Judith Piepe In The East End
Only three tours left this year – Saturday 12th October, Saturday 20th November and Saturday 21st December.
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Peter Parker came across the remarkable figure of Judith Piepe (1920-2003) while researching ‘male vice’ in the East End for the second volume of his anthology Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-1967
Judith Piepe, 1966
In 1963, Stepney councillor and social worker Edith Ramsay was corresponding with a young priest called Kenneth Leech about her difficulties dealing with immigrants and homosexual men in the borough. He recommended that she get in touch with Judith Piepe, who lived in Dellow House just off Cable St, but had for many years worked with ‘male prostitutes in Soho’.
Judith was a well-known figure, not just for her social work but also because she befriended leading folk singers, including Bert Jansch, Al Stewart, Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, Peter Bellamy, and Simon & Garfunkel. She took her surname from her second husband, whom she married in England in 1951, but the details of her early life remain unclear, perhaps because it contained a good deal she wanted to forget.
She was born in Silesia (then part of Prussia, now in Poland). Her paternal grandfather was a wealthy Jewish financier, but her father, Fritz Sternberg, became a well-known Marxist economist. She was an only child, and 1926 moved with her father to Berlin, her mother – who may or not have been a French gypsy – having committed suicide three years earlier. When the Nazis came to power, Sternberg fled to Czechoslovakia, presumably leaving his thirteen-year-old daughter behind in someone’s care.
Judith was nevertheless taken hostage by the Gestapo, who imprisoned her for three months and tortured her in an attempt to find her father’s whereabouts. Yet Fritz seems to have taken little interest in his daughter, and after her release, she married briefly, then left Germany on her own, wandering around Europe without home or money for several years until she came to Switzerland where she studied for a doctorate in philology.
Shortly before the outbreak of war, Judith moved to the East End of London and found a job teaching at a girl’s school. She had been brought up an atheist but in 1946 she became a Christian and her faith guided the social work she had taken up. The church of St Anne’s, Soho, became her centre of operations, and it was here in 1967 that Kenneth Leech became an assistant priest and co-founded Centrepoint, the charity for the homeless.
Judith’s work revolved around ‘kids on the loose around Soho with nowhere to go, homosexual boys, kids on drugs’, all of whom she got to know by visiting the places where they congregated. In training she had been warned against becoming too involved with those she was trying to help, but she dismissed this as ‘a poisonous piece of teaching – complete rubbish’. ‘If I sat in an office looking respectable behind a desk they couldn’t come to me when they’re in difficulties,’ she said. ‘But because I spend my nights hanging about the clubs whether they are, they can talk to me. It is easier to help one’s friends than to help strangers. The kids know that I am fond of them – and they’re fond of me.’
Asked how young people recognized her as someone who could help them, she replied that it was a question of her past. ‘When one has been a refugee, knocking around Europe without a valid passport, without the right to stand on the ground where one stands or breathe the air one breathes, one is an outcast,’ she said. ‘When somebody has TB, after it has healed there are scars left which are visible to the x-ray machine. I’m no longer a refugee or an outcast, but the scars are there and outcasts have x-ray eyes.’ Young people, she believed, recognized something in her that made them feel she was one of them.
Recommending Judith to Edith Ramsay because of her counselling of rent boys, Leech had added that ‘her success and knowledge of this type of work is quite remarkable’. Indeed it was. Dismayed that many youths ‘had to prostitute themselves to airforce officers just to get a meal and shelter from the rain for the night’, she provided some of them with temporary accommodation in her spacious flat at 6 Dellow House. Here they might find themselves in the company of the famous folk singers for whom Piepe also provided beds when they were visiting London. It seems likely that it was staying in this mixed household that inspired the nineteen-year-old Al Stewart to write his song ‘Pretty Golden Hair’, which describes how a teenager drifts into homosexual prostitution.
Judith was drawn to folk music because she felt that it addressed the same social problems. She also realised that folk music was a way of reaching young people who would never ordinarily go to church, and she arranged for concerts to be held in the crypt of St Anne’s. ‘These troubadours of the 1960s sing to win your love for the unloved, the despised, the rejected,’ she said; their songs ‘are not particularly pretty, nor are they intended to be. But they are true, and the truth sets us free’.
Her suggestion that these songs ‘arose out of the situation in which I work’ was taken up in a 1966 episode of Meeting Point, BBC television’s series of documentaries on broadly religious themes. An interview with Judith about her work was juxtaposed with performances of such songs as Stewart’s ‘Pretty Golden Hair’ and Bert Jansch’s ‘Needle of Death’, which described heroin addiction.
Also featured was Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Blessed’, the lyrics of which – ‘Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on’ – echoed Judith’s beliefs. Paul Simon was a particular favourite, and in 1965 she was instrumental in his recording his first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook – perhaps through her partner Stephen Delft, a highly regarded maker and repairer of guitars, who was also a talented sound technician frequently employed at Abbey Rd studios. She also wrote the liner notes for the album, and the introduction and notes to the book of the same name.
She claimed that when Simon & Garfunkel became famous and were put up by their record company at a grand London hotel, they still preferred to stay with her in Dellow St. Judith tried her hand at writing lyrics herself, providing the words of ‘The Hungry Child’ a song for Peter Bellamy’s band The Young Tradition that appeared on their 1967 album So Cheerfully Round
She described Simon’s ‘I am a Rock’ as ‘an almost clinical description of isolation’, the kind of isolation from which she hoped to rescue young people. Particularly isolated, she felt, were homosexuals, who were ‘very much a despised and an outcast minority – probably the only minority in this country that are not yet equal before the law’.
That those who administered the law were not always as objective as they should be was demonstrated when two plain-clothes policemen asked her what she was doing in a café much frequented by rent boys. When she explained her mission, one policeman said: ‘Well, I suppose you mean well, but you’re wasting your time with this lot. These queers are nothing but animals and ought to be exterminated.’ She ‘blew up at him’, and after he had departed, ‘very red in the face’, his colleague said to her: ‘I don’t think you’re wasting your time. I think if there were more of you there’d be need for fewer of us.’ This was in 1966, and the law would change the following year.
Meeting Point ends with film of Judith striding though the dark streets in her stylish cloak and thigh-length boots to the accompaniment of Stephen Delft performing ‘Come Down Lord from Your Heaven’, a ‘Soho De Profundis’ they had composed together. The couple would eventually marry in 1981, after which they bade farewell to Soho and the East End and emigrated to New Zealand. Now chiefly remembered for her connections to the world of folk music, Judith Piepe should also be celebrated for her social work, particularly with young rent boys. So many were helped by this remarkable woman.
Dellow House, Cable St where Judith Piepe lived
St Anne’s, Soho, which was Judith Piepe’s centre of operations
Blessed
By Paul Simon
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
Blessed is the lamb whose blood flows
Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?
I got no place to go
I’ve walked around Soho for the last night or so
Ah, but it doesn’t matter, no
Blessed is the land and the kingdom
Blessed is the man whose soul belongs to
Blessed are the meth drinkers, pot sellers, illusion dwellers
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?
My words trickle down
From a wound that I have no intention to heal
Blessed are the stained glass, windowpane glass
Blessed is the church service, makes me nervous
Blessed are the penny rookers, cheap hookers, groovy lookers
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?
You may also like to read this earlier story by Peter Parker
The War on ‘Vice’ in the East End
The Gentle Author’s Writing Course
Spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Spitalfields, eat cakes freshly baked to historic recipes, enjoy delicious lunches catered by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog.
HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 1st-2nd February 2025
This course is suitable for writers of all levels of experience – from complete beginners to those who already have a blog and want to advance or refresh their approach.
We will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world and the opportunities it can deliver – writing newspaper and magazine articles, publishing books, talks, walks ann community campaigns.
SALIENT DETAILS
Courses will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 1st-2nd February, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.
Lunch, tea, coffee & cakes are catered by the Townhouse included within the course fee of £350.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on a course.
Please note we do not give refunds if you are unable to attend or if the course is postponed for reasons beyond our control.
Comments by students from courses tutored by The Gentle Author
“I highly recommend this creative, challenging and most inspiring course. The Gentle Author gave me the confidence to find my voice and just go for it!”
“Do join The Gentle Author on this Blogging Course in Spitalfields. It’s as much about learning/ appreciating Storytelling as Blogging. About developing how to write or talk to your readers in your own unique way. It’s also an opportunity to “test” your ideas in an encouraging and inspirational environment. Go and enjoy – I’d happily do it all again!”
“The Gentle Author’s writing course strikes the right balance between addressing the creative act of blogging and the practical tips needed to turn a concept into reality. During the course the participants are encouraged to share and develop their ideas in a safe yet stimulating environment. A great course for those who need that final (gentle) push!”
“I haven’t enjoyed a weekend so much for a long time. The disparate participants with different experiences and aspirations rapidly became a coherent group under The Gentle Author’s direction in a gorgeous house in Spitalfields. There was lots of encouragement, constructive criticism, laughter and very good lunches. With not a computer in sight, I found it really enjoyable to draft pieces of written work using pen and paper.Having gone with a very vague idea about what I might do I came away with a clear plan which I think will be achievable and worthwhile.”
“The Gentle Author is a master blogger and, happily for us, prepared to pass on skills. This “How to write a blog” course goes well beyond offering information about how to start blogging – it helps you to see the world in a different light, and inspires you to blog about it. You won’t find a better way to spend your time or money if you’re considering starting a blog.”
“I gladly traveled from the States to Spitalfields for the How to Write a Blog Course. The unique setting and quality of the Gentle Author’s own writing persuaded me and I was not disappointed. The weekend provided ample inspiration, like-minded fellowship, and practical steps to immediately launch a blog that one could be proud of. I’m so thankful to have attended.”
“I took part in The Gentle Author’s blogging course for a variety of reasons: I’ve followed Spitalfields Life for a long time now, and find it one of the most engaging blogs that I know; I also wanted to develop my own personal blog in a way that people will actually read, and that genuinely represents my own voice. The course was wonderful. Challenging, certainly, but I came away with new confidence that I can write in an engaging way, and to a self-imposed schedule. The setting in Fournier St was both lovely and sympathetic to the purpose of the course. A further unexpected pleasure was the variety of other bloggers who attended: each one had a very personal take on where they wanted their blogs to go, and brought with them an amazing range and depth of personal experience. “
“I found this bloggers course was a true revelation as it helped me find my own voice and gave me the courage to express my thoughts without restriction. As a result I launched my professional blog and improved my photography blog. I would highly recommend it.”
“An excellent and enjoyable weekend: informative, encouraging and challenging. The Gentle Author was generous throughout in sharing knowledge, ideas and experience and sensitively ensured we each felt equipped to start out. Thanks again for the weekend. I keep quoting you to myself.”
“My immediate impression was that I wasn’t going to feel intimidated – always a good sign on these occasions. The Gentle Author worked hard to help us to find our true voice, and the contributions from other students were useful too. Importantly, it didn’t feel like a ‘workshop’ and I left looking forward to writing my blog.”
“The Spitafields writing course was a wonderful experience all round. A truly creative teacher as informed and interesting as the blogs would suggest. An added bonus was the eclectic mix of eager students from all walks of life willing to share their passion and life stories. Bloomin’ marvellous grub too boot.”
“An entertaining and creative approach that reduces fears and expands thought”
“The weekend I spent taking your course in Spitalfields was a springboard one for me. I had identified writing a blog as something I could probably do – but actually doing it was something different! Your teaching methods were fascinating, and I learnt a lot about myself as well as gaining very constructive advice on how to write a blog. I lucked into a group of extremely interesting people in our workshop, and to be cocooned in the beautiful old Spitalfields house for a whole weekend, and plied with delicious food at lunchtime made for a weekend as enjoyable as it was satisfying. Your course made the difference between thinking about writing a blog, and actually writing it.”
“After blogging for three years, I attended The Gentle Author’s Blogging Course. What changed was my focus on specific topics, more pictures, more frequency, more fun. In the summer I wrote more than forty blogs, almost daily from my Tuscan villa on village life and I had brilliant feedback from my readers. And it was a fantastic weekend with a bunch of great people and yummy food.”
