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The inexorable descent into the winter darkness is upon us, even if just a couple of weeks from now we shall reach the equinox and days will start to lengthen. At this season, I am more aware of light than at any other – especially when the city languishes under an unremitting blanket of low cloud, filtering the daylight into a grey haze that casts no shadow.

Yet on some recent mornings I have woken to sunlight and it always lifts my spirits to walk out through the streets under a clear sky. On such days, the low-angled sunshine and its attendant deep shadow conjures an exhilarating drama.

In these particular conditions of light, walking from Brick Lane down Fournier St is like advancing through a cave towards the light, refracting around the vast sombre block of Christ Church that guards the entrance. The street runs from east to west and, as the sun declines, its rays enter through the churchyard gates next to Rectory illuminating the houses opposite and simultaneously passing between the pillars at the front of the church to deliver light at the western end where it meets Commercial St.

For a spell, the shadows of the stone balls upon the pillars at the churchyard gate fall upon the houses on the other side of the street and then the rectangle of light, admitted between the church and the Rectory, narrows from the width of a house to single line before it fades out. At the junction with Commercial St, the low-angled sun directed through the pillars in the portico of Christ Church casts tall parallel bars of light and shade that travel down Fournier St from the Ten Bells as far as number seven, reflecting off the window panes to to create a fleeting pattern like stars within the gloom of the old church wall.

As you can see from these photographs, I captured these transient effects of light with my camera to share with you as a keepsake of winter sunshine, for consolation when those clouds descend again.

The last ray

The shadow of the cornice of Christ Church upon the Rectory

The shadow of the pillars of Christ Church upon Fournier St

Windows in Fournier St reflecting upon the church wall

In Princelet St

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Midwinter At Christ Church Spitalfields

A View of Christ Church Spitalfields

War memorial at Christ Church photographed by John Claridge, 1961

Click to enlarge this map which shows the homes we have traced in Spitalfields of those of who died

The memorial today – ‘Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends’

(Click to enlarge this map)

1. DAVID FREEMAN, Air Mechanic 3rd class. Service No 55241, Royal Flying Corps.

Died 29 May 1917, aged 37. Panel P.1.17 Plashet Jewish Cemetery.

David was born in 1880 in Poland, the Son of Jacob & Rachel Freeman, the eldest of five children. He married Louise and they lived at 22 Clifton Buildings, Camlet St, on the Boundary Estate.

This is the doorway that David Freeman walked out of at Clifton Buildings

2. JOSEPH HARRIS, Corporal. Service No 13507, Royal Berkshire Regiment, 2nd Battalion.

Died 2nd April 1918,  aged 23.  Grave II. E. 4. Pargny British Cemetery.

Joseph’s father, Benjamin, a slipper maker from Warsaw who worked from home was unable to write his name, signing the census form with a cross. Joseph was born in Spitalfields and had four brothers and four sisters. His mother, Sarah, was a charwoman. By seventeen, Joseph was a general labourer and, when he died, the family were living at 33 Culham Buildings on the Boundary Estate.

This is the doorway that Joseph Harris walked out of at Culham Buildings

3. JAMES DANIEL POPPY, Private.

James was Roman Catholic, born in 1885, and attended St Ann’s School in 1893 while living at 24 Gt Pearl Street. By 1901 he was a ‘Boy Under Detention’ at St David’s Reformatory School for Catholic Boys’ in Wales, run by Jesuits, where he received land-based nautical training. By 1906, aged twenty-one while living at 24 Thrawl St and working as a shoemaster, he entered Whitechapel Infirmary with a ‘swelled face.’ In 1909, now at 4 Flower and Dean St, he was treated in Stepney Workhouse Hospital for ulcerated legs. By 1915, he was a hawker and back in the Whitechapel Infirmary. His military career is unknown.

4. JOSEPH FREDERICK GOODSON, Rifleman. Service No 56007, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 6th Battalion. City of London Rifles.

Died 20th June 1918, aged 19.  Grave VIII. I. 12. Dernancourt Communal Cemetery Extension. Epitaph: ‘Oh for a glimpse of the grave where you’re laid only to lay a flower at your head, Mother.’

Born 10th May 1899 at 19a Corbetts Court and baptised at Christ Church, Spitalfields, Joseph went to St Mary’s School, Spital Sq, when the family lived at 2 Chapel Place. The following year, they moved just around the corner to 2 Nantes Place, Norton Folgate. He was one of six children born to Joseph & Norah Goodson until the year before he enlisted when a brother and sister both died.

5. HENRY GEORGE VINCENT, Private. Service No 16017, Norfolk Regiment, 7th Battalion.

Died 12th August 1916, aged 41.  Grave IV. H. 19. Pozieres British Cemetery, Ovillers-la-Boiselles

Henry Vincent may have brought his young family to Spitalfields to work for the Great Eastern Railway, a short walk from his home at in Commercial St. His father, George, had worked on the railway as a goods clerk, rising to become Railway Station Master in Ramsey, Huntingdonshire, where Henry was born. He followed his father into the railway starting as a railway clerk while living in Tottenham and eventually became a correspondence clerk working from home at 117 Commercial St. The son of George and Mary Ann Vincent, he married the daughter of a farmer, Caroline Chapman, who lived in Hornsey Rise, Islington and they married there before moving to Tottenham. They had four children, three surviving infancy.

The door that Henry George Vincent walked out of at 117 Commercial St

6. & 7. MALCOLM & LESLIE ANDREW

MALCOLM ANDREW, Lieutenant. Service No 4722, Lancashire Fusiliers, attd. 104th Trench Mortar Bty.

Died 4 November 1918, aged 28. Grave VI. D. 1. Romeries Communal Cemetery Extension. Epitaph ‘In God’s Keeping’ (Gladys)

LESLIE WALTER ANDREW, Carpenter’s Crew. Service Number M13789, Royal Navy, H.M.S. Duncan

Died 17 November 1915, aged 19. Grave IV. E. 3. Taranto Town Cemetery Extension.

Malcolm & Leslie, born 1890 & 1896 respectively, were both baptised at Christ Church, Spitalfields, and lived at 96 Commercial St. Their father Thomas, a potato salesman and then a dairyman, was from the remote village of Granton in the Highlands of Scotland while their mother, Martha, was born in Jersey. By 1911, Malcolm, then twenty-one years old and single, a fruit salesman’s clerk, was living in a boarding house along with eight others in Hackney while Leslie, a greengrocery clerk, boarded with his sister at 25 Osborn St, Spitalfields. Malcolm was married to Gladys who later returned to her parents’ home on a farm near Tunbridge Wells.  Malcolm signed up in 1917 and died seven days before the Armistice, the same day as his neighbour Thomas Anderson.

Leslie died from “a fracture of the skull consequent upon falling from aloft” whilst serving on HMS Duncan six months after enlisting. He was a motor body builder, who was recorded as 5 foot 5 3/4 inches tall with a 36 3/4 inch chest with black hair, hazel eyes, a fresh complexion and a scar to his right knee. Previously, he had served on HMS Pembroke II where his character was described as ‘Very Good.’

The door that Malcolm & Leslie Andrew walked out of at 96 Commercial St

8. WILLIAM HENRY PERCIVAL, Rifleman. Service No 534290, London Regiment (Prince of Wales’ Own Civil Service Rifles), 15th Battalion.

Died 8th June 1917, Age 19. Grave I. D. 16. Mendinghem Military Cemetery. Epitaph ‘He giveth his beloved rest’ (Father)

William Gray was adopted by Percy & Grace Percival, parents of Fred, born in Aldgate with a crippled left hand, and Stanley and Grace who both died young. Born on 15th Mar 1898 in Kentish Town, William entered Raywood St Infants School at age three, while living in Battersea, where his father an omnibus conductor. On 9th August 1909, his parents with their three surviving children were admitted to Poplar Workhouse. The children were ten and nine years old with the littlest just eleven months, when when their father was classed as ‘infirm’ and requiring an ‘infirm diet,’ while their mother was classed ‘firm.’ By the end of that year, baby Grace had died. On 20th Feb 1911, Percy was a ‘fruit hawker,’ by then aged forty-three and living at 82 Brushfield St, when he admitted himself to South Grove Workhouse, Whitechapel, as ‘destitute.’ By the time of William’s enlistment, the family were living at 7 Puma Court.

The door that William Henry Percival walked out of at 7 Puma Court

9. HARRY TIPPETT, Rifleman. Service No S/25195, Rifle Brigade, 11th Battalion.

Died 1st April 1918, aged 21. Grave P. VII. G. 4A. St Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen.

The Tippett family home was 10 Puma Court, Commercial St. Harry was born on the 14th September 1897 and baptised at Christ Church, Spitalfields. By the time of his death in 1918 his mother, Sarah, widowed since 1911, had moved across the court into the Norton Folgate Almshouses, to “No 3 Alms Rooms, Puma Court.” Harry was one of eleven children, six of whom had died by 1911. By the time of the census his father William, a printer’s assistant, had been dead only a week, leaving Harry, age thirteen and still at school, the eldest son with three remaining sisters.

10. LESLIE LLEWELLYN LITTLEJOHN, QMS. Service No 10673, Royal Scots Lothian Regiment, 2nd Battalion.

Died 11th April 1917,  aged 24. Grave I.M.2  Duisane British Cemetery.

Leslie was an orphan, born in Kensington on 5th Jan 1892. Given a home by Matthew, a blindmaker, and Ellen (Nellie) Littlejohn, he was the third of their six children. On July 15th, 1901 Nellie and all the children entered Britten St Workhouse in Chelsea. In 1909 Leslie, age fourteen, he spent a month in Whitechapel Infirmary with pneumonia and his address given as 14 Fournier St with his brother Cyril, listed as his relative, living in West Brompton.

