fancy that I walked away from, years later. Now these hundred Penguin books are the only evidence of my innocent tenacity to create a life for myself at that time.
Allen Lane’s idealistic conception, to use the mass market to promulgate good writing to the widest readership in cheap editions that anyone could afford, is one that I admire. And these first hundred are a fascinating range of titles, a snapshot of the British public’s reading tastes in the late thirties. Looking back, the search for all these books led me on a wonderful journey through Britain. If you bear in mind that I only found a couple in each city, then you will realise that my complete collection represents a ridiculously large number of failed job interviews in every corner of these islands. It was a job search than became a cultural tour and resulted in a stack of lovely old paperbacks. Now they sit on my shelf here in Spitalfields as souvenirs of all the curious places I never would have visited if it were not my wayward notion to scour the entire country to collect all the first hundred Penguins.
Columbia Road Market 22
The market was full of life early again this week with many more varieties of plants now on sale including Camellias and Witchhazel (Hamamellis) in flower, and tall Lemon trees hanging with Lemons, as well as lots of garden perennials sold as bare root plants. I was tempted by these as my garden looks entirely blasted and I am eager to bring it back to cultivation and life after the winter chills, but I am not quite ready to risk planting anything new yet.
Several stallholders showed their faces for the first time this year and I was especially pleased to welcome back Mick and Sylvia, the herbsellers, who have their nursery in Hainault and are highly respected stalwarts of Columbia Rd with their outstanding selection of herbs. I was impressed their fresh Mint (Mentha Spicata) plants, grown outdoors under nets, and I bought one Garden Mint for mint sauce and salads and one Moroccan Mint for tea. It cost me a fiver for the pair. I planted them in this pot (Garden Mint on the left Moroccan Mint on the right) on my kitchen window sill, which means I can bring them hastily inside if the temperatures should plunge again.
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.