“An inspirational weekend, digging deep with lots of laughter and emotion, alongside practical insights and learning from across the group – and of course overall a delightfully gentle weekend.”
“The course was great fun and very informative, digging into the nuts and bolts of writing a blog. There was an encouraging and nurturing atmosphere that made me think that I too could learn to write a blog that people might want to read. – There’s a blurb, but of course what I really want to say is that my blog changed my life, without sounding like an idiot. The people that I met in the course were all interesting people, including yourself. So thanks for everything.”
“This is a very person-centred course. By the end of the weekend, everyone had developed their own ideas through a mix of exercises, conversation and one-to-one feedback. The beautiful Hugenot house and high-calibre food contributed to what was an inspiring and memorable weekend.”
“It was very intimate writing course that was based on the skills of writing. The Gentle Author was a superb teacher.”
“It was a surprising course that challenged and provoked the group in a beautiful supportive intimate way and I am so thankful for coming on it.”
“I did not enrol on the course because I had a blog in mind, but because I had bought TGA’s book, “Spitalfields Life”, very much admired the writing style and wanted to find out more and improve my own writing style. By the end of the course, I had a blog in mind, which was an unexpected bonus.”
“This course was what inspired me to dare to blog. Two years on, and blogging has changed the way I look at London.”
The Tragical Death Of An Apple Pie
Cover price is £35 but if you order now you can buy it for £30 and you will receive a signed copy on publication, 17th October.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
The time in the year for apple pie has arrived again. So I take this opportunity to present The Tragical Death of an Apple Pie, an alphabet rhyme first published in 1671, in a version produced by Jemmy Catnach in the eighteen-twenties.
Poet, compositor and publisher, Catnach moved to London from Newcastle in 1812 and set up Seven Dials Press in Monmouth Court, producing more than four thousand chapbooks and broadsides in the next quarter century. Anointed as the high priest of street literature and eager to feed a seemingly-endless appetite for cheap printed novelties in the capital, Catnach put forth a multifarious list of titles, from lurid crime and political satire to juvenile rhymes and comic ballads, priced famously at a ‘farden.’
A An Apple Pie
B Bit it
C Cut it
D Dealt it
E Did eat it
F Fought for it
G Got it
H Had it
J Join’d for it
K Kept it
L Long’d for it
M Mourned for it
N Nodded at it
O Open’d it
P Peeped into it
Q Quartered it
R Ran for it
S Stole it
T Took it
V View’d it
W Wanted it
XYZ and & all wished for a piece in hand
Dame Dumpling who made the Apple Pie
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Remembering Rogg’s Delicatessen
Alan Dein fondly remembers Barry Rogg and his celebrated Whitechapel delicatessen
Barry Rogg by Shloimy Alman, 1977
As the years tick by and the places and the people I have loved pass on, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on a remarkable character whose shop was an East End institution for over fifty years.
Just south of Commercial Rd, Rogg’s delicatessen stood at the junction of Cannon Street Rd and Burslem St with its white-tiled doorway directly on the corner. One step transported you into a world of ‘heimishe’ or homely Jewish food that still had one foot in the past, a land of old-time street market sellers and their Eastern European roots.
Rogg’s was crammed from floor to ceiling with barrels, tins and containers of what Barry Rogg always called “the good stuff”. He was the proud proprietor who held court from behind the counter, surrounded on all sides by his handpicked and homemade wares. The shelves behind him were lined with pickles and a variety of cylindrical chub-packed kosher sausages dangled overhead.
Barry’s appearance was timeless, a chunky build with a round face that sometimes made him look younger or older than he was. He would tell you the story of Rogg’s if you wanted to know, but he was neither sentimental about the heyday of the ‘Jewish East End’ nor did he run a nostalgia-driven emporium. Rogg’s customers were varied and changed with the times. There was always the Jewish trade but, up to their closure, Rogg’s was also a popular a haunt for dockers who would traipse up from the nearby Thames yards. After that his customers were made up from the local Asian community, until there came another wave when he was being discovered by the national press increasingly focusing eastwards.
Barry’s grandfather started in the business at another shop on the same street in 1911. By 1944, when Barry was fourteen and still at school, he had already begun to help the family out at their new corner shop at 137 Cannon Street Rd. In 1946 he moved in for good, though he had only anticipated it would be a two-year stint as the building was earmarked for compulsory purchase for a road widening scheme that fortunately never happened.
I got to know Barry Rogg in 1987 when I joined a team of part-time workers at the Museum of the Jewish East End – now the Jewish Museum – who were collecting reminiscences and artefacts relating to East End social history. Then Rogg’s was one of the very last of its kind in East London. By the nineties it was Barry alone who was flying the flag for the Yiddisher corner deli scene that had proliferated in Whitechapel from the late nineteenth century. Thankfully, due to his popularity and the uniqueness in the last decade of the twentieth century, we have some wonderful photographs and articles to remember Barry by.
There are tantalising images of the food but we no can longer taste it. An array of industrial-sized plastic buckets filled with new green cucumbers, chillies, bay leaves and garlic at various stages of pickling, the spread of homemade schmaltz herrings, fried fish, gefilte fish, salt beef, chopped liver, the cheesecake. I am sure everyone reading this who visited Rogg’s will remember how their senses went into overdrive. The smells of the pickles, the herrings, the fruit and the smoked salmon, the visual bombardment of all the packaging and the handwritten labels. “Keep looking” was a favourite Barry catchphrase and how could you possibly not?
Of course, you could spend all day listening to the banter with his customers. I also fondly recall conversations with his partner Angela, who helped out but generally kept a low profile in the back of the shop. Rogg’s was Barry’s stage. He had a deep love for the theatre and for art, and one wonders what else he might have done if – like so many of his generation – he had not ended up in the family business as a fifteen-year-old out of school.
Barry died in 2006 at the age of seventy-six. Years ago, I co-compiled an album for JWM Recordings, Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World: Yiddisher Jazz in London’s East End from the twenties to the fifties. As a follow-up, my co-compiler and regular companion on trips to Rogg’s, Howard Williams suggested releasing another disc, this time with a food theme and dedicated to Barry Rogg.
This disc dishes up two sides recorded in New York in the late thirties and forties. Slim Gaillard – whose hip scatological word play would be celebrated in On the Road – performs a paean to the humble yet filling Matzoh Balls, dumplings made of eggs and matzoh meal. Yiddish singer Mildred Rosner serves Gefilte Fish a galloping love affair with this slightly sweet but savoury ancient recipe which consists of patties made of a poached mixture of ground deboned white fish, boiled or fried. These two classic dishes have graced the Jewish luncheon or dinner table for generations and the recipes are included.
On the label is Irv Kline’s portrait of Barry from 1983. Irv was an American who had retired to live in London. Barry’s photograph formed part of Irv’s study of surviving Jewish businesses in the East End, a travelling exhibition which I helped to hang during the eighties. I recall Irv being a real jazz buff so I hope that he too would appreciate the music accompanying his portrait of Barry Rogg.
Click here for information about the ‘Gefilte Fish/Matzoh Balls’ recording
Irv Kline’s portrait of Barry Rogg, 1983
Alan Dein’s photograph of Rogg’s with one of Barry’s regular customers framed in the doorway, 1988
Shloimy Alman’s photograph of Rogg’s interior, 1977
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Clive Murphy’s Matchbox Labels
Cover price is £35 but if you order now you can buy it for £30 and you will receive a signed copy on publication in October.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A SIGNED COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY
Clive Murphy, Phillumenist
Nothing about this youthful photo of the late novelist, oral historian and writer of ribald rhymes, Clive Murphy – resplendent here in a well-pressed tweed suit and with his hair neatly brushed – would suggest that he was a Phillumenist. Even people who have knew him since he came to live in Spitalfields in 1973 never had an inkling. In fact, evidence of his Phillumeny only came to light when Clive donated his literary archive to the Bishopsgate Institute and a non-descript blue album was uncovered among his papers, dating from the era of this picture and with the price ten shillings and sixpence still written in pencil in the front.
I was astonished when I saw the beautiful album and I asked Clive to tell me the story behind it. “I was a Phillumenist,” he admitted to me in a whisper, “But I broke all the rules in taking the labels off the matchboxes and cutting the backs off matchbooks. A true Phillumenist would have a thousand fits to see my collection.” It was the first time Clive had examined his album of matchbox labels and matchbook covers since 1951 when, at the age of thirteen, he forsook Phillumeny – a diversion that had occupied him through boarding school in Dublin from 1944 onwards.
“A memory is coming back to me of a wooden box that I made in carpentry class which I used to keep them in, until I put them in this album,” said Clive, getting lost in thought, “I wonder where it is?” We surveyed page after page of brightly-coloured labels from all over the world pasted in neat rows and organised by their country of origin, inscribed by Clive with blue ink in a careful italic hand at the top of each leaf. “I have no memory of doing this.” he confided to me as he scanned his handiwork in wonder,“Why is the memory so selective?”
“I was ill-advised and I do feel sorry in retrospect that they are not as a professional collector would wish,” he concluded with a sigh, “But I do like them for all kinds of other reasons, I admire my method and my eye for a pattern, and I like the fact that I occupied myself – I’m glad I had a hobby.”
We enjoyed a quiet half hour, turning the pages and admiring the designs, chuckling over anachronisms and reflecting on how national identities have changed since these labels were produced. Mostly, we delighted at the intricacy of thought and ingenuity of the decoration once applied to something as inconsequential as matches.
“There was this boy called Spring-Rice whose mother lived in New York and every week she sent him a letter with a matchbox label in the envelope for me.” Clive recalled with pleasure, “We had breaks twice each morning at school, when the letters were given out, and how I used to long for him to get a letter, to see if there was another label for my collection.” The extraordinary global range of the labels in Clive’s album reflects the widely scattered locations of the parents of the pupils at his boarding school in Dublin, and the collection was a cunning ploy that permitted the schoolboy Clive to feel at the centre of the world.
“You don’t realise you’re doing something interesting, you’re just doing it because you like pasting labels in an album and having them sent to you from all over the world.” said Clive with characteristic self-deprecation, yet it was apparent to me that Phillumeny prefigured his wider appreciation of what is otherwise ill-considered in existence. It is a sensibility that found full expression in Clive’s work as an oral historian, recording the lives of ordinary people with scrupulous attention to detail, and editing and publishing them with such panache.
Clive Murphy, Phillumenist
Images courtesy of the Clive Murphy Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute
You may like to read my other stories about Clive Murphy
Rose At The Golden Heart
Rose
When Sandra Esqulant, celebrated landlady of The Golden Heart in Commercial St, saw this photo taken by Phil Maxwell of Rose sitting in her barroom more than twenty years ago she told me the story of an unforgettable character who became one of her most loved regulars.
“I loved Rose. I don’t know what happened to her, she’s got to be dead now hasn’t she?
What happened was – you know how you fall in love with some people? – this woman appeared in the pub one day and I fell in love with her. I just liked her.
She asked for a rum & lemonade, and she never had to pay for a drink in my pub.
I used to have to warn everyone when Rose was coming in because she used to pick up everyone’s cigarettes and put them in her bag.
I used to dance with her.
You might think she was dumb, but she was the most astute person I ever met. She didn’t like my husband while I was there, but when I wasn’t there it was a different story!
My husband liked her a lot.
You know I lost my husband.
When she stopped coming, I went round to the Sally Army in Old Montague St, where she lived, but they told me they didn’t know what happened to her, so I went to the Police Station and they were going to search the morgue. I kept going back to the Sally Army and this Irish woman said to me, ‘Are you looking for Rose? She moved to Commercial Rd.’ So I went round to the Commercial Rd shelter and there was Rose. She was very sad because the Sally Army had put her out after forty years. So I used to send a cab to pick her up and take her back from my pub.
The Sally Army, they should have known how fond I was of her and told me where she had gone.
One Sunday, when I was on my own, she collected all the glasses and the ashtrays and the crisp packets and emptied them over the bar. I didn’t mind, Rose could do anything in my pub.
People like Rose would go into a pub and people wouldn’t serve them, but I had everyone in here – this was the dossers’ bar!
One day, Phil Maxwell asked Rose if he could put her in one of his films and she didn’t like that, but he set his camera on the table and took these pictures. And after that, he always had her picture in his exhibitions.
She must have known I was fond of her.
She did like me.
I know she liked me.
She was lovely.
She used to talk about her daughter, but I sometimes wonder if she ever had a daughter.
At Christmas, she always asked me for a Christmas box and, of course, I always gave her one.
They moved her out after forty years, what a thing to do to someone.
If Rose was here today, I’d let her smoke in my pub – I don’t care about the law.
Very special, she was.”
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
See more of Phil Maxwell’s work here
Phil Maxwell’s Kids on the Street
Phil Maxwell & Sandra Esqulant, Photographer & Muse
More of Phil Maxwell’s Old Ladies
Phil Maxwell’s Old Ladies in Colour
Cruikshank At The Tower Of London
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey at Tower Green
“It has been for years, the cherished wish of the writer of these pages to make the Tower of London the groundwork of a Romance,” wrote William Harrison Ainsworth in 1840, introducing his novel, “The Tower of London” – and it is an impulse that I recognise, because I know of no other place in London where the lingering sense of myth and the echoing drama of the past is more tangible that at the Tower.
Whenever I have entered those ancient walls, I am struck anew by the mystery of the place. I have to stop and reconcile my knowledge of history with the location where it happened, and each time I become more spellbound by the actuality of the place, which in spite of Victorian rebuilding still retains its integrity as an ancient fortress. I always make a point to pause and read the age-old graffiti, to stop in each doorway and take in the prospect at this most dramatic of monuments.
When I discovered “The Tower of London” by William Harrison Ainsworth I was captivated by George Cruikshank’s illustrations, realising that not only had this favourite of mine amongst nineteenth century illustrators once stood in exactly the same places I had stood, but he had the genius to draw the images inspired by these charged locations.
“Desirous of exhibiting the Tower in its triple light of a palace, a prison and a fortress, the author has shaped his story with reference to that end, and he has also endeavoured to combine such a series of incidents as should naturally introduce every relic of the old pile, its towers, halls, chambers, gateways and drawbridges – so that no part of it should remain uninvolved.” explained Ainsworth in his introduction to his sensationalist fictionalised account of the violent end of the short reign of Lady Jane Grey. Yet it is George Cruikshank’s engravings which bring the work alive, providing not just a tour of the architectural environment but also of the dramatic imaginative world that it contains – and done so vividly that I know already that when I return I shall be looking out for his characters in my mind’s eye while I am there.
There is a grim humour and surreal poetry in pictures which, to my eyes, presage the work of Edward Gorey, who like George Cruikshank also created a sinister diaphanous world out of dense hatching. Maurice Sendak was another master of the mystery that can be evoked by intricate webs of woven lines in which – as in these Tower of London engravings – three dimensional space dissolves into magical possibility. But to me the prime achievement of these pictures is that George Cruikshank has given concrete life to the Tower’s past, creating figures that convincingly take command of the stage offered by its charged spaces and, like the acting of Henry Irving, appear as if momentarily illuminated by flashes of lightning. Cruikshank’s pictures are like glimpses of a strange dream, drawing the viewer into a compelling emotional universe with its own logic, peopled by its own inhabitants and where it is too readily apparent what is going on.
The popularity of William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel was responsible for creating the bloodthirsty reputation of the Tower of London which still endures today – even though for centuries the Tower was used as a domestic royal residence and administrative centre, headquarters of the royal ordinances, records office, mint, observatory, and a menagerie amongst other diverse functions throughout its thousand year history. Yet although it may be just one of the infinite range of tales to be told about the Tower of London, William Harrison Ainsworth’s Romance does witness historical truth. There is a neglected plaque in the corner of Trinity Green, just outside Tower Hill station, which is a memorial to those executed there through the centuries – as testament to the reality of the violence enacted upon those with the misfortune to find themselves on the wrong side of authority in past days.
Jane Grey’s first night in the Tower – “Prompted by an undefinable feeling of curiosity, she hastened towards it and, holding forward the light, a shudder went through her frame, as she perceived at her feet – an axe!”
Cuthbert Cholmondeley surprised by a mysterious figure in the dungeon adjoining the Devilin Tower.
Jane Grey interposing between the Duke of Northumberland and Simon Renard.
Jane Grey and Lord Gilbert Dudley brought back to the Tower through Traitors’ Gate – “Never had Jane experienced such a feeling of horror as now assailed her – and if she had crossed the fabled Styx, she could not have greater dread. Her blood seemed congealed within her veins as she gazed around. The light of the torches fell upon the black arches – upon the slimy walls and upon the yet blacker tide.”
Jane imprisoned in the Brick Tower – “Alone! The thought struck her to the heart. She was now captured. She heard the doors of the prison bolted – she examined its stone walls, partly concealed by tapestry – she glance at its barred windows, and she gave up hope.”
Simon Renard and Winwinkle, the warder, on the roof of the White Tower – “There you behold the Tower of London,” said Winwinkle, pointing downwards. “And there I read the history of England,” replied Renard. “If it is written in these towers, it is a dark and bloody history, ” replied the warder.
Mauger sharpening his axe – ” A savage-looking individual seated on a bench at a grinding stone, he had an axe blade which he had just been sharpening, and he was trying its edge with his thumb. His fierce blood-shot eyes, recessed far beneath his bent and bushy brows were fixed upon the weapon.”
Execution of the Duke of Northumberland upon Tower Hill – “As soon as the Duke had disposed himself upon the block, the axe flashed like a gleam of lightning in the sunshine – descended – and the head was severed from the trunk. Mauger held it aloft, almost before the eyes were closed, crying out to the the assemblage in a loud voice, “Behold the head of a traitor!”
Cuthbert Cholmondeley discovering the body of Alexia in the Devilin Tower – “Pushing aside the door with his blade, he beheld a spectacle that filled him with horror. At one side of the cell upon a stone seat, rested the dead body of a woman, reduced almost to a skeleton. On the wall, close to where she lay, and evidently carved by her own hand, the name ALEXIA.”
Queen Mary surprises Courtenay and Princess Elizabeth
Lawrence Nightgall dragging Cicely down the secret stairs in the Salt Tower
Courtenay’s escape from the Tower
The burning of Edward Underhill at Tower Green – “As the flames rose, the sharpness of the torment overcame him. He lost control of himself, and his eyes started from their sockets – his contorted features and his writhing frame proclaimed the extremity of his agony. It was a horrible sight, and a shudder burst forth from the assemblage.”
The Death Warrant – “Mary tried to ascertain the cause of the animal’s disquietude as its barking changed to a dismal howl. Not without misgiving, she glanced towards the window and there between the bars she beheld a hideous black mask, through the holes of which glared a pair of flashing eyes.”
Elizabeth confronts Sir Thomas Wyatt in the torture chamber – “‘Sir Thomas Wyatt,’ Elizabeth declared in a loud and authoritative tone, and stepping towards him, ‘If you would not render your name forever infamous, you must declare my innocence!'”
The Fall of Nightgall – “Nightgall struggled desperately against the horrible fate that waited him, clutching convulsively against the wall. But it was unavailing. He uttered a fearful cry, and tried to grab at the roughened surface. From a height of nearly ninety feet, he fell with a terrific smash upon the pavement of the court below.”
The Night before the Execution – “In spite of himself, the executioner could not repress a feeling of dread and the contrary urge, which represented his curiousity. He pointed towards the church porch, from which a figure, robed in white, but insubstantial as the mist, suddenly appeared. It glided noiselessly along and without turning its face to the beholders.”
Jane Grey meeting the body of her husband at the scaffold – “She knew it was the body of her husband, and unprepared for so terrible an encounter, uttered a cry of horror.”
Plaque at Trinity Green on Tower Hill
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