The door that Leslie Llewellyn Littlejohn walked out of at 14 Fournier St

11. HENRY SHATKOVSKY, Private Service No 132092, Machine Gun Corps (Infantry), 8th Battalion.

Died 28th May 1918, aged 20.  Soissons Memorial

Henry was the son of Jacob & Fanny Shatkofsky who lived at 19 Booth St (now Princelet St). Jacob died in 1919, followed in December 1927 by Henry’s brother Samuel, followed twelve days later by their mother. When the family buried Fanny alongside Jacob they erected a third stone between them with the inscription ‘In memory of their dear son Henry, Killed in Action 28th May 1918, aged 20.’ The graves are at the Edmonton Federation Cemetery laid our in 1889 on land donated by Lord Montague, MP for Whitechapel, for Jewish people in the East End who could not afford fees asked by other synagogues.

The door that Henry Shatkovsky walked out of at 19 Princelet St

(Click to enlarge this map)

12. JAMES MINNS, Corporal. Service No 4/7904, West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales’s Own), 18th Battalion.

Died 3rd May 1917, aged 20. Panel Bay 4: Arras Memorial

James’s father George, of 56 Flower & Dean St, a brewer’s labourer, married Elizabeth Homewood in 1891 at Christ Church, Spitalfields. Her father was a weaver. On 14th May 1896, James was born and, at fourteen months, he was admitted to the Whitechapel Infirmary with measles, his mother staying with him as he was still suckling. The notes say that his father, then a dock labourer, had been ‘absent for two weeks.’ They lived in Hanbury St then but when he started at George Yard Charity School, the family lived in Aldgate. At six years old, he was re-admitted to Whitechapel Infirmary with an abscess on his face, his address now South Grove Workhouse where his mother lived while his father was at 9d Dorset St. A year on found him still at George Yard School but living in ‘shelters.’ In 1911, James’ parents were at 15 Little Pearl St but James then fourteen years old was an ‘inmate’ at the East London Industrial School in Lewisham for ‘Boys under Detention’, described as ‘a plumber.’ All boys had a trade title but received some schooling. At enlistment, he was living at 45 Crispin St.

The doorway that James Minns walked out of at 45 Crispin St

13. CHARLES THOMAS KENNY, Rifleman. Service No R/32916, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 10th Battalion.

Died 19th February 1917, aged 36. Panel Pier and Face 13 A and 13 B. Thiepval Memorial

Charles Keeny died leaving a wife and five surviving children. In 1901, Charles was a plumber living at 9 Paternoster Row, Spitalfields (now Brushfield St) with his parents John, a warehouseman, and Elizabeth – who ran their home as a lodging house – and six siblings. The family lived in two of the rooms, while the other four rooms were occupied by nineteen others. In January 1904, he married Jane Hayes, a hawker, who lived next door. By 1911, they had six children, one of whom died in infancy and they lived two doors from his parents. At the time of his death, the family were at 51 Gun St.

14. DAVID FLYNN, Driver. Service No 40123, Royal Field Artillery, “A” Bty. 83rd Brigade.

Died 29th October 1917, aged 21. Grave VI. B. 3. Bard Cottage Cemetery

In 1890, David Flynn was born in Spitalfields, one of seven children, two of whom died before 1911. His parents were David & Theresa Flynn, born in Holborn and the City, both men’s tailors. In 1911 David was sixteen and a contractor’s van boy, he was living with his parents and older brother James, eighteen years old, and younger sister Theresa, twelve years old. They lived in one room at 6 Tenter St, Spitalfields. At the time of his enlistment, the family lived at 35 Artillery Lane.

15. AUGUSTUS MAHONEY, Sergeant. Service No 8807, York & Lancaster Regiment, 2nd Battalion.

Died 21st March 1918. Bay 8, Arras Memorial

Augustus was born on 8th June 1888 to John & Mary Ann Mahoney, as the eldest of six children. His father, John, was a general labourer from Cork. In 1894, when Augustus enrolled at St Matthias School, the family were living at 41 Bacon St but by 1901 they had moved to 39 Dorset St – in the house at the entrance to Millers Court where thirty-seven people lived, seven families in seven rooms. When he was nineteen years in 1907, Augustus decided to leave his job as a news vendor and enter the army and by 1911 was serving in India. On Christmas Day 1917, he married Florence Squibb at the Church of St Mathew, Bethnal Green, but was killed just three months later.

16. JOSEPH DANIEL DISS, Gunner. Service No 125215, Royal Field Artillery, 306th Brigade.

Died 30th August 1917, aged 22.  Grave VI. A. 5A. Wimereux Communal Cemetery

On 11th February 1901, Joseph Diss spent eight days with his siblings Mary & Edward in the City Rd Workhouse, where they were followed a few days later by brothers George & Walter. The family lived in an overcrowded house in Clerkenwell, which was home to eight families, totalling thirty-two people. Born in 1895 in Robin Court in the City of London, he was one of eleven children born to Thomas Diss, a hawker of wooden cases and his wife Minnie. Six children had died by 1911, when the remaining five with their parents plus Joseph, aged fifteen, a brewer’s van boy, lived in one room at 5 Duval St (Dorset St). Three months before the war, Joseph, then a carman, married Ellen, twenty years old, a packing case dealer who was pregnant with their first child. They lived at 7 Duval St. The year Daniel married, his younger sister Mary married Philip Schratsky, who was also killed.

17. BERTIE INGREY, Rifleman. Service No 14/45152, Royal Irish Rifles, 14th Battalion.

Died 7th December 1917, aged 25.  Grave V. E. 21. Rocquigny-Equancourt British Cemetery

Born in 1892, Bertie was the son of Mrs. Agnes Garroway, of 2 Duval St, Spitalfields.

18. JAMES EAGLE, Rifleman. Service No 11475, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 16th Battalion.

Died 20th May 1917, aged 23.  Panel Bay 7. Arras Memorial.

In 1911, James Eagle’s mother, Anna, an out-of-work charwoman, was recorded as an ‘inmate,’ along with two hundred and fifty-nine others, at Providence Row Night Refuge in Crispin St, Spitalfields. James was born in Bow in 1894 and by 1917, the year James was killed, Anna was living at 33 Whites Row, with his brothers William and Thomas.

19. HARRY JOHNSON, Private. Service No 524482, Private Labour Corps, 111th Company

Died 23rd November 1918, aged 45. One of three graves ‘near the SE corner’ of Wevelgem Communal Cemetery.

Harry was the husband of Annie and they lived at 23 St Margarets Buildings, Whites Row. He was forty-one years old in 1914, three years over the age limit of thirty-eight for regular army enlistment.

‘The Labour Corps, formed in 1917, was manned by officers and other ranks who had been medically rated below the “A1” condition needed for front line service. Many were wounded. Units were often deployed for work within range of enemy guns, sometimes for lengthy periods. In the crises of March and April 1918 on the Western Front, Labour Corps units were used as emergency infantry. The Corps always suffered from its treatment as something of a second class organisation.’

20. ISAAC FRANKS, Private. Service No 282370, London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), 4th Battalion.

Died 4th June 1917.  Grave II. B. 11. Crooisilles Railway Cemetery.

Emanuel & Raynor Franks were born in Amsterdam, but their children all born in Spitalfields. Isaac was born on 25th January 1893. In 1900, when he was aged seven, the family were living at 3 Butler St (now Brune St) and he attended St Mary’s School. They lived with two other families making eighteen in one house, six adults and twelve children. Isaac’s father, Emanuel, was a hawker and the two other fathers in the house were ‘hawkers of lemons.’ By 1911, they had moved to 130 Rothschild’s Buildings, E Block, Spitalfields.

21. LOUIS BARZOLOI, Private. Service No. 611863, London Regiment, 1st/19th Battalion.

Died 7th December 1917, aged 23.  Grave III. F. 7. Abbeville Communal Cemetery Extension.

Louis’s father, Philip, was a labourer in the London Docks and came from Leeds, while his mother, Hannah, was from Amsterdam. In 1901, Louis, age six years old, he was living with his Dutch Grandparents, Emanuel, a retired upholsterer, and his wife Betsy, along with his parents Philip & Hannah, and his four siblings at 8 Freeman St, Spitalfields. His brother Isaac was a cigar maker and fourteen-year-old David was a bookstall assistant. They shared their tiny terraced house with another couple. By 1911, the family were  at 6 Butler St. His father, who was no longer a dockworker, and his brother David, were both hawkers of sweets, while his brother Jacob was a labourer in the market and Louis, then sixteen years old, was a boat riveter. All eight children were born in Spitalfields.

(Click to enlarge this map)

22. MOSES MICHAELS, Private. Service No 54958. Royal Welsh Fusiliers, 10th Battalion.

Died 3rd January 1917, aged 31. Grave VII. F. 4.  Puchvilliers British Cemetery. Epitaph ‘Deeply mourned by his sorrowing mother, brother, aunts’

Moses’ father, Simeon, died when Moses and his brother Solomon were aged just three and one years old and thereafter their mother Rosetta (known as Rose) brought up her two sons while working from home as a dealer in old silk hats. Rose had grown up a few streets away in Gravel Lane, just off Petticoat Lane. Moses was born in 1887 at 9 Palmer St and by the age of fourteen he was working in the boot trade. Also living with them were Rose’s niece Bloomah, a cigar maker, and her brother Alexander, a repairing tailor, in which trade Moses joined him while his brother Sol became a tailor’s stock cutter.

23. ALEXANDER ISAACS, Rifleman. Service No 6044, Rifle Brigade, 9th Battalion.

Died 6th January 1916. Panel 46-48 & 50 Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial.

Alexander was married to Sarah Isaacs who lived at 18 Palmer St.

24. MICHAEL HOLBROOK, Private. Service No 77180, London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), 2nd/4th Battalion.

Died 25th April 1918, aged 18. Grave I. A. 1. Crouy British Cemetery, Crouy-Sur-Somme.

Michael’s family were Roman Catholic. Born in 1900, he was the son of John & Ellen Holbrook of 7a Shepherd Buildings, (now Toynbee St). At age thirteen, Michael was admitted to hospital with ulcerative tonsillitis. The family were then living at 11 Margaret’s Buildings, Whites Row. His hospital discharge states that his mother had moved to 194 Hanbury St and his father, a dock labourer, was living in Duval St (Dorset St).

25. GEORGE FIELDSEND, Private. Service No 211800, Rifle Brigade.

George was not killed in battle but died in Whitechapel in 1921 aged thirty-five, presumably from injuries sustained in the war. He was the son of Frederick Fieldsend & Norah Hennessey. His father was a market porter, and later a fruit and vegetable hawker. George and brothers Frederick & William followed their father into the trade. They had two sisters, Ellen & Nora. In 1896, they lived at 8 Corbett’s Court, Hanbury St. By 1901, the family lived at 5 Crispin St in a pub on the corner of Dorset St, the Horn of Plenty, where forty-two others lived, mainly families with children. By 1911, they were at 20a Shepherds Buildings. While working as a travelling salesman in June 1911, George married ‘the girl next door’ Ellen Bailey from No 19.

In 1901, the Fieldsend family lived above the Horn of Plenty at 5 Crispin St, as photographed by C A Mathew in 1911

26. GEORGE RANDALL, Private. Service No 205180, Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment), 11th Battalion.

Died 21st September 1917. Grave XXIV. H. 5A. Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery

George’s mother, Emma, lived by taking in washing and his father, Thomas, was a labourer. In 1891, Thomas & Emma and their children lived at 4 Brick Lane and, by 1901, they were at 27 Shepherd’s Buildings (Toynbee St) with the older son, Ernest, working as a horse groom and their father as a navvy. By 1911, George was no longer at home but his family were at 4 Wheler St, Spitalfields. At the time of his marriage at Christ Church in 1915 to Rose Everson, a glassblower of 132 Vallance Rd, George was a City Corporation servant and back living in Spitalfields again. George died just nine months after their first son, Edward William, was born on 23rd December 1916.

27. THOMAS DERBY ANDERSON, Private. Minns. Service No 49655, Northamptonshire Regiment, 1st Battalion.

Died 4th November 1918, aged 19.  Grave D4. Le Rejet-de-Beaulieu Communal Cemetery. Family’s Epitaph ‘Gone But Not Forgotten.’

Thomas’ father, William, a cigar maker, was thirty-seven years older than his mother, with May, the youngest, born when he was seventy-one. Thomas was born on 31st May 1899 and baptised at Christ Church, Spitalfields, one of nine children in the family, living at 132 Lolesworth Buildings, Thrawl St. He attended George Yard Charity School, Whitechapel, (also known as the George Yard Ragged School). His older brother was a telegraph messenger and an older sister was  a card box maker. He worked as a carman and was living in Lolesworth Buildings when he enlisted. He died seven days before the Armistice.

28. JOHN ALFRED BARNSLEY, Lance Corporal. Service No G/10818, The Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment), “B” Coy. 11th Battalion.

Died 1st August 1917, aged 27. Panel 11 – 13 and 14. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial

After his father died when John was fourteen and his mother when he was twenty, John was left head of the family with four sisters, the youngest just eight, living in two rooms in Old Ford. John, a chairmaker, was born in 1890, the son of John Barnsley, a book laster, and his wife Emma.. In 1915, he was married at Christ Church, Spitalfields, by the Rector Charles H Chard, to Rose, a glass engraver, daughter of George Clements, a dock labourer and they lived at 167 Lolesworth Buildings, Thrawl St.

29. WILLIAM HENRY CLEMENTS, Private. Service No 295381, London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), 2nd/4th Battalion.

Died 9th August 1918, aged 21. Panel 10. Vis-en-Artois Memorial.

When William was fourteen, his brother was employed as an upholsterer’s spring binder with his three sisters working as a cigarette labeller, a worker in a druggists and a charwoman. Born on 1st May 1897, Henry’s father George was a dock labourer and his mother Caroline was a charwoman. Their cousin lived with them in three rooms at 167 Lolesworth Buildings, Thrawl St. All were born in Stepney, except their mother who was from Hoxton. He started at George Yard Charity School on 12th January 1903 where many of the children starting at that time were listed as from Russia. Rose Clements, William’s sister, married John Barnsley – also on the memorial – and moved into the family home.

30. RENE GAUTIER, Corporal. Service No 10462, Gloucestershire Regiment, 7th Battalion.

Died 8th August 1915. Panel 102 to 105. Helles Memorial.

Rene’s parents, Fernand & Victorine (later called Adele) were born in France. Rene, one of eight children, was born in Paris but, by 1891, the family were living in a shared house in Shoreditch. By the time of his marriage in 1910 to Emily Wragg, aged twenty-one but already a spinster, he was a ‘moulding maker,’ as his father had been, and living at  202 Lolesworth Buildings. They were married at Christ Church. In 1911, Rene & Emily had a daughter, Gladys, who was just four when her father died.

31. WILLIAM ROBERT LIPMAN, Rifleman. Service No 5978, London Regiment, 17th Battalion.

Died 8th November 1916, aged 22.  Panel X.C.5, Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery.

William was born on 3rd Nov 1893 in Spitalfields, as the youngest of five children of Joseph & Mary Ann Lipman. The family lived at 63 Lolesworth Buildings, Thrawl St. When William was born they lived in No 44 but, by the time he started at George Yard Charity School, they had moved across the Buildings into two rooms at No 63. William, like his father and older brother, was a carman while his elder brothers were a tea packer and a railway van guard.

32. PHILLIP SCHRATSKY, Rifleman. Service No R/22366, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 7th Battalion.

Died 21sr March 1918, aged 24. Panel 61 to 64, Pozieres Memorial.

School records show Phillip was born in Romania on 30th May 1894, the eldest of eleven children born to Jack, a tailor, and Mary (Minnie) Schratsky. He started at Berner StSchool in 1900 while living at 51 Cable St but a few months later the growing family moved into two rooms at No 25 Block A, Rothschild’s Buildings in Flower and Dean St. Then they moved to three rooms in 20 Alexandra Buildings, Commercial St. Phillip and his father were tailor’s pressers and his fifteen-year-old brother Zucman was a cigarette maker. In 1914, he married Mary Diss who lived next door when he was at 6 Duval St, the younger sister of Daniel Diss, who was also killed in the war.

33. MOSES FRESCO,Rifleman. Service No 474352, London Regiment (The Rangers), 12th Battalion.

Died 9th April 1917, aged 20. Panel 1.A.27. London Cemetery, Neuville-Vitasse.

Moses’ father was a short man of 5 feet 6 inches who enlisted in the Army on 7th June 1915 stating his age asthirty-eight years. Howevee, he was actually forty-five years old with seven dependant children .The second of twelve children born to Alexander, a fish hawker, and his wife Betsy, Moses was born in 1897 in Spitalfields. In 1901, the family of six lived in two rooms at 171 Wentworth Buildings, but by the next year the family had mysteriously grown to eleven and lived in three rooms at 19 Grey Eagle St, which they shared with another couple.

34. CHARLES WASHINGTON, Private. Service No 6427, The King’s (Liverpool Regiment), 1st Battalion.

Died 10th March 1915,  aged 36. ‘Missing at Givenchy.’ Panels 6 to 8, Le Touret Memorial.

Charles Washington, son of Henry Charles Stamm, was born in 1878 in Montreal, Canada, as one of four boys. Then his parents moved to Brooklyn, New York. By April 1899, aged twenty, he was a labourer living in Warrington where he enlisted in the Army for twelve years, but completed fifteen. He fought in the Boer War. Recorded as just 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighing nine and half stone stone, he had grey eyes, light brown hair, sallow complexion with numerous scars to his back and loins. By 1908, he had a scar on his jaw, two scars on his left hand and three tattoos to his arms – anchor, stars & stripes and a ‘female figure and bust.’ His character was described as ‘Indifferent.’ He was in hospital in Rangoon, later in Dublin, for various conditions including syphilis which caused ‘loss of feeling in both arms.’ He was on the Syphilis Register. In March 1900, he spent 56 days in the Military Prison, the first of various confinements for offences which included ‘using insubordinate language towards an officer’ (84 days), ‘drunk in town,’ ‘deficiency of kit and public clothi,g,’ ‘loss of equipment,’ ‘absence from Tattoo,‘ going AWOL and desertion. He forfeited pay ‘thru physical inefficiency.’ Yet on his death, the box for ‘Good Conduct Pay’ was ticked. In 1910, while living at 22 Whitechapel High St, he made a statement to the Thames Police Court about losing his Identity & Life Certificate, and by September 1911 he had moved to 198 Wentworth Buildings, Wentworth St. He changed his name to Isidor Stamm – occasionally calling himself Israel – and converted from Roman Catholic to Judaism prior to marrying Fanny Bearman in Mile End Old Town in July 1912. They had to no children. However, the Army received a letter from ‘Margaret’ in Warrington asking for his whereabouts as he was the father of her child. Fanny was awarded his Widow’s Pension of ten shillings a week.

Letter to Fanny Washington informing her of the death of Charles Washington

35. JAMES HAYES, Private. Service No 8946, South Staffordshire Regiment, 2nd/8th Battalion.

Died 25th September 1915, aged 20. Panel XXX1.A.8, Cabaret-Rouge Cemetery, Souchez.

John, James’ father, was born in Bishopsgate and his mother, Elizabeth, in Spitalfields. James was born on 16th February 1894 and the family of six lived in Spitalfields, firstly at 116 Wentworth St, then they moved to 6 Flower & Dean St where they were when he started at George Yard Charity School. On finishing school, James followed his father to the docks where they both worked as labourers.

(Click to enlarge this map)

36. ALBERT E. SUTER, Company Quartermaster Sergeant. Service No 27496, Royal Engineers, Postal Section.

Died 22nd November 1918. Grave I. D. 2. Solesmes British Cemetery.

Albert’s wife was Louie, the daughter of the schoolmaster and mistress, Edward & Louisa Skinner, of Christ Church School, Brick Lane. They lived in the Schoolmaster’s House.  Albert, when twenty-five years old and living in Notting Hill while working as a Post Office sorter, married Louie on the 10th January 1913. He had been baptised at Christ Church, Spitalfields, on 28th Sept 1887. His father, Alfred, was a carpenter, later a warehouseman, and the family lived at 4 Heneage St. Albert died just after war ended and Louie returned to the School House to live with her parents.

This is the doorway where Albert E. Suter walked out at 4 Heneage St

37. HYMAN MOSES, Private. Service No 37806, Northamptonshire Regiment, 9th Labour Company – transferred to (87874) 147th Company. Labour Corps.

Died 21st April 1918,  aged 32.  Grave XI. C. 11. Warlincourt Halte British Cemetery, Saulty. Epitaph ‘My dear husband Hymie mourned by his wife.’

Hyman’s parents were Barnett & Sarah Moses from Russia. Barnett was an umbrella stickmaker who worked from home. They had seven children but one died. Born in Spitalfields, Hyman was still living there at the time of his enlistment. In 1891 ,the family were living at 50 Grey Eagle St and by 1901 they were at 134 Brick Lane. By 1911, they were all at 27 Heneage St when Hyman, twenty-five years old and single, was a packer in the tobacco works, while his older siblings worked in the fur and millinery trades. Hyman married Hannah and they had a daughter, Rose and lived at 8 Palmer St, opposite Moses Michaels, who was the same age as him and was killed the previous year.

38. MORRIS GOODMAN, Rifleman. Service No S/19802, Rifle Brigade, 12th Battalion.

Died 24th August 1917, aged 27. Grave VIII. I. 13. Boulogne Eastern Cemetery.

Morris was born in 1890 and married Leah, with whom he had two children and lived at 35 Heneage St.

39. JOHN WRIGHT, Rifleman. Service No 6/608, Rifle Brigade, 9th Battalion.

Died 25th September 1915.  Panel 46 – 48 and 50. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial.

John Alfred Wright was born in Spitalfields and baptised in Christ Church on 24th March 1889. The family lived at 27 George St in the heart of the Flower & Dean rookery. John had an older sister Sarah Ellen. By 1901, their mother had died and the family of three were living at 63 Brick Lane. At recruitment on 24th Aug 1914, John had become a general labourer like his father.

This is the doorway where John Wright walked out at 63 Brick Lane

40. FREDERICK GOLDSTEIN, Private. Service No 281362, London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), 2nd/4th Battalion.

Died 19th May 1917.  Panel Bay 9, Arras Memorial.

Frederick’s father Harris was from Plotska in Poland and his mother Annie from South Russia, both were tailor machinists. He was born on 22nd October 1895, as one of eight children all born in Spitalfields. Frederick joined his parents as a tailor machinist on leaving school. They lived at 2 New Church St, Brick Lane.

41. & 42. JAMES & THOMAS HUGHES

JAMES HUGHES, Rifleman. Service No 6/9878, Rifle Brigade, 11th Battalion.

Died 14th July 1918, aged 27. Grave 1.E.24, Ligny-St. Flochel British Cemetery, Averdoingt.

THOMAS HUGHES, Rifleman. Service No S/2458, Rifle Brigade, 12th Battalion.

Died 25th September 1915, aged 23.  Panel 10, Ploegsteert Memorial.

James was admitted into the Whitechapel Infirmary with bubonic plague in February 1914, at the age of twenty-two, while living in lodgings in Flower & Dean St, still single and working as a chairmaker. Born May 1891 at 59 Wentworth St, he was the eldest child of seven born to Thomas Hughes, a haddock smoker, and his wife Rachel, all in Spitalfields. Thomas was born eighteen months after James. James & Thomas started at George Yard Charity School on the same day. In 1911, the family were at 38 Hanbury St. By then James had become a chairmaker and his mother worked as a ‘bedmaker in lodging houses.’ In 1912, Thomas, who had become a french polisher, was married to Sarah Strange and they had two daughters, Emma & Sarah.

This is the doorway where James & Thomas Hughes walked out at 38 Hanbury St

43. HENRY LEE, Rifleman. Service No 21016, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 21st Battalion.

Died 4th August 1917. Grave C19, Oak Dump Cemetery.

Henry, the son of Thomas Lee, was baptised in July 1886 at Christ Church, Spitalfields, when the family were living at 6 Gt Eastern Buildings and he was still living in Spitalfields at the time of his enlistment.

44. & 45. MARK & DAVID SHUSTER

MARK SHUSTER, Lance Corporal. Service No 33285, Lancashire Fusiliers, 18th Battalion.

Died 30th July 1916, aged 21.  Addenda Panel, Thiepval Memorial.

DAVID SHUSTER, Private. Service No 33292, Lancashire Fusiliers, 18th Battalion.

Died 30th July 1916, aged 19.  Panel Pier and Face 3 C and 3 D, Thiepval Memorial.

On 30th July 1916, the Shusters lost their two eldest sons, David & Mark, aged nineteen and twenty-one respectively. David had been a gents’ tailor. They were the eldest sons of nine children born to Russian immigrants, Vigdor (Victor) Shuster, who worked from home as a ‘finisher of boots,’ and his wife Golda, who bore him nine children. They lived at 4 Harriot Place, Fashion St, in 1901, moving to Bethnal Green, then Dalston, but by 1916 a newspaper report shows them back in Spitalfields, at 46 Weaver St. David & Mark joined the Lancashire Fusiliers together. On the day they died, their regiment was part of the Somme offensive attacking near the village of Guillemont. They are remembered at Thiepval along with 72,193 fellow soldiers from the Somme with no known grave.

War memorial at Christ Church

NAMES FOR WHOM WE CAN TRACE NO ADDRESS IN SPITALFIELDS

ERNEST EDWARD DENCH, Lance Corporal. Service No 9351, East Lancashire Regiment, 2nd Battalion.

Died 4th March 1917, aged 28.  Grave VII. A. 23. Fins New British Cemetery, Sorel-le-Grand

Enlisted in London

WALTER H HERSEY, Gunner. Service No 47144, Royal Field Artillery, 46th Bty.

Died 3rd November 1914. Grave I.A.17. Longuenesse (St Omer) Souvenir Cemetery

ERNEST PETERS, Rifleman. Service No R/21426, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 9th Battalion.

Died 15th September 1916. Panel Pier & Face 13 A & 13 B Thiepval Memorial.

Edward Ernest Raymond Peters was born 24th January 1897, the son of John & Phoebe Peters, his father a recorded as a fly driver. He had nine brothers and sisters and they lived at 39 Nutley Lane, Reigate. By 1901, his father was a groom and, by 1911, a cab driver with Ernest, then fourteen years old, an errand boy. By the time Ernest enlisted he was living in Stepney.

Ernest Peters, the only one of the names on the memorial for whom we can find a photograph

ERNEST WILLIAM RANDELL, Rifleman. Service No 323355, London Regiment (City of London Rifles),1st/6th Battalion.

Died 8th October 1916.  Panel Pier & Face 9 D. Thiepval Memorial

GEORGE RANDALL, Private. Service No 205180, Queen’s Own Regiment (Royal West Kent), 11th Battalion.

Died 21st September 1917. Lijssenhoek Militart Cemetery. Grave XX.1V.H.5A

George lived in Spitalfields but enlisted at St Paul’s Churchyard

ALBERT EDWARD RUSSELL, Rifleman. Service No S/14866, Rifle Brigade, 2nd Battalion.

Died between 22nd & 24th October 1916. Grave XXIX. A. 4. Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval

Albert was born in Bermondsey, lived in Spitalfields and enlisted in Shoreditch.  By the time the graves were detailed his mother, Mrs S A Russell, was living in Croydon.

FREDERICK WRIGHT, Private. Service No 22042, Royal Fusiliers, 32nd Battalion.

Died 7th October 1916.  Grave VIII. J. 5. A.I.F Burial Ground, Flers.

Frederick was born and lived in Spitalfields, and signed up in Shoreditch where many locals enlisted. On 7th October 1916, as part of the Somme offensive, Frederick’s unit attacked Bayonet Trench where he lost his life. Between 15th September and 7th Oct the Royal Fusiliers, 32nd Battalion, made three attacks with 185 men losing their lives of which 117 bodies were never found.

Additionally, there are these twenty-nine men for whom no records have yet been found and who are not listed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It is possible that they died of injuries after the war and after the date range covered by the Commission.

Rifleman R Arnett

Private W Barlow

Private J J Benson

Private A W Buckley

Rifleman J Burgess

Private J H Carrol

Private T Carrol

Grenadier A Collins

Private G Cook

Private W Crawley

Private R N Davis

Private W H Evans

Private J Gannon

2nd Mechanic G Haines

Private H Hare

Rifleman R Hewson

Rifleman T Hughes

Private T J Kenyon

Private R Long

Private R Marshall

Private W H Mason

S.M.H. Mortimer

Rifleman G Page

Able Seaman T G Patten

Private S S Phillips

Sergeant W E Rackham

Private J Sullivan

Private F Smith

Private G N Vincent

Sergeant J Watts

Homeless men sleeping outside Christ Church photographed by Moyra Peralta in the eighties

Maps & C A Mathew photograph courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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I believe I was born with a medieval imagination. It is the only way I can explain the explicit gothic terrors of my childhood. Even lying in my cradle, I recall observing the monstrous face that emerged from the ceiling lampshade once the light was turned out. This all-seeing creature, peering at me from above, grew more pervasive as years passed, occupying the shadows at the edges of my vision and assuming more concrete manifestations. An unexpected sound in my dark room revealed its presence, causing me to lie still and hold my breath, as if through my petrified silence I could avert the attention of the devil leaning over my bedside.

When I first became aware of gargoyles carved upon churches and illustrated in manuscripts, I recognised these creatures from my own imagination and I made my own paintings of these scaled, clawed, horned, winged beasts, which were as familiar as animals in the natural world. I interpreted any indeterminate sound or movement from the dark as indicating their physical presence in my temporal existence. Consequently, darkness, shadow and gloom were an inescapable source of fear to me on account of the nameless threat they harboured, always lurking there just waiting to pounce. At this time of year, when the dusk glimmers earlier in the day, their power grew as if these creatures of the shades might overrun the earth.

Nothing could have persuaded me to walk into a dark house alone. One teenage summer, I looked after an old cottage while the residents were on their holiday and, returning after work at night, I had to walk a long road that led through a deep wood without street lighting. As I wheeled my bicycle up the steep hill among the trees in dread, it seemed to me they were alive with monsters and any movement of the branches confirmed their teeming presence.

Yet I discovered a love of ghost stories and collected anthologies of tales of the supernatural, which I accepted as real because they extended and explained the uncanny notions of my own imagination. In an attempt to normalise my fears, I made a study of mythical beasts and learnt to distinguish between a griffin and a wyvern. When I discovered the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Breughel, I grew fascinated and strangely reassured that they had seen the apocalyptic visions which haunted the recesses of my own mind.

I made the mistake of going to see Ridley Scott’s The Alien alone and experienced ninety minutes transfixed with terror, unable to move, because – unlike the characters in the drama – I was already familiar with this beast who had been pursuing me my whole life. In retrospect, I recognise the equivocal nature of this experience, because I also sought a screening of The Exorcist with similar results. Perhaps I sought consolation in having my worst fears realised, even if I regretted it too?

Once, walking through a side street at night, I peered into the window of an empty printshop and leapt six feet back when a dark figure rose up from among the machines to confront my face in the glass. My companions found this reaction to my own shadow highly amusing and it was a troubling reminder of the degree to which I was at the mercy of these irrational fears even as an adult.

I woke in the night sometimes, shaking with fear and convinced there were venomous snakes in the foot of my bed. The only solution was to unmake the bed and remake it again before I could climb back in. Imagine my surprise when I visited the aquarium in Berlin and decided to explore the upper floor where I was confronted with glass cases of live tropical snakes. Even as I sprinted away down the street, I felt the need to keep a distance from cars in case a serpent might be lurking underneath. This particular terror reached its nadir when I was walking in the Pyrenees, and stood to bathe beneath a waterfall and cool myself on a hot day. A green snake of several feet in length fell wriggling from above, hit me, bounced off into the pool and swam away, leaving me frozen in shock.

Somewhere all these fears dissolved. I do not know where or when exactly. I no longer read ghost stories or watch horror films and equally I do not seek out dark places or reptile houses. None of these things have purchase upon my psyche or even hold any interest anymore. Those scaly beasts have retreated from the world. For me, the shadows are not inhabited by the spectral and the unfathomable darkness is empty.

Bereavement entered my life and it dispelled these fears which haunted me for so long. My mother and father who used to turn out the light and leave me to sleep in my childhood room at the mercy of medieval phantasms are gone, and I have to live in the knowledge that they can no longer protect me. Once I witnessed the moment of death with my own eyes, it held no mystery for me. The demons became redundant and fled. Now they have lost their power over me, I miss them – or rather, perhaps, I miss the person I used to be – yet I am happy to live a life without supernatural agency.

Fourteenth century carvings from St Katherine’s Chapel, Limehouse

This is the face of the dead man in Clerkenwell. He does not look perturbed by the change in the weather. Once winters wore him out, but now he rests beneath the streets of the modern city he will never see, oblivious both to the weather and the wonders of our age, entirely oblivious to everything in fact.

Let me admit, although some might consider it poor company, I consider death to be my friend – because without mortality our time upon this earth would be worthless. So I do not fear death, but rather I hope I shall have enough life first. My fear is that death might come too soon or unexpectedly in some pernicious form. In this respect, I envy my father who always took a nap on the sofa each Sunday after gardening and one day at the age of seventy nine – when he had completed trimming the privet hedge – he never woke up again.

It was many years ago that I first made the acquaintance of the dead man in Clerkenwell, when I had an office in the Close where I used to go each day and write. I was fascinated to discover a twelfth century crypt in the heart of London, the oldest remnant of the medieval priory of the Knights of St John that once stood in Clerkenwell until it was destroyed by Henry VIII, and it was this memento mori, a sixteenth century stone figure of an emaciated corpse, which embodied the spirit of the place for me.

Thanks to the curator at the Museum of the Order of St John, I went back to look up my old friend after all these years. They lent me their key and, leaving the bright October sunshine behind me, I let myself into the crypt, switching on the lights and walking to the furthest underground recess of the building where the dead man was waiting. I walked up to the tomb where he lay and cast my eyes upon him, recumbent with his shroud gathered across his groin to protect a modesty that was no longer required. He did not remonstrate with me for letting twenty years go by. He did not even look surprised. He did not appear to recognise me at all. Yet he looked different than before, because I had changed, and it was the transformative events of the intervening years that had awakened my curiosity to return.

There is a veracity in this sculpture which I could not recognise upon my previous visit, when – in my innocence – I had never seen a dead person. Standing over the figure this time, as if at a bedside, I observed the distended limbs, the sunken eyes and the tilt of the head that are distinctive to the dead. When my mother lost her mental and then her physical faculties too, I continued to feed her until she could no longer even swallow liquid, becoming as emaciated as the stone figure before me. It was at dusk on the 31st December that I came into her room and discovered her inanimate, recognising that through some inexplicable prescience the life had gone from her at the ending of the year. I understood the literal meaning of “remains,” because everything distinctive of the living person had departed to leave mere skin and bone. And I know now that the sculptor who made this effigy had seen that too, because his observation of the dead is apparent in his work, even if the bizarre number of ribs in his figure bears no relation to human anatomy.

There is a polished area on the brow, upon which I instinctively placed my hand, where my predecessors over the past five centuries had worn it smooth. This gesture, which you make as if to check his temperature, is an unconscious blessing in recognition of the commonality we share with the dead who have gone before us and whose ranks we shall all join eventually. The paradox of this sculpture is that because it is a man-made artifact it has emotional presence, whereas the actual dead have only absence. It is the tender details – the hair carefully pulled back behind the ears, and the protective arms with their workmanlike repairs – that endear me to this soulful relic.

Time has not been kind to this figure, which originally lay upon the elaborate tomb of Sir William Weston inside the old church of St James Clerkenwell, until the edifice was demolished and the current church was built in the eighteenth century, when the effigy was resigned to this crypt like an old pram slung in the cellar. Today a modern facade reveals no hint of what lies below ground. Sir William Weston, the last Prior, died in April 1540 on the day that Henry VIII issued the instruction to dissolve the Order, and the nature of his death was unrecorded. Thus, my friend the dead man is loss incarnate – the damaged relic of the tomb of the last Prior of the monastery destroyed five hundred years ago – yet he still has his human dignity and he speaks to me.

Walking back from Clerkenwell, through the City to Spitalfields on this bright afternoon in late October, I recognised a similar instinct as I did after my mother’s death. I cooked myself a meal because I craved the familiar task and the event of the day renewed my desire to live more life.

The Museum of the Order of St John, St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, EC1M 4DA

Viscountess Boudica consults her crystal ball

Halloween is a very important festival for Viscountess Boudica, formerly the wise woman of Bethnal Green before she was banished to Uttoxeter.

For days, she had been hanging up her pumpkin decorations, arranging her spooky knick-knacks and organising her witchy outfits in preparation for the big day. “I like it because it is the celebration of the Pagan New Year,” she admitted to me, as one who identifies herself with the Ancient Britons and still adheres to the pre-Julian calendar which contains only ten months.

Yet Viscountess Boudica is also highly sensitive to the significance of Halloween as the time when the spiritual and temporal worlds become permeable. And so, when I visited her to take this series of portraits recording her observation of the rituals and customs of the season, she confided to me this spine-chilling personal account of her first encounter with supernatural forces in the form of a Headless Horseman in Braintree.

“I saw the Headless Horseman for the first time on April 20th 1987 when I lived at Plains Field near Braintree. One night, my friend Ted and I, we walked to the Three Ashes which was down a dark lane full of ditches and hedges and no light. We played darts and there was no-one else there, so I said, ‘It’s getting late and we have to walk back down the lane.’ So we left the pub and walked back in the dark and, after we’d left the lights of the houses behind, this old black iron street lamp appeared in the lane. I said to Ted, ‘Have you heard that Braintee Council was putting lamps up here?’ There was no moon and you could tell this was no normal lamp because it burned with a red flame.

