eastlondonhistory.com

As Victorian London mushroomed in size and population, Londoners looked back to earlier times, becoming fascinated by the archaeological evidence of earlier times - much of it dredged up by the toshers and mudlarks who made a poor living sifting through the water and filth of the East End’s sewers and riverbanks.

The problem was - as anybody who has ever picked up a metal detector in the hope of unearthing a Roman bracelet or Saxon diadem will know - that the choice finds are few and far between. But Shadwell mudlarks William Smith and Charles Eaton hit on an ingenious way to maintain the supply … they would make their own.

And around 1857, London archaeologists became suspicious at the sheer quantity of medieval lead pieces that were coming on to the market. More suspicious still, most of the hundreds of artefacts were coming from the London offices of William Edwards and George Eastwood, a pair of bona fide antiques dealer who appeared to have struck it very lucky.

Eastwood had been buying the objects from Edwards, who in turn had been paying Charley and Billy for some years for the objects they retrieved from the Thames mud. He took a paternalistic interest in the pair, who he thought of as ‘his boys’ and they had probably been little more than that when they started working for him in the mid 1840s. But in 1857, the pair decided to step things up a gear, and started making antiquities themselves. They would make crude plaster of Paris moulds for coins, etched with nails and knives, and cast objects in lead or pewter. The finished effect was crude and thus satisfyingly medieval. To add to the effect they would dip the finished coins in acid to age them. Later, the pair turned their hand to statuettes, daggers, ampullae and shrines.

If Edwards and Eastwood didn’t directly collude, they at least let their enthusiasm carry them away. Edwards described them as “the most interesting relics I have met with for years and the earliest pilgrims’ signs that have yet been found.” Eastwood called them “a remarkably curious and unique collection of leaden signs or badges of the time of Richard Il.” Remarkable indeed that two antique dealers could so precisely identify and date such hasty forgeries. Today’s experts would dismiss them immediately, though to be fair archaeological methods were considerably cruder then, and carbon dating was a century away.

Neither Billy nor Charley was literate, so the writing on the coins was a random jumble of symbols and letters, with dates in Arabic numerals dating the coins between the 11th and 16th centuries (Arabic numbering didn’t come to Britain until the 15th century). Two archaeologists, Henry Syer Cuming and Thomas Bateman, weren’t having any of it, dismissing the pieces as ‘almost worthless’ and ‘children’s toys’. But for every expert who trashed the dodgy coins, there was another happy to make a fool of himself. The Rev Thomas Hugo of St Botolph’s in Bishopsgate declared they were ‘pilgrims’ signs’. These were specially franked coins bearing the head of the king which pilgrims carried as protection on their journeys, producing them as a kind of passport if challenged. Pilgrim signs were being unearthed, and still are, in great quantity from digs in London and elsewhere.

Charles Roach Smith was another. The much lauded archaeologist was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, of the London Numismatic Society, and a founding member of the British Archaeological Association. He compiled the first collection of Roman coins from London digs (it ended up in the British Museum) and, though an amateur, was pioneer in urban archaeological digs. By the late 1850s, Smith was in his early fifties and had largely withdrawn from public life, but he happily emerged to defend the Shadwell coins, which Billy and Charley were now saying had been excavated in such numbers as a result of the diggings for the new docks at Shadwell. Smith too had dug many ancient coins from the London soil - though none of this vintage.

He was a coin expert then, but his area was a thousand years or so earlier than the coins in Billy and Charley’s ‘finds’. The science of archaeology was a young and undeveloped one too. Nevertheless, Smith declared them genuine on the curious basis that if fakes they would be “the most extraordinary insults that ever were offered to the judgments of collectors this century”. He seemed to be suggesting that it was the very unlikeliness of the find and the inaccuracy of the work that made them certain to be genuine. He was suggesting an audacious double bluff by the two forgers that they certainly never intended.

He also seemed to be offended by the very idea that anyone should perpetrate such a cruel and embarrassing fraud upon collectors. But while the effete Smith bent over backwards to believe, the sceptics were gathering strength. Cuming now had a good idea how the pieces were being manufactured, and gave a lecture in April 1858 to the British Archaological Association, clearly outlining the flaws and anachronisms in their designs, describing how they might have been made and aged and lambasting this ‘gross attempt at deception’.

The lecture was well reported, in the Athanaeum and the Gentleman’s Magazine. George Eastwood saw the value of his stock drop abruptly. Although Cuming had exaggerated when he spoke of ‘12,000 pieces’ we can assume that Eastwood was holding a great many rapidly depreciating coins. Billy and Charley were knocking them out for 2d apiece (less than 1p in today’s money), but Eastwood could sell them for a half crown or more (12.5p). His market evaporating, a panicking Eastwood, wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine assuring them that the pieces were genuine.

But Eastwood went too far when he sued the publishers of the Athanaeum magazine for libel. It would cause the whole story to unravel. We continue the story next week.

* With many thanks to www.mernick.co.uk. Go to the website for more on the Billy and Charley and much more on East End history.
*See too ‘The Billy and Charley forgeries’ by Robert Halliday, first published in ‘The London Archaeologist’ in Winter 1986.

The death of Felicity Ashbee at the end of July severed on of the last links with the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century. The movement had a profound effect on architecture, furnishings and designs right up to the Second World War - and after the triumph of modernism in the fifties and sixties has been rediscovered and reappreciated in recent years. But Felicity’s father, CR Ashbee, was much more than a maker of buildings. In his ‘Mile End Experiment’ he attempted to remake society - at least in microcosm. The Guild of Handicraft may have failed in business terms, but it gave a start to a generation of East End craftsmen and a legacy that lasts to this day.

Charles Robert Ashbee was the son of a wealthy London family. After studies at Wellington College and reading history at Cambridge he moved back to London and into Whitechapel’s Toynbee Hall, where he lectured in arts and crafts. The multiskilled Ashbee was a furniture designer, silversmith and architect, and was inspired by the ideas of William Morris and John Ruskin. He embraced not just their ideas on craftsmanship but sought to liberate the craftsman themselves. The ‘mission statement’ of the Guild said it all:

” To seek not only to set a higher standard of craftsmanship, but at the same time, and in so doing, to protect the status of the craftsman. To this end it endeavours to steer a mean between the independence of the artist— which is individualistic and often parasitical— and the trade-shop, where the workman is bound to purely commercial and antiquated traditions, and has, as a rule, neither stake in the business nor any interest beyond his weekly wage”.

Ashbee established the Guild in 1888 while still at Toynbee Hall, moving it on to workshops at Essex House in Mile End, with his partner, MH Baillie Scott. But he visualised a sylvan setting for his craftsman, and Mile End was never that. So in 1902, Ashbee made the bold decision to improve the quality of life for his craftsmen by moving the various Guilds - some 50 jewellers, enamellers, woodcarvers, cabinet makers, silversmiths, French polishers and bookbinders – from workshops in the East End of London to Chipping Campden in the centre of the Cotswolds. With wives and children, the group totalled around 200. It’s hard to imagine what the people of Chipping Camden felt about 200 cockneys descending into their midst, but the influx gave the town a fresh injection of life, bringing new ideas and making the little market town a centre for the study of Arts and Crafts and contemporary design in the early 1900s.

Charles and wife Janet settled in the neighbouring village of Broad Campden and four daughters followed (Felicity was born in 1913). But while Ashbee was a visionary and a genius, he was alas not a businessman. His craftsmen, with a limited local market, faced stiff competition from cheaper, mass produced goods. In London, the Guild had its own shop in Brook Street, Mayfair, and plenty of rich patrons willing to buy - Chipping Campden was rather different. Arguably today they would have a better chance of survival - there has been a revival in interest in handmade pieces, and there are numerous small workshops in the Cotswolds and other far-flung parts of the British Isles, marketing their goods over the internet.

The Guild was liquidated in 1907, though the Ashbees stayed on in Broad Campden, watching as the 50 original craftsmen slowly dwindled in number. It was a dispiriting end, and Charles drifted, unsure of where to turn next. That turn would be characteristically bold, the family decamping to Jerusalem, where Ashbee would work as a town planner and conservationist. In the thirties, Felicity would train as a painter at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, become a teacher and designer and member of the Communist Party. During World War II she worked at the code breaking centre at Bletchley Park, and in peacetime returned to London to teach art. In later years she would write, and in 2002 penned Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which brought her mother firmly out of the shadow of husband ‘CRA’.

Back in the Cotswolds, the cockney craftsmen did struggle on, but the sole survivor today is Hart Gold & Silversmiths, on Sheep Street in Chipping Campden. Ashbee would have approved of how things have gone for Hart and Co, with the business and skills being handed down from father to son. George Hart came down with the original 200 and in 1912 set up his own workshop. In 1930 son Henry came on board. And the tradition of fine work is carried on today by his grandson David Hart, along with Derek Elliott, William and Julian Hart. The company still proudly has (Guild of Handicraft) in parantheses beneath its name, though they are the only ones left. Anyone who happens to be passing through Chipping Campden between 4 and 11 October should drop in to see the company’s Guild of Handicraft 1908 - 2008 Exhibition.

The list of great Baroque violinists is long, with some legendary names in this early heyday of the instrument. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, Tomaso Albinoni, JS Bach, Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi enthusiastically explored the instrument’s potential, stretching its boundaries as the newly elaborate forms of the Baroque formed a bridge between Renaissance music and the later Classical era.

Among the names of these talented Italians and Germans, all of them born in the latter 1600s, there is one you’ll rarely see. But the improbably named Obadiah Shuttleworth, born in Spitalfields (possibly in 1675, possibly in 1680) was not only one of the finest exponents of the violin, he arguably changed the course of Classical music in England. His remarkable story involves a little help from a music-loving coal merchant, an ageing spy, and some masonic connections.

Obadiah was born into a musical family, with father Thomas working as a professional music copyist and harpsichord player. And he showed early skill on the violin, which had become increasingly popular in orchestral and chamber music since the development of the modern instrument a hundred or so years before.

He was soon taking part in concerts arranged by Thomas Britton, the so called ‘musical coal man’. Britton had moved to Clerkenwell from Nottinghamshire as a young man and apprenticed himself to a charcoal merchant. The polymath Britton, who had also studied chemistry, had built himself a large library, and was fascinated by Rosicrucianism, was also a keen singer and lover of music. In 1678, Britton fitted out the loft of his Clerkenwell house as a little concert hall. It was an unlikely setting for fine music, with a harpsichord and five-stop organ shoehorned into the tiny garret, the participants gaining entrance via an outdoor stairway.

But with the support of his friend Roger L’Estrange, a colourful character who had been sentenced to death as a spy for his support of King Charles I back in 1644, Britton got the venue up and running. The colourful L’Estrange, who was now in his sixties and pursuing a career in journalism, played the viol at the first concert.

Improbable though the setup was, it became one of London’s most important musical salons, with a remarkable mixture of enthusiastic amateurs and great musicans - Handel was among the visitors. The young Shuttleworth turned his hand to the organ at the evenings, which ran until Britton’s death in 1714. And it was on the organ that he made his living, being first made organist at St Mary’s Whitechapel, and then from 1724, at St Michael’s Cornhill. In his latter years he would be organist to the Inner Temple Society.

The change in European music was coming courtesy of a genius called Arcangelo Corelli. In the early 1700s the Italian master was pioneering a new form of Concerto Grosso (where the music passes back and forth between the full orchestra and a small group of soloists). Corelli made two violins the focus of the soloists (the ‘concertino’) and invented a new form of music that would prevail until the Classical era saw the rise of the solo concerto and the sinfonia concertante.

Back in London, Obadiah was becoming ‘celebrated for his fine finger on the organ, and drew numbers to hear him, especially at the Temple Church where he would frequently play near an hour after evening service’. The writer of those words, musical historian Sir John Hawkins, also wrote that Shuttleworth ‘played the violin to such a degree of perfection, as gave him a rank among the first masters of his time’. He was also a composer of music, and this status as violnist-composer qualified him perfectly for what would perhaps be his finest, if least known work.

Corelli died in 1713, and in the years after his death his revolutionary music became hugely popular in London. Writing in 1728, Roger North talks of young English musicians going to Italy, becoming enraptured by Corelli’s concertos, and casting all other music aside. Soon, the London public wanted to hear nothing else, and it fell to a couple of talented violinist-composers to arrange Corelli’s opus 5 solo sonatas in the concerto grosso form. One was Francesco Germiniani, the other Obadiah. There were family connections, with Obadiah’s brother Thomas and Germiniani both belonging to a music-loving freemasons lodge which met at the Queen’s Head tavern on the Strand. Obadiah, meanwhile, was a member of another lodge, in Pitfield Street, Hoxton.

Both Francesco and Obadiah published their arrangements of Corelli’s work in 1726. For the first time a classical concerto was scored for two ‘lead’ violins. If Gerniniani was the first man to publish in the new form in England, Shuttleworth was certainly the first Englishman. Perhaps, through their family connection, they had visualised themselves - among the greatest violinists of the day - as the two lead players. Certainly the man from Spitalfields had changed the course of English Classical music forever. Shuttleworth died eight years later, in 1734, leaving a widow, two daughters and an immense musical legacy.

The name of Bishop Edward Bonner is well remembered around Bethnal Green. We have a Bonner Street, and a Bonner primary school round the corner in Hartley Street. And within a couple of hundred yards, Victoria Park has a gate named after the bishop. Fitting memorials to a pious man of the cloth you might think. But this BIshop of London was known in his time as ‘Bloody Bonner’. During the mid-1500s, at the right hand of Queen Mary, he was a most enthusiastic burner of heretics (protestants in other words), killing hundreds before Mary’s death, Elizabeth’s accession and his own fall from grace.

That Bonner is so remembered in the area is more an accident of history than anything else. Among the many earthly rewards for Bonner’s service first to Henry VIII and then Queen Mary was the gift of the manor of Stepney, which came as part of the package for the Bishop of London at the time. Bonner was the last to hold the title of Lord Manor of Stepney, but a huge tract of open space became known forever as Bonner Fields. By the early 1800s, as building and industry encroached, the area had become brickfields, local artisans digging up the heavy London clay to make bricks to build the houses for a booming population.

It was this land that would be chosen as the site for the new Victoria Park. An 1839 report for the Registrar General recommended the creation of a public park, a healthy green space in the east to match the royal parks of west London. While the affluent West End had Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park, St James’s Park and the rest, there was a danger that the whole of east London would soon be under bricks and cobbles. So the new park was built, and got its Bonner Gate.

Bonner himself rose to a terrifying position of power at one of the bloodiest and most confused periods in English history. Born in 1500, the son of a Worcestershire sawyer, Bonner went up to Oxford and graduated in law. By 1529, he was chaplain to Cardinal Wolsey, and impressed both Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Bonner showed a remarkable ability to survive the internicine politics of the day, staying loyal to Wolsey even after the Cardinal’s fall from favour with the king. Cromwell had spotted in the lawyer a rare talent, and put him to use arguing Henry’s case in Rome, where the king’s casual attitude towards marriage and divorce had led to direct conflict with the Papacy.

Bonner wasn’t a popular figure, but it would be hard to question his stubborness or nerve. He toured the courts of Europe arguing Henry’s case. His manner - coarse, argumentative, dictatorial and overbearing - infuriated many. The French king, Francis I, was so offended by this medieval John Prescott, that he threatened him with a hundred strokes of the lash. Pope Clement supposedly threatened to have the envoy burned at the stake. He was effective though, and the king and Cromwell were grateful. During the 1530s he was granted a succession of ‘livings’, including East Dereham in Norfolk, Blaydon in Durham, Ripple in Worcestershire and Cherry Burton in Yorskshire. Bonner was becoming a very rich man.

At this point, Bonner was effectively batting for the newly separate Church of England against Rome. But following Henry’s death in 1547, he was appalled by the new Protestant reforms brought in by Lord Protector Edward Seymour (who effectively ruled England as regent for Henry’s son, the boy king Edward VI). In Edward’s name, Seymour repealed Henry’s ‘Six Articles’, rules on transubstantion, clerical celibacy, heard confession and the like, which kept the Church of England effectively a Catholic Church, albeit one separated from the authority of Rome.

Bonner was no fan of Rome either, and had been happy, like many other English clergymen, to help Henry break from the power of the Pope. But he certainly wasn’t ready to embrace the radical version of Christianity proferred by Martin Luther and his Protestants - for one thing, the challenge to authority went against his instincts. Stubborn as ever, he refused to bend with the new rules. The bishop was sent first to Fleet Prison in August 1547 and then to Marshalsea gaol in 1550. His sentence was ‘perpetual imprisonment’.

But perpetuity was shortlived. The young king died aged 16 in 1553, and Queen Mary came to the throne. Mary restored Catholicism and released Bonner, who took up his bishopric again, now an unashamedly Catholic and Rome-friendly cleric. Many were unhappy with the volte face. Most were given the opportunity to recant and accept Catholicism. Those who refused were burned at the stake. It’s from these bloody five years that Bonner’s terrible reputation comes, though some argue that Bonner was merely the instrument of a state where civil and ecclesiastical power had become one. Bonner was the instrument of Mary’s particularly brutal law, and on occasions was admonished for not being hard enough on the ‘heretics’.

He was pretty hard by most standards though. Hundreds were burned at the stake during the mid-1550s. Contemporary John Foxe describes his work thus: ‘This cannibal in three years space three hundred martyrs slew. They were his food, he loved so blood, he spared none he knew.’

If all modern political careers end in failure, those of the 16th century suffered a much worse fate, in prison or on the scaffold. Bonner predictably fell from grace under Mary’s successor, Elizabeth, and spent the final years of his life in and out of Marshalsea prison. He died there in September, 1569, and was buried in St George’s, Southwark.

It’s the sort of mad scheme that only an enthusiastic amateur historian would come up with … and for which researchers ever after would be eternally grateful. For when Mrs Basil Holmes set out to write a book detailing every London cemetery of every and all denomination and creed, there was no financial incentive in the job. The market for the book, would be small, but Isabella Holmes (to give her back her Christian name) was tireless, sometimes fanatical in tracking down her sites – often risking suspicion and physical danger in the process. But writing as she did at the close of the 19^th century, she caught some of the burial grounds just in time. If it hadn’t have been for her seminal work, many sites of special historic interest in the East End would have been lost to posterity.

The London Burial Grounds website* takes the work of Mrs Holmes as its starting point. The book is a ‘useful and surprisingly lively account’ of Isabella’s adventures around the East End and beyond ‘encountering mystified workmen, suspicious householders and savage guard dogs on the way’. Her aim was to preserve as many of the burial grounds as possible as open spaces - the demands on land in a London with an ever growing population were huge.

Many of the spaces we still have. There is St Anne’s Limehouse, one of Hawksmoor’s triumphs, with its mysterious pyramid, ‘beloved of occultists and psychogeographers’. And there is St Paul’s Shadwell, consecrated in 1671 and a plague pit for Stepney Parish originally. There is another old plague pit opposite St John’s Church in Wapping. And there are churchyards that have been pressed into new uses: St James’s Church in Ratcliff was destroyed in 1940 and the churchyard was cleared in 2002, to create ‘a bleak, joyless park overlooking the approach to the Rotherhithe Tunnel’. But there are still fragments of gravestones left at the park’s edges. The Brunswick Wesleyan Chapel Ground in Three Colts Lane, meanwhile, which reportedly contains some thousand bodies, is now the playground of the Cyril Jackson primary school. And some are lost forever, such as the Roman Cemetery which stood on Sun Tavern Fields as was, between the Highway and Cable Street today. Lost too is the Friends Burial Ground in Wapping, first used in 1700, but now buried beneath later redevelopments.

Some sites have a mixed history. The Roman Catholic Burial Ground in Bethnal Green was in use in the early 19^th century, but was possibly on the site of an earlier plague pit. Certainly, by the 1900s, some of the cemeteries were becoming full up (leading to the creation of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ – giant new cemeteries, including Tower Hamlets Cemetery (now the Cemetery Park) in the 1830s and 1840s. The rather ominously titled ‘Gatherings from Graveyards’ was written by London surgeon GA Walker in 1839, just as the problem of overcrowding was at its worst. Walker writes in sometimes gruesome detail of the worst of the burial grounds. The doctor was a subscriber to the ‘miasmic’ theory of contagion - the same thinking that attributed cholera and malaria to ‘bad air’ rather than, respectively, dirty water and mosquitoes. He thus had a particular interest in the health problems that could result from overcrowded local churchyards (which certainly were a health hazard, though for different reasons). He writes of the ground having to be ‘dug with care’ to avoid disturbing newly interred corpses.

Death was not always bad news for all concerned of course. For some it was good business. In 1736 it was discovered that the grave digger at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, one Thomas Jenkins, was selling bodies to Cesar Hawkins, a surgeon at Pall Mall. Mr Hawkins seems to have got away with what was effectively receiving stolen goods. Jenkins was less lucky, being sentenced to a public whipping. In ‘Albion’s Fatal Tree’, author Douglas Hay writes that ‘a mob of sailors and chimney sweeps met in Stepney Churchyard and he was tied to a cart. The cart horses were walked slowly so that he received many hundreds of lashes from the hangman, John Hooper, encouraged by the mob who shouted that he was not to spare him’.

The sites are peppered around the borough, from Bow in the east to Aldgate in the west, north from Bethnal Green to south on the Isle of Dogs. Many of us walk past the evidence every day without realising – a few headstones laid up against the wall of a park here, some fragments almost buried in tarmac there. The sites (and you can find dozens more at London Burial Grounds) could form the basis of a fascinating history tour around the East End … and the history that lies hidden beneath our feet and in unexpected corners.

* http://www.doubleo.fsnet.co.uk/bgpage1.htm

During the Victorian era and after, it was a tradition for the well-heeled to enter the East End to do good works. And though for many one visit was enough, many stayed to leave a lasting legacy - their institutions outliving them and even growing far beyond the boundaries of Tower Hamlets. The names of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett and Thomas Barnardo come to mind, Angela Burdett-Coutts and the ‘East End Squires’ who started Oxford House.

All had entered the East End and been appalled at what they saw - the poverty, disease, drunkenness and exploitation. This was a world of high infant mortality and low life expectancy. But Maria Dickin was different. Visiting Whitechapel in the early years of the last century she saw plenty of pain and suffering, but it was the animals that caught her eye. She found goats and rabbits huddling sick and injured in backyards. There were the costermongers’ and coal delivery men’s donkeys and horses, often crippled and lamed by heavy loads and overwork. It was a horror her sheltered Victorian childhood had ill prepared her for, as she would describe in her book ‘The Cry of the Animal’. The suffering and misery of these poor, uncared-for creatures in our overcrowded areas was a revelation to me. I had no idea it existed, and it made me indescribably miserable.’

The eldest of eight children of a Free Church minister, Mia (as she was known) was born in 1870, and showed a fierce independence from the start. Women of her class weren’t expected to work in the 1890s, but Mia opened a sucessful voice production studio in Wimpole Street - one of her customers was the famed singer Clara Butt. But at 28 she married her cousin, Arnold Dickin and was encouraged to give up work to run the house. It wasn’t enough, and like many bright and industrious women of the time, Maria had turned to charity work as a conduit for her energies. So in the early years of the 20th century she found herself in Whitechapel.

Mia had been forced to have her own sick Yorkshire terrier put down. Bad enough, she thought. But how much worse for those whol couldn’t afford vets’ bills. The response of those she spoke to was derisory. The poor don’t have any sick animals and if they did they would not bring them for treatment,’ was one comment. But after a long struggle for funds, Mia finally opened her first ‘People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor’. Outside the dimly lit cellar in the Whitechapel district of London, a notice read:

Bring your sick animals.
Do not let them suffer.
All animals treated.
All treatment free.

The shop was mobbed, with police called to control the crowd. More than 100 animals a day were now coming in, and there was a rush to find larger premises. And Mia was ambitious, writing: ‘I must have dispensaries throughout the whole of East of London … no, throughout the whole of London, then I became very bold - why not - throughout England - then the British Isles, the British Empire?’

In 1921 she took a gypsy caravan and, accompanied by a vet, travelled the length and breadth of Britain treating animals and setting up clinics along the way. By 1923 there were 16 PDSA dispensaries and a motor caravan dispensary. By 1935 there were PDSA hospitals, 71 dispensaries and 11 motor caravan dispensaries, and the PDSA was spreading abroad.

In 1943, Maria endowed the Dickin Medal to honour animals’ war work, and it became popularly known as ‘the animals’ Victoria Cross’. By February 2008, the medal had been awared 62 times, often posthumously. The first award of the medallion, bearing the words ‘For Gallantry’ and ‘We Also Serve’, was to Winkie, a messenger pigeon who flew 120 miles to deliver an SOS from a crashed bomber. Messenger pigeons were big winners in the early days. In 1949, Simon became the only cat to win the medal having survived the shelling of the HMS Amethyst during the Yangtze Incident. In modern times, sniffer dogs from the Royal Army Veterinary Corps have won a lion’s share of Dickin Medals. In 2003 in Iraq, Buster nosed out a cache of weapons and explosives, while in 2007, Sadie uncovered a bomb planted outside the UN HQ in Kabul.

But the medal is not without its controversies, most famous among them the medal awarded to Rob, the SAS dog who supposedly completed 20 successful parachute jumps into Italy and North Africa during World War II. On the ground, the enterprising collie would lick the cheeks of sleeping commandoes to waken them at first scent of danger. An oil painting of the fearless hound would later accompany his medal at the centre of the Imperial War Museum’s ‘Animals War’ exhibition. The only problem was, it never happened. It was all a scheme cooked up by the SAS barracks’ quartermaster, who had grown attached to Rob and didn’t want to send him back to his owners. Ex SAS man Quentin Hughes helped devise the story, and laughingly remarked years later that “Nobody survived 20 parachute drops, let alone a dog. You were lucky to survive three!”

By the time Mia died in 1951, aged 81, she had been made both OBE and CBE. She had established a huge and lasting legacy, but as ever, she was looking ahead. Writing for children toward the end of her life she said: ‘oday we are all thinking about what each of us can do towards making the world a better place for every man, woman and child to live in. We must not forget to include the animals in our programme, they too must have a better world to live in.’

Read more on Rob the SAS Dog and the PDSA Dickins Medal.

Robin Hood Gardens likely to be demolished: The decision by culture minister Margaret Hodge not to list Poplar’s Robin Hood Gardens as ‘a building of special architectural signficance’ brings the demolition of the 1970s’ Brutalist block a stage closer. Alison and Peter Smithson’s housing estate, completed in 1972, is a masterpiece to some, with its ’streets in the air’ concept. Alan Powers, Chairman of the 20th Century Society, calling it a “unique place”. It’s a bit tougher to find fans among people who actually live there - I did an admittedly brief vox pop of locals a few years back and comments ranged from ‘horrible’ to ‘really horrible’ to ‘we’re trying to be rehoused to somewhere with a garden’. There is a campaignto get Robin Hood Gardens listed as a historical landmark in order to save it from destruction. However, English Heritage has failed to back the proposal.

You can read more about Robin Hood Gardens here, and there are some great pictures of Robin Hood Gardens on flickr. See what you think. Robin Hood Gardens likely to be demolished … good idea or bad?

A frustratingly brief piece pops up on the radar courtesy of the Press Association, saying that seven paintings by the late East End gangster Ronnie Kray are set to be auctioned. However there’s very little in the way of what, where and by who, so if anybody knows anything, please post a comment to this story.

The works, which date from the early 1970s, in the early years of Ronnie’s life sentence, will be auctioned in Sudbury, Suffolk, on 26 July. Ronnie, who died aged 61 in 1995, and his identical twin Reggie (who died a few years later, as did older brother Charlie), was a terrifyingly violent man who used his years of incarceration to explore the other side of his character, through books, writing, art and a deal of spiritual self examination. I don’t know if the paintings are any good, but they should be interesting to see.

I stumbled across a terrific documentary on BBC1 last night, covering the work of the doughty officers who work out of Wapping’s River Police station. The programme, which the BBC in an admirable lack of hype had simply called River Police followed them over the course of a day, with handheld cameras. The work, unsurprisingly, largely seems to consist of talking people down off bridges or fishing them out of the water if they’ve already jumped.

Superb footage of the Thames by day and especially by night - this was a lovely little film, quite old fashioned in feel, and touching on a part of the city that all of us are aware of but rarely see. If you missed it, don’t worry. Courtesy of the magic of the internet and digital media you can watch River Police on your computer screen or download it to watch later. Just click the following link:

River Police on BBC 1

On 28 December 1911 a man stumbled into Leman Street Police Station and announced he had come to help the police with their enquiries into a particularly gruesome double murder … that of Hanbury Street restauranteurs Solomon and Annie Milstein.

Even the rudimentary policing standards of the day couldn’t miss the clues in this case. For as the officers searched Myer Abramovitch they found that beneath his top set of clothes was a second. Covered with blood the garments were identified as those of Solomon Milstein. Within three months, the hapless Abramovich would be dead, executed at Pentonville gaol.

The downfall of the Milsteins came about through a (relatively) honest attempt to boost their restaurant’s takings. The eaterie, at 62 Hanbury Street, never really got going, and just a few months after it opened, the takings were failing fast. So it was, in November 1911, that Solomon suggested setting up a gambling den in the basement. The game of choice was Faro.

Although it has died out now, Faro was one of England’s most popular card games during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The game was popular with the punters because it was easy to learn and offered good odds to the player. That was when it was played fairly at least. But Faro was notorious because it was so easy for the banker to rig, and games were invariably crooked. Similar to baccarat, it was banned in France but hugely popular in the Wild West; watch those Westerns and the guys in the saloon are probably playing Faro, with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday famed Faro dealers. Famous conman, card sharp and riverboat gambler Canada Bill Jones was once asked why he bothered playing at a notoriously crooked Faro game in Cairo, Illinois and replied ‘Yeah, but it’s the only game in town!’

The Milsteins’ was far from the only game in Spitalfields but it was proving mighty profitable. Every deal of the cards meant thrupence profit for the house and there was more. People started to lose of course, and then pledged their rings, watches and jewellery – which Milstein could then sell on. But Annie Milstein was unhappy. Cards she didn’t mind, but gambling was immoral. She put her foot down and Solomon and his partner Joe Goldstein reluