23 Oct 2010, Comments (0)

The man with a passion for cats

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Artists find inspiration in many things. Vincent van Gogh loved the intense colours of the Provencal countryside, Paul Gaughin the exotic beauty of the South Sea Islands and Monet his beloved gardens which inspired his famous water lily paintings.

Louis Wain’s passion was cats.

The London suburban artist produced tens of thousands of drawings and illustrations of cats in a variety of human poses and occupation. His caricatures gently poked fun at the absurdity of everyday life but his humour hid a lifelong struggle with mental illness.

At his height of his fame, Wain was one of the world’s most popular artists but tragically died alone in a mental hospital in 1939.

His unique talent would have gone undiscovered but for his wife’s encouragement.

The couple had received a kitten as wedding gifts and, when his wife fell ill with cancer, Wain spent hours at her bedside in Kilburn sketching the cat as it played among the covers

Louis already worked as a newspaper artist and his dying wife suggested he show his boss the cat drawings.

His efforts were snubbed until several years later when the editor of the Illustrated London News discovered them gathering dust in a drawer.

He suggested that Wain draw a double-page illustration for a festive edition of the magazine showing a cats’ Christmas party. Wain responded with a picture containing more than 100 cats.

It might have seemed a Herculean task but Wain could draw with either hand with equal deftness and often amused his fellow workers by drawing with both at the same time.

The illustration was a huge success and he spent the next 15 years drawing up to 1,500 cats a year for newspapers and periodicals. Wain’s cats played across nursery walls of the world and appeared on postcards, posters and playing cards.

They played golf, drove cars and went fishing and reflected the various fads and fashions of their owners. When Europe went to war in 1914 the cats donned khaki and nursing uniforms.

The author H.G Wells said: ‘He made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world.  Any British cats that don’t look and live like Louis Wain cats should be ashamed of themselves.”

Louis won a place in the hearts of a nation of animal lovers and suddenly found himself regarded as a world authority on felines. He was elected President of the National Cat Club, attended jamborees and fetes and was often quoted on the subject.

His success spread to America where he was on the verge of pioneering the film cartoon about a character called Pussyfoot.

Pussyfoot was later acknowledged as an inspiration for Felix the Cat and several Walt Disney characters.

Unfortunately, Wain was hit by a bus and seriously hurt just before he could sign a film contract and spent several weeks in hospital.

It marked a turning point in the artist’s fortunes.

He had never recovered from death of his beloved wife Emily and a series of bad investments and bad luck – a ship transporting a container full of his china cats was torpedoed and sunk during the war – left him with little money.  His mental health began to unravel

Wain had always been a generous man lending freely and rarely quibbling over the cost of commissions.

He didn’t want to trouble his friends with his problems and stopped visiting his old haunts to avoid them.

He became a recluse preferring the company of his 17 cats. His mental condition worsened and he was committed to Middlesex County Asylum suffering from schizophrenia.

Hardly anyone realised what had happened to the reclusive genius until a journalist recognised him during an unrelated visit.

A number of public figures including Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald and H.G Wells launched a public appeal and Wain was transferred to a hospital where he had a private room and could continue painting.

His illness was mirrored in a series of cat paintings that become progressively more abstract as his grasp on reality loosened.

The colours became increasingly vivid, the images blurring and disintegrating into a vortex of kaleidoscopic patterns during the worst bouts of his illness. The paintings are today regarded one of the most important and graphic representations of mental illness recorded.

Louis Wain died in Bethlam Hospital in 1939.

If you happen visit his final resting place in St Mary’s Cemetery, Kensal Green, tread carefully.  Local legend says that, for years, a cat was seen be seen playing by the graveside of its master.

-o0o-

23 Oct 2010, Comments (0)

Lightning fists

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If you were alive in the 1920s and living in London’s Isle of Dogs, you might have seen a slim red-headed man running to beat the bus.

He wasn’t trying to catch it; just beat it round the island.

The man, Teddy Baldock, was training hard in an effort to become world bantamweight boxing champion.

He born in Poplar and was proud of the fact that his grandfather had been a bare-knuckle fighter.

His father, who also loved a fight, used to sink to his knees on arriving home from work to spar with Teddy.

Much to his mother’s amusement, the little lad learned to dart in and out like a mosquito, bring tears to Dad’s eyes with straight lefts.

His father took him to watch bouts at Premierland and other East End halls, and it was not long before Teddy climbed in the ring.

Out of the ring he was shy, but when the bell sounded he took on a Sphinx-like expression and became totally absorbed in what he was doing.

At the age of 14, he accepted two fights at different venues and won them both.

He got a job as a rivet boy at the Millwall Dock the same year, while fighting in his spare time.

Soon he was successful enough to turn to boxing full time and he beat the Millwall Terror, Ernie Jarvis.

In 1926, he took his record of 40 wins and one draw to America and began earning big money.

Two years he had captured both the British and European titles and was known as ‘the man with lightning fists.’

Now he was ready for a world title shot and took on the American holder, Archie Bell, at the Albert Hall. It was a gruelling fight which left both men exhausted.

At the end, Teddy gasped at his seconds, “Who won?”  They yelled back over the roar of the crowd, ‘You have!’

It was a triumph, although Americans later claimed it had not been a world title fight.  But Teddy did not celebrate.  He slipped away from the celebrations and went straight home to Poplar – and bed.

-o0o-

23 Oct 2010, Comments (1)

A killer – but women could not resist him

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til death do us part

George Joseph Smith fascinated women.  He was born in east London and spent much of his youth in a reformatory but, once he realised his potential, he took full advantage of the opposite sex.

And, it seemed, women could not get enough of him.

He married at least eight times and, on most occasions, made way for the next bride by drowning his current wife in her bath.

When he was tracked down by Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, and put on trial in 1915, such was his powerful attraction that females packed the Old Bailey.

They wanted to see for themselves the good-looking ‘monster’ who played the piano, loved poetry and killed women.

A jury found him guilty after retiring for only 21 minutes.

Smith came to police notice at the beginning of the Great War when a letter arrived at the Yard from a Blackpool boarding house.

The owner had read of a newly-wed Mrs Lloyd being drowned in her bath in Highgate and felt it was similar in detail to the death of Alice Burnham at his boarding house, just a few days after she married a Mr Smith.

The Yard sent for Chief Inspector Arthur Neil, who was known as Drooper Neil because of his round-shoulders and mournful expression.

The inspector’s first visit was to Highgate where the landlady told of sounds of a struggle in Mrs Lloyd’s bathroom on the afternoon of her death.

He learned that ‘Mr Lloyd’ then appeared in the sitting room and played Nearer my God to Thee on an organ.  He seemed composed until water began to leak from the ceiling and, on hurrying upstairs with the landlady, discovered his bride dead in the bath.

Soon after, he moved away with all their belongings.

When Drooper went to Blackpool, he confirmed that the second death was very similar to Mrs Lloyd’s – and that the husband’s description matched Mr Lloyd’s though he had given his name as George Smith.

The inspector found a file on Smith at the Criminal Record Office and the more he enquired, the more deviousness he uncovered.

The East End bigamist’s technique was to carefully select a victim, win her confidence with flattery and enquire how much money she’d saved.

Sometimes he bought a marriage licence, took his new sweetheart out for the day and then excused himself and dashed back to her rooms and vanished with her valuables.

He “married” again on meeting 31-year-old Bessie Mundy in Bristol after she inherited £2,500.  Within ten days he disappeared with the money.

Two years later, Bessie met him again by chance.  She was lonely and, incredibly, forgave him.

But it was misplaced trust which cost her life.  She was discovered a few days later with her head under bath water.

Drooper caught up with the smooth-talking Romeo in Hammersmith and arrested him.

Home Office pathologist Bernard Spilsbury told the court it was impossible for the women to have drowned accidentally in such small baths and Drooper staged a dramatic reconstruction, with a nurse, of how someone might be pushed under water.

The jury took little convincing.  Smith was found guilty of murder and hanged.

Drooper Neil later revealed that Smith himself rarely took a bath.

-o0o-

29 Sep 2010, Comments (0)

Dance crazy, just like dad

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Dancer Lionel Blair inherited his show business flair from his mum and dad, who were dance-mad Londoners.

Dad was a barber of Russian extraction whose great passion in life was ballroom dancing and met his wife-to-be at an East End dancehall in the 1920s.

During the Second World War the family lived in Hackney, but there was not much room to spare and Lionel’s younger sister, Joyce, slept in the bottom drawer of their parents’ wardrobe.

Lionel saw night skies lit up as the docks and  surrounding streets were blitzed and one day at school, while helping clear up broken glass and rubble, he managed to get his pals singing.  From then on, he was encouraged by teachers to entertain classmates.

In the 1950s Lionel and Joyce amused friends and family by jitterbugging and tap dancing, just as they’d seen at the cinema.

Their first stage appearance was at a talent show run by music hall’s Kate Carney in which contestants had to sing and dance to Kate’s best known songs. 

She gave them a week’s contract to jitterbug as England’s Youngest Swingsters.  Soon afterwards, Lionel landed a small part in the Burt Lancaster film The Crimson Pirate.

One of Lionel’s close friends was Bruce Forsyth.  They’d met as young dancers at London’s peekaboo Windmill Theatre.

Lionel moved on to TV and, for many years, his nimble feet and irrepressible smile could be seen on the small screen week after week.

 He appeared in Royal Command Performances, variety nights, concerts and game shows.

 If his dance-made dad could have seen him, he would have been proud.. and a little envious.

 For further reading: Stage-Struck by Lionel Blair

29 Sep 2010, Comments (0)

General who dodged cats

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William Booth, long-bearded patriarch of the Salvation Army, was a commanding orator.

His thundering speeches against exploitation and greed struck responsive chords in many East Enders.

But he not born a public speaker.  Indeed, as a young man, he almost gave up addressing open-air meetings.

Dead cats, stones and vegetables were flung at him near his home in Nottingham by gang of hooligans who singled him out.

But Booth dug in his heels against the bullies.

Later, when he moved to London with his widowed mother in order to find work, his experience helped him become adept at swaying audiences with simple but powerful oratory.

At first, the only job he could get was working for a pawnbroker.  But, after marrying fellow evangelist Catherine Mumford, he became a full-time preacher.

He launched the Salvation Army one Sunday in 1865 from a tent set up on the Mile End Waste.

Afterwards he said he felt at home, adding ‘I was haunted with a desire to offer myself to Jesus Christ as an apostle to the heathen of East London.’

Volunteers helped him find an old warehouse, where nightly meetings were held, but youngsters threw fireworks and stones through the windows and made life difficult.

As the work became better known, many poor people made one farthing (one quarter of a penny) contributions to the cause.

Booth was eventually able to take a lease on the People’s Market in Whitechapel Road where he opened kitchens to feed the poor.

If you were hard up, you paid a penny for a large bowl of soup and chunks of bread.  And, if you were penniless, you got them for nothing.

The Salvation Army was officially constituted in 1878, and with it came the uniforms and bands we know today.

Food and lodgings were established not only in the East End but, in time, across the world.

Booth became the Sally Army’s first general, though many people felt he was more saint than soldier.

 

13 Sep 2010, Comments (0)

Buckingham Palace link with a witch

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Few of the thousands of sight-seers who flock to the gates of Buckingham Palace each week realise that the ground on which they are standing was probably once the home of a witch.

Margarie Gourdemaine was believed to indulge in the black arts some 600 years ago after being brought up in the ancient hamlet of Eye Cross, near Tyburn Crossing.

In common with a number of other poverty-stricken women she earned a meagre living from her knowledge of herbs, mid-wifery and bone-setting.

Superstition was rife and it was all too easy for people to believe that some also concocted and sold poisons.

Margarie acquired a hut close to where the Palace now stands – possibly in the vicinity of the courtyard – and welcomed clients there.

One of those, said to have listened to her spells, was Eleanor wife of the heir presumptive Duke of Gloucester.

The impetuous and grasping Eleanor dreamed one day of becoming Queen and spread rumours of treason at court.

The great lady was eventually found guilty of doubtful charges involving the black arts and put to death. 

Soon afterwards, Margarie the Witch of Eye, was also accused of distilling murderous potions and was burned to death ‘at Smythfield, ye 27 Octuber, 1441.’

Maybe, even today, the stamping of the Changing of the Guard outside the Palace carries an echo down to the witch who went too far.

13 Sep 2010, Comments (0)

Penny-farthings pulled the girls

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In grandad’s day, hopping on your bike was a cheap and cheerful way of seeing the countryside or spending a day at Southend.

Almost everybody did it.  Pals joined cycling clubs and streamed away at weekends in search of rural bliss: saddlebags bulging with sandwiches, drinks and a puncture repair outfit.

Bicycle-liberated Londoners found it gave them a sense of freedom and good health.  But riding the earliest boneshakers – over 100 years ago – required daring and skill.

Cycle schools sprang up in order to instruct eager riders on how best to mount and control the first penny-farthings.

You had to push off with your right foot until the machine was moving swiftly enough for you to hoist yourself up to a small precarious saddle.

There were no soft tyres and usually no brakes.  The way to stop was to press back on the pedals, or simply fall off.

Young men dressed in cycling jackets and knickerbockers, with cloth caps turn back to front to counter wind velocity, wobbled past admiring females.

England’s first bicycle race was from London to Brighton but the favourite hardly reached the outskirts of London before he gave up from exhaustion.

A few weeks later he tried again, in the company of two friends, and completed the course in 16 hours: earning newspaper headlines for ‘An extraordinary velocipede feat.’

Women were by no means excluded from cycling but the need for them to wear long discreet skirts made it a difficult pastime.  However, side-by-side tricycles soon came in and then inflated tyres.

By then the East End and West End alike were bike crazy.

Music hall entertainers regularly brought the house down with Daisy Daisy, give me your answer do, by encouraging appreciative audiences to join in the rollicking chorus of You look sweet, upon the seat, of a bicycle made for two.

Policemen were given bicycles to patrol the streets, soldiers formed cycle battalions.  And it was not until well after the Second World War, with the advent of  family cars and busier roads, that the bike took a back seat.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to find a surviving boneshaker.  

A hundred years ago you could have got one in Bethnal Green or Poplar for £2.  Today it could cost you well over £1,000 at auction.

13 Sep 2010, Comments (0)

Girls who became artful dodgers

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Beggars were two a penny in London’s East End 150 years ago when work was scarce and life was hard.

For those driven by desperation, there was an inevitability that they would step over the boundary into crime and get caught, which sometimes meant transportation to Australia.

Even so, artful dodgers kept the law on the hop for years. Girls sometimes took the first slippery step by becoming ‘lucifer droppers.’

The idea was to take position at a busy junction while carrying two or three boxes of matches. When a suitable gentleman approached, she’d contrive to get in his way so that they collided.

As matches spilled into the mud, she howled with tears. Inevitably, the man calmed her down by thrusting money into her hand and hurrying on his way.

Youngsters took the ruse a step farther by carrying a trayful of white peppermints which looked disastrous when strewn in the gutter. Henry Mayhew, studying the poor in Victorian London, identified all manner of beggars including apparent victims of pit blasts.

These were men quick to display burns or scars, though police said the injuries were often self-inflicted. The dodge was to cover part of a limb with thick soap and then saturate it with vinegar. The soap would blister and the arm or leg looked as if it was festering.

Begging could be lucrative. Mayhew talked to one man who’d been a beggar for 70 years: earning as much as 30 shillings on a good day in Westminster.

Even so, countless men and women begged simply to survive. There was no work for them and no state support unless they chose the harsh confines of a workhouse.

In those days people who truly needed help usually found East Enders generally more understanding and responsive than their wealthier neighbours in the City.

6 Sep 2010, Comments (0)

Scandal of baby farming

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Baby farming angered Londoners beyond belief in Victorian times.

It was a trade encouraged by strangers who approached mothers of illegitimate children and offered to take them off their hands permanently on payment of a few pounds.

Poverty forced large numbers of women to become prostitutes in poor areas of the capital and the offer was tempting.  But it gradually emerged that many of the infants were dying under suspicious circumstances.

London journalist James Greenwood grew concerned in 1870 over the number of similar advertisements which appeared in local newspapers:

CHILD WANTED.  A widow with a little family of her own would be glad to receive the charge of a young child.  A small payment will secure adoption.

It was an agonising way out of a predicament for poor unmarried mothers, but they had little chance of receiving maintenance from the fathers and faced a bleak future in the workhouse.

So Greenwood answered one of the ads, pretending to have a weak daughter he could no longer manage.

A woman who replied, care of Stepney Post Office, said she would be happy to take his daughter “as a companion for my own darling child” on payment of a suitable sum.

She turned out to be a Mrs Oxleek, of Bethnal Green.  When Greenwood called at the house he was told by a bedraggled servant girl that Mrs Oxleek was visiting an insurance company “where you pays for young ‘uns and burying and that.”

Greenwood, now pretending to be a doctor, noticed a baby in a corner wrapped in a filthy garment.  But when Mrs Oxleek returned home she turned out to be “a fat, florid woman with a sunny smile who gave nothing away.”

The ease with which it was possible to get away with baby farming was revealed at an inquest which Greenwood attended soon after.

It was held into the death of little Fred Wood, whose unmarried mother had handed him a few months earlier to a Mrs Savill, of Bow.  Mrs Savill had lost five of the 11 infants in her care but this was the first that led to an inquiry.

The court was told that Fred broke a thigh in an accident on the stairs and his injury had not mended.  Yet he was kept in a straw-lined egg box only 16 inches wide, in which he could not turn.

Mrs Savill claimed that she had never tied the boy’s legs together.

The jury returned a verdict of death from natural causes but wanted to add a rider, censuring Mrs Savill.  However the coroner would not permit it, and Mrs Savill left court “without a stain on her character.”

Another young mother, 17-year-old Caroline Williams, told a separate inquest that she handed her daughter, Fanny, to a woman named Ann Brown who said she would adopt her for £5.

In return, Brown gave her a note promising “to bring Fanny up in a respectable manner with no further trouble or expense to her mother or friends.”

Four months later Fanny was dead.

Greenwood noted that London coroners recorded an average of 226 infant deaths by foul play a year in the 1850s.  But he believed that many other infants found their way into the hands of beggars “especially if they are of a convenient age at which they can walk but not talk.”

The investigator’s sad conclusion was that most children who were handed to someone else to bring up on payment of a fee were never heard of again.

6 Sep 2010, Comments (0)

Genius with a £2 fiddle

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Lionel Bart’s musical career started when his dad, a tailor, bought him a second-hand violin in Petticoat Lane.

It cost £2, though six months later he had his doubts.  All Lionel could scrape out was The Bluebells of Scotland and he repeated it so many times that people covered their ears.

The boy from Bethnal Green was the last of ten children born to Austrian immigrant parents.

His mother, Yetta, adored him and was convinced he was an artistic genius but music lessons cost money.  And there was not much to go round.

So Lionel turned to the piano and picked out tunes with one finger at their home in Underwood Road.

He used the same simple technique in later life to write chirpy songs for West End musicals which brought fame.

When he was 21, Lionel felt that his family name, Begleiter, was not right for show business.  Glancing out of a bus which passing Bart’s Hospital, he decided it was the name for him: Lionel Bart.

He did not however foresee that some Cockneys would adopt his new name in rhyming slang, asking ‘Phew, who’s dropped a Lionel?’

In the late 1950s he was hired to write songs for a film in which an almost unknown Cliff Richard appeared.  One of them was Living Doll which sold a million records and, from then on, both young Londoners were unstoppable.

Next, Lionel learned that a play called Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’Be needed songs to turn it into a musical.  He went home and began writing. 

He said: “I’d come up with two or three songs in an evening, go in next morning and sing them to the company as well as choreograph them.”

Fings opened with a roar in 1959.

Even greater success came with Oliver! in 1960.  Numbers like Consider Yourself and As Long As He Needs Me were pre-recorded by Max Bygraves and Shirley Bassey, so that when opening night came around, it was already a winner.

Afterwards, Lionel stood on stage bathed in perspiration, taking dozens of curtain calls.  The Queen saw the show twice in a fortnight.

But disappointments followed.  New musicals got lukewarm reviews while he was buying expensive homes around the world.  By 1972, he was bankrupt and moved into a flat over a launderette.

However, before he died in 1999, there was a revival of Oliver! at the London Palladium and a new generation of theatre-goers applauded his music.

So, was his mother right about him being a genius?  “Who me?” he said, “I’m just an ordinary bloke who can whistle a song.”

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