Then we heard the sound of horses’ hooves approaching and, all of a sudden, the clouds parted and it was a full moon and we stood under the lamp as the Horseman appeared, coming closer with his cloak billowing. His big black horse reared up with piercing eyes and foaming at the nostrils. And the rider had no head! But when he lifted his cloak, there was his head with blue eyes and a long grey beard. Then the wind picked up and blew the clouds across the moon, and he took off towards Braintree. I said to Ted, ‘What do you make of that?’ He said, ‘It must be for a film,’ so I said, ‘I didn’t see any cameras.’

I said, ‘What are we going to do? We can’t tell anyone, they wouldn’t believe us.’ Braintree is known for its ghosts and Coggeshall has all the ley lines, so I thought, ‘I’m going to sleep with the lights on,’ and I did for six months.

After five years, in 1992, we decided to go back. Ted said, ‘You’ve got to wear exactly what you wore in 1987,” and we went there on the same day, April 20th, and walked down the lane to the pub but I said to Ted, ‘There’s no chance of seeing him again.’ I took a Polaroid Instamatic camera with me in case I could get a picture. It was five to twelve by the time we returned down the lane and I said to Ted, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen.’

All of a sudden, the lamp appeared burning with the red flame and we heard the sound of hooves approaching. I said to Ted, ‘Your luck’s in.’ The beating of the hooves got louder  but the Headless Horseman galloped past and he set off towards Braintree. Then he turned and came back and the great big horse reared over us and the cloak lifted up and I saw it had a red silk lining. The light grew brighter and I realised it was time, so I produced my camera and took a picture. Immediately, the light went out and he rode away, but when we reached the end of the lane the Headless Horseman was there waiting for us, blocking the path. So we turned and walked back the other way to the pub where we met an old lady.

We showed her the photograph, it was pitch black and all you could see was just the shape of the Horseman. Ted said, ‘I’ll take it to see if we can the resolution improved,’ and he said, ‘We’ll go back again in five years,’ but shortly afterwards he died and that was the end of it.”

Keeling the pot

Hanging the lanterns

Preparing the altar

Brandishing her wand

Working the broomstick

Mixing the brew

With her familiars, Keith & Paul

Consulting the Tarot

Cooking up a spell in the kitchen

Seeing the future in her looking glass

Setting out to bewitch Bethnal Green

Viscountess Boudica – “The only ghostly experience I ever had in Bethnal Green was in the Underground – as I was going down the escalator, someone tapped me on the shoulder but when I turned round there was no-one there. I remember talking to a friendly clairvoyant who told me, ‘There was a witch in your family and that’s why these things happen to you.'”

Drawings copyright © Viscountess Boudica

Be sure to follow Viscountess Boudica’s blog There’s More To Life Than Heaven & Earth

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Read my original profile of Mark Petty, Trendsetter

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The Altar and Pulpit at St George’s German Lutheran Church, Alie St

In Aldgate, caught between the thunder of the traffic down Leman St and the roar of the construction on Goodman’s Fields sits a modest church with an unremarkable exterior. Yet this quiet building contains an important story, the forgotten history of the German people in the East End.

Dating from 1762, St George’s German Lutheran Church is Britain’s oldest surviving German church and once you step through the door, you find yourself in a peaceful space with a distinctive aesthetic and character that is unlike any other in London.

The austere lines of the interior emphasise the elegant, rather squat proportion of the architecture and the strong geometry of the box pews and galleries is ameliorated by unexpected curves and fine details. In fact, architect Joel Johnson was a carpenter by trade which may account for the domestic scale and the visual dominance of the intricately conceived internal wooden structure. Later iron windows of 1812, with their original glass in primary tones of red and blue, bring a surprising sense of modernity to the church and, even on an October afternoon, succeed in dispelling the gathering gloom.

This was once the heart of London’s sugar-baking industry and, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, Germans brought their particular expertise to this volatile and dangerous trade, which required heating vast pans of sugar with an alarming tendency to combust or even explode. Such was the heat and sticky atmosphere that sugar-bakers worked naked, thus avoiding getting their clothes stuck to their bodies and, no doubt, experiencing the epilatory qualities of sugar.

Reflecting tensions in common with other immigrant communities through the centuries, there was discord over the issue of whether English or the language of the homeland should be spoken in church and, by implication, whether integration or separatism was preferable – this controversy led to a riot in the church on December 3rd 1767.

As the German community grew, the church became full to overcrowding – with the congregation swollen by six hundred German emigrants abandoned on their way to South Carolina in 1764. Many parishioners were forced to stand at the back and thieves capitalised upon the chaotic conditions in which, in 1789, the audience was described in the church records as eating “apples, oranges and nuts as in a theatre,” while the building itself became, “a place of Assignation for Persons of all descriptions, a receptacle for Pickpockets, and obtained the name St George’s Playhouse.”

Today the church feels like an empty theatre, maintained in good order as if the audience had just left. Even as late as 1855, the Vestry record reported that “the Elders and Wardens of the Church consist almost exclusively of the Boilers, Engineers and superior workers in the Sugar Refineries,” yet by the eighteen-eighties the number of refineries in the vicinity had dwindled from thirty to three and the surrounding streets had descended into poverty. Even up to 1914, at one hundred and thirty souls, St Georges had the largest German congregation in Britain. But the outbreak of the First World War led to the internment of the male parishioners and the expulsion of the females – many of whom spoke only English and thought of themselves as British.

In the thirties, the bell tower was demolished upon the instructions of the District Surveyor, thus robbing the facade of its most distinctive feature. Pastor Julius Reiger, an associate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leading opponent of the Nazis, turned the church into a relief centre offering shelter for German and Jewish refugees during World War II, and the congregation continued until 1996 when there were only twenty left.

St George’s is now under the care of the Historic Chapels Trust, standing in perpetuity as a remembrance of more than two centuries of the East End’s lost German community.

The classically-patterned linoleum is a rare survival from 1855

The arms of George III, King of England & Elector of Hanover

The principal founder of the church Diederick Beckman was a wealthy sugar refiner.

The Infant School was built in 1859 as gift from the son of Goethe’s publisher, W. H. Göschen

Names of benefactors carved into bricks above the vestry entrance.

St Georges German Lutheran Church, c. 192o

The bell turret with weathervane before demolition in 1934

The original eighteenth century weathervane of St George & the Dragon that was retrieved from ebay

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I am proud to publish these extracts from THE OXFORD SAUSAGE by a graduate of last spring’s blog writing course. The author set out to write a spicy mix of Oxford stories from a house once belonging to a city sausage maker.

Follow THE OXFORD SAUSAGE

I am now taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on November 25th & 26th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, all catered by Townhouse, and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details

If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.

In 1785

Today

THE OLDEST TREE IN OXFORD

In truth, I do have a bit of a soft spot for the yew tree. And therefore on a bright, sunny day this week I made a pilgrimage in its honour. I wanted to pay homage to this age-old tree. And I knew just the place to go.

Yews have lifespans of up to 3,000 years. In fact it must live to be at least 900 years before it can be considered ancient. In order to see one like that, I am told by the gardener at the Oxford Botanic Garden, I must head to St Mary’s Church in Iffley. That is where I will find Oxford’s oldest tree.

You can cycle all the way to Iffley along the river, whose banks at this time of year are high with Himalayan balsam and meadowsweet. It may be just under two miles from Carfax tower but I fancy I am off on a trip to the country. Though Iffley now forms part of the city’s suburban sprawl, it still calls itself a village and its pretty cottages and local shop make it feel that way.

Across the water at Iffley Lock and up the hill and you find yourself in the churchyard of the Romanesque church of St Mary the Virgin. It has six yew trees in its grounds but there is no mistaking the one I have come to see. It is a giant amongst its kind, its top dwarfing the tower, its massive branches reaching wide, and then bending over to hide ivy-clad monuments and gravestones, its inner shelter dappled in sunlight. There you can see that the trunk is hollow, its bark rust red, furrowed and covered with large knots and nodules. But there is still a vigorous growth of evergreen needle like leaves that are laden with berries.

This one is thought to be over 1600 years old, so more than double the age of St Mary’s which was built around 1170. The church was almost certainly erected on a site of pre-Christian worship – druids considered the evergreen sacred – and there are references to pagan imagery on the building’s southern doorway in the form of carvings of centaurs, beak heads and the green man.

But there are more practical reasons for its inclusion as well. The yew’s poisonous berries prevented people grazing their livestock on church land. And its strong, flexible wood was perfect for making longbows, a stalwart of medieval weaponry. After 1252 it was mandatory for everyone to engage in archery practice, so great was the need for bowmen.

It is awe inspiring to think that the magnificent tree here ‘must have been full-grown long before the first Oxford spire was raised in the vale below’ – so reads an entry in Chambers Journal written in 1892. Here it is described as ‘an ancient tree, whose furrowed half-prostrate trunk seems ‘weary worn with care’, and as we stand beside its bending form, a feeling of sympathy, akin to that which we extend to a fellow human being stooping low with a load of years, rises within us.’ Hurrah to that, and here’s to another thousand years.

Lewis Carroll is thought to have often visited St Mary’s, Iffley, and it is said that this drawing he made for ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ was inspired by the great yew.

THE STONE SAINTS’ RETIREMENT HOME

Antonia Hockton has been coming to New College twice a year for twenty-six years. She arrives as the students leave for the long vacation. For this is when her work as a stone conservator with the many statues, memorials and monuments can be undertaken without interruption. And so it is, late in the summer that I have managed to catch up with her. I wanted to find out more about her ancient profession. But I was also interested in a particular set of statues that once stood overlooking the city at the foot of the spire of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. Replaced at the end of the nineteenth century, after languishing in the basement, they were bought here to New College fo rehabilitation.

I came across them when, after attending evensong in the chapel, I had taken a wrong turn. I found myself in the fourteenth century cloisters. There was no lighting and, despite only a gentle breeze, the rafters seemed to move and creak. Feeling spooked, I was just turning to go when a shaft of moonlight, hidden before by a cloud, illuminated the face of what looked like a seven foot giant. And there were nine more of these huge stone figures, some with staffs, others with croziers, crosses and mitres. They were arranged as sentinels on the corners and along the aisles of the covered walkways. I was totally smitten.

Returning in the daylight they have a gentler presence. Here are the saints of their day, St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, St John the Baptist wearing a wool shirt, St Hugh with his tame swan, St Edward the Confessor and St Cedd. Also, St Mary the Virgin with baby Jesus, St William of York, St David, St Thomas à Becket and St Cuthbert holding the head of St Oswald. ‘They’ve become like old friends,’ explains Antonia, as she takes a break to introduce them. ‘I think it must be their stance. They are like biblical soldiers. I feel they are protecting me.’

These are not the original fourteenth century statues, which was when, according to Antonia, ‘the level of skill amongst stonemasons was at its peak.’ When Victorian architect TG Jackson took them down in 1896 to install these reproductions by George Frampton (famous for his Peter Pan statue in Hyde Park), his report was damning. Centuries of inclement weather, bad patching with totally inappropriate materials, and several inferior replacements had – he claimed – made them and much of the masonry a public hazard. There were finials and crockets that had fallen from above, piled around the church. Jackdaws had made nests behind the saints’ hollow backs, their once wooden croziers had rotted away and the metal bars that held them in place were completely rusted. On Sunday March 17th 1889, there was ‘serious alarm caused by the fall of the face of one of the statues close to the north door of the church, just after the congregation had entered for the University Sermon.’

‘There were bits missing and they were pitch black,’ remembers Antonia when, after a century of neglect, she was commissioned to perform her magic. Apprenticed at Lincoln Cathedral, working with stone was something she had always wanted to do. ‘Way back in my ancestry on my mother’s side there were French stonemasons ,’ she explains as we pause to admire the figure of St Cedd, her very first patient all those years ago. ‘Stonemasons were always journeymen, going from building to building, just as I still do. And I believe they came from France to the West Country and then one came up to the Midlands where I am from, where they happened to meet my great grandmum. Some of his work can still be seen on the Coventry Town Hall. ’

Dexterity and patience are the most important requirement for the job. A steady hand is essential too because a slip of the wrist could ruin months of work. What Antonia is doing is sympathetic restoration. ‘I was asked to put features back to how they would have looked,’ she explains in front of an imposing St Mary and a rather grumpy Christ child. Both have alarmingly large, out-of-proportion heads – apparently so when seen high up on the church they did not look too small. ‘For this one, I had to put a whole new head on the baby,’ she smiles. ‘People have said to me, ‘Couldn’t you have made him a bit prettier?’ but I had been given photographs from Jackson’s time as reference, so I can’t put my personality in really.’

When the statues were first carved, the stone came from local quarries, no longer extant. The belt of limestone is still there, running down from Lincolnshire, snaking across Oxfordshire and then under the channel to Northern France. As there was not enough height in these beds of stone to make the tall stature needed, they had to either be carved in sections or by what is known as ‘off the bed’. This is when they turn the block upward so the layers are stood on end. But this creates a vulnerability which explains the deterioration of the pieces. It was rain seeping in through the head that caused the face of that archbishop to fall off.

Antonia uses lime mortar to mould the shape. ‘It’s the same components as the blocks in the wall behind are made of,’ she says of the warm stone used to build the new college founded by William of Wykeham in 1379. ‘It’s just the seabed really. The bones of millions and millions of sea creatures. It’s amazing to think we dig something out of the earth that was once miles under the sea and carve it.’

Next to her stands St Hugh of Lincoln, the place where her work first started. He is my favourite figure, lovingly caressing the neck of his pet swan. And as I take my leave I cannot help but feel they both look serene and happy. St Hugh in his retirement with Antonia at hand should he require attention.

St Cedd, before and after

St Thomas à Becket

St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland

St William of York

St John the Baptist

St Hugh with his pet swan

St Edward the Confessor

St David, patron saint of Wales

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St Brides

Contributing Writer, Gillian Tindall, visits St Brides Church in Fleet St

This year is the three hundredth anniversary of Sir Christopher Wren’s death in 1723 at the age – very advanced for those days – of ninety. This anniversary is being celebrated in many of the City of London churches that he was responsible for redesigning, after eighty-seven of them had been ravaged by the Great Fire of 1666. But he is given special prominence at St Brides which is situated without the old City walls.

Even after suffering another firey destruction in the Blitz of World War II, St Brides still stands today just down the hill from the site of the old Lud Gate, on the west side of the Fleet valley where Fleet St leads towards Charing Cross and Westminster, and to everywhere else that is now Central London.

When the Great Fire took hold on the other side of the City, in Pudding Lane not far from the Tower, on 2nd September 1666, the wind was blowing from the east. So, four days later, when the devastated Londoners returned to survey the blackened wreckage of their homes and businesses, churches and storehouses, they found that much of the Aldgate and Bishopsgate area to the north-east of the walled City had been spared, but – in defiance of all hopes and prayers – the wind-driven blaze had jumped the stream in the Fleet Valley and devoured St Brides.

It just spared St Andrew, Holborn, a little to the north, and was about to consume the buildings of the Temple when fortunately it was quelled. Perhaps the wind dropped or possibly the energies and organisation of King Charles II, who had taken matters over from the desperate City Mayor, had something to do with it.

So Wren’s triumphant rebuilding of St Brides in the 1670s is being celebrated this autumn with a recital and a dramatic performance. But this is not in the actual St Brides, brick for brick, that was built by Wren, but rather, in the careful simulacrum of it that was a post-World-War II rebuilding. The design followed Wren’s faithfully, though leaving out the gallery seating and bits of late-Victorian décor. So what you see today is very much what Wren’s contemporaries, in their periwigs and cumbersome great-coats, would have see in the exciting modernity of the early 1700s. Except that the church is now nicely heated: no thick coats needed.

What the Blitz of 1940 also revealed were not merely extensive graveyards, spreading to the south-east right across where Farringdon Rd now runs, but – beneath everything else – the ruins of Roman mosaics. Evidently this site was a holy place well before an obscure `St Bridget’ lived and died – indeed before the first emissaries of the Christian faith landed on our shores. Relics and fragments of these distant times are now displayed beneath the church in the old crypt. This was sealed up, along with its bodies and coffins, when it came to be understood in the Victorian era that putting rotting remains beneath a church floor is hardly an hygienic method of disposal.

After the War, these and all the other newly-found bones were taken off to the Museum of London, but some of them were later returned to the church for storage in neatly labelled cardboard boxes. A previous Rector once opened a box to show me the tiny fragmented skull bones of Wynken de Worde, the man credited with the invention of print in the late fifteeth century. Though Fleet St is no longer the heart of newspaper production, the association of the church with print flourishes to this day. St Brides is where editors and journalists, including those who lose their lives in foreign wars, are celebrated and commemorated.

Samuel Pepys was baptised here, in the old pre-Great Fire St Brides while the poet John Dryden was a regular attender in the post-Great Fire one. But in recent times more obscure yet equally interesting members of the congregation have featured on wall-plaques on the west porch. Who has heard of Denis Papin? Very few, I guess, although he was a remarkable man, extraordinarily ahead of his time. A Huguenot from the Loire, he came to London in the 1670s and managed to interest several members of the newly-founded Royal Society in his ideas about steam. It could, he argued, be utilised to power devices, and he managed to invent a kind of pressure cooker.

Later, back in France and then on the far side of the Rhine, he created the first model of a piston steam-engine, a whole century before steam-power became the driver of the Industrial Revolution.

But when he returned in 1707 his old acquaintances in London had forgotten him or were dead, and several years later he was destitute. His lonely death in August 1713 went unremarked, and it was not until three hundred years later that a researcher in the Metropolitan Archive came upon the record of his burial in St Brides’ lower ground. Now he is commemorated in stone.

A nearby memorial similarly bestows dignity on a forgotten individual of a different kind. The current Rector of St Brides, Canon Alison Joyce, became interested in one of the victims of the over-publicised Whitechapel murders – one who evidently did not conform to the stereotypical assumption that the women were all sex workers. Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was not only born in St Brides parish, she was also married there in 1864 to a printer. She could read and write, and she had five children. But the marriage broke up and there is evidence that she chose to live instead with the man she would have preferred to marry in her teens but was not allowed to. When this relationship ended too, she seems to have taken to drink and the addresses recorded for her were workhouses and the lowest sort of lodging houses.

A plaque in St Brides reads ‘Remember her life, not its end.’ Given the uncertainties, pains and regrets that accompany too many people’s last days, that might serve as a kindly epitaph for many of us.

In St Brides Churchyard

Gillian Tindall’s The House by the Thames is available from Pimlico

You may like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall 

The Bones of Old London

Memories of Ship Tavern Passage

At Captain Cook’s House in Mile End

In Stepney, 1963

Stepney’s Lost Mansions

Where The White Chapel Once Stood

The Old South Bank

Leonard Fenton, Actor

In Old Deptford

Lifesaving in Limehouse

From Bedlam To Liverpool St

Smithfield’s Bloody Past

The Tunnel Through Time

Starting in 2013, Spitalfields Life Books published 15 books over 6 years until the pandemic shut us down. Now we are ready to begin again and are crowdfunding to raise enough money to cover production of our next 3 books. So far we have raised £8,810 but we still have a significant way to go.

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I have often seen the tall spire at Clapton from the footpath along the River Lea, but only recently I climbed the hill from the river to visit for the first time. Built as the Church of the Ark of the Covenant by the Agapemonites in 1892, it became the Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd after 1956 and then began a new life in 2011 as the Cathedral of the Nativity of Our Lord, a Georgian Orthodox Cathedral. Yet despite these different occupants, it remains almost unchanged since it was built in 1896.

My quest was to view Walter Crane’s windows which are considered to be his greatest achievement in stained glass and were described by Sir John Betjeman as”the richest Victorian glass I have ever seen” maintaining that “it made Burne-Jones and Rossetti’s glass look pale by comparison.”

On either side of the nave are a series of pairs of lancet windows with lyrical designs of fruit and flowers, and it is these benign images that welcome the visitor, glowing within the darkness of the church beneath the heavy wooden roof lowering overhead.

It is in the west windows that a certain surreal melodrama creeps in. Here you will discover a Blakean tableau of the Rising Sun of Righteousness, flanked by personifications of the Powers of Darkness – Disease and Death, and Sin and Shame. The Art Journal had a quite a lot to say about these in 1896 which I quote below.

The submission of women to men was a central tenet of the Agapemonites, a bizarre misogynist sect founded by Henry Prince in 1856 that advocated polygamy for men and died out in 1956.

Thankfully Walter Crane interpreted his commission loosely, portraying nine female figures and a single male who is not presented as dominant. Yet there is a grotesquely seductive morbidity in the portrayal of the Powers of Darkness, who are embodied as female which must have made uncomfortable viewing for the long-suffering women of the Agapemonites.

Outside, on the exterior of the church, the effect is as much Gothic horror as Victorian gothic. On the corners of the spire sit outsize sculptures of the symbols of the four evangelists – the winged ox for Luke, the winged lion for Mark, the eagle for John and the angel for Matthew, each trampling underfoot a human figure, representing the trials of earthly existence: Death, Sorrow, Crying and Pain.

It is a strange experience to confront these brutally sentimental representations of melancholy descending to nihilism, the relics of a sinister cult extinguished a generation ago reduced now to mere curiosities.

Pomegranates

Fig

Briar rose

Iris

Poppies in the corn

Olives

Grapes

Lilies

“The side windows of the nave, nine in all, are filled with flower and fruit designs, in considerably paler colour than the figure compositions. These include the rose, the fig, the pomegranate, the bay, the lily, the vine, the olive, corn and poppies, and the iris. They are naturally of less interest than the subject windows; but they are boldly, simply, and effectively treated, and in a fashion that is thoroughly glass-like, without too nearly following the lines of old work. Perhaps they are a trifle large in scale. It is characteristic of the thoroughness of the artist that no two of these windows are alike; and, more than that, there is absolutely no repetition whatever in them: even when one light seems at first sight to be the counterpart of the other, it is not actually so; each, it will be seen upon comparison, has been separately drawn.” Art Journal 1896

The Rising Sun of Righteousness (Photo by John Salmon)

“Thence rises the Sun, and from its rays issue the forms of Angels with flaming wings bearing a scroll inscribed, ‘Then shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in His wings.’ To the right and left of the window stand the figures of a man with upstretched hands, saluting, and a woman with hands clasped in contemplation. ” The Art Journal 1896

Disease and Death

“There is something most appropriately morbid in the many-hued raiment of Disease, crossed by forked tongues of flame; but it lends itself to strangely fascinating colour. The head is crowned, Medusa-like, with wriggling snakes, in place of locks of hair. The action of the arm behind the head, and the hand clutching the drapery on her breast, are indicative of intense pain. The white -shrouded figure of Death counterbalances in colour the figure of Sin. It again is encircled by a snake, which fulfils much the same decorative purpose as before; but in this case Death’s livid hand grips it by the neck. The other hand, uplifted, lets fall a blood- stained dart. It is a grim and ghastly figure enough; but at the same time admirably decorative. Imagine a white-clad figure, with greenish flesh and purplish wings, against a blue background, the blue and purple echoed, in fainter key, in the snake against the drapery. Its coils break the mass of white, whilst the greenish flames below, growing yellower as they begin to wrap the figure about, carry the lighter tones of colour into the lower part of the window. A clever point in the construction of these designs is the way the faces of Disease and Shame are artfully set in the colour of the drapery, as Death’s dark visage is wrapped in the folds of her white garment. To have made these painful subjects not only dramatically impressive, but at the same time decoratively delightful, is something of a triumph in design” Art Journal 1896

Sin and Shame

“Sin, draped in white, the cloak of pretended innocence, huddles herself together in the attitude of fear and shrinking; her bat-shaped wings break with deep purple the blue sky which forms the background to the greater part of the window. The blue below represents the sea, leaden towards the horizon, against which are seen flames, radiating, it may be presumed, from the Sun of Righteousness. A snake, encircling the figure, whispers the counsel of evil; and fulfils at the same time the decorative function of connecting, by the prismatic colour of its scales, the purple of the wings above with the colour of the flames below.

No less expressive is the companion figure of Shame, crimson-robed, with dull green wings, ruddy-tipped; about her sombre figure also leap the flames; her bent head, and the painful clutch of her hand upon it, are full of meaning.” Art Journal 1896

On the spire are the symbols of the four evangelists – the winged ox for Luke, the winged lion for Mark, the eagle for John and the angel for Matthew, each trampling underfoot a human figure, symbolising the trials of earthly existence: Death, Sorrow, Crying and Pain.

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In the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane

If ever I should require a peaceful walk when the crowds are thronging in Brick Lane and Columbia Rd, then I simply wander over to the City of London where the streets are empty at weekends and the many secret green enclaves of the churches are likely to be at my sole disposal. For centuries the City was densely populated, yet the numberless dead in the ancient churchyards are almost the only residents these days.

Christopher Wren rebuilt most of the City churches after the Great Fire upon the irregularly shaped medieval churchyards and it proved the ideal challenge to develop his eloquent vocabulary of classical architecture. Remarkably, there are a couple of churches still standing which predate the Fire while a lot of Wren’s churches were destroyed in the Blitz, but for all those that are intact, there are many of which only the tower or an elegant ruin survives to grace the churchyard. And there are also yards where nothing remains of the church, save a few lone tombstones attesting to the centuries of human activity in that place. Many of these sites offer charismatic spaces for horticulture, rendered all the more appealing in contrast to the sterile architectural landscape of the modern City that surrounds them.

I often visit St Olave’s in Mincing Lane, a rare survivor of the Fire, and when you step down from the street, it as if you have entered a country church. Samuel Pepys lived across the road in Seething Lane and was a member of the congregation here, referring to it as “our own church.” He is buried in a vault beneath the communion table and there is a spectacular gate from 1658, topped off with skulls, which he walked through to enter the secluded yard. Charles Dickens also loved this place, describing it as “my best beloved churchyard”

“It is a small small churchyard, with a ferocious, strong, spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone … the skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence, there is attraction of repulsion for me … and, having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight.” he wrote in “The Uncommercial Traveller.”

A particular favourite of mine is the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the East in Idol Lane. The ruins of a Wren church have been overgrown with wisteria and creepers to create a garden of magnificent romance, where almost no-one goes. You can sit here within the nave surrounded by high walls on all sides, punctuated with soaring Gothic lancet windows hung with leafy vines which filter the sunlight in place of the stained glass that once was there.

Undertaking a circuit of the City, I always include the churchyard of St Mary Aldermanbury in Love Lane with its intricate knot garden and bust of William Shakespeare, commemorating John Hemminge and Henry Condell who published the First Folio and are buried there. The yard of the bombed Christchurch Greyfriars in Newgate St is another essential port of call for me, to admire the dense border planting that occupies the space where once the congregation sat within the shell of Wren’s finely proportioned architecture. In each case, the introduction of plants to fill the space and countermand the absence in the ruins of these former churches – where the parishioners have gone long ago – has created lush gardens of rich poetry.

There are so many churchyards in the City of London that there are always new discoveries to be made by the casual visitor, however many times you return. And anyone can enjoy the privilege of solitude in these special places, you only have to have the curiosity and desire to seek them out for yourself.

In the yard of St Michael, Cornhill.

In the yard of St Dunstan’s in the East, Idol Lane.

At St Dunstan’s in the East, leafy vines filter the sunlight in place of stained glass.

In the yard of St Olave’s, Mincing Lane.

This is the gate that Samuel Pepys walked through to enter St Olave’s and of which Charles Dickens wrote in The Uncommercial Traveller – “having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight.”

Dickens described this as ““my best beloved churchyard.”

In the yard of St Michael Paternoster Royal, College St.

In the yard of St Lawrence Jewry-next-Guildhall, Gresham St.

In the yard of St Mary Aldermanbury, Love Lane, this bust of William Shakespeare commemorates John Hemminge and Henry Condell who published the First Folio and are buried here.

In the yard of London City Presbyterian Church, Aldersgate St.

In the yard of Christchurch Greyfriars, Newgate St, the dense border planting occupies the space where once the congregation sat within the shell of Wren’s finely proportioned architecture.

In the yard of the Guildhall Church of St Benet, White Lion Hill.

In St Paul’s Churchyard.

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The Secret Gardens of Spitalfields

At Bow Cemetery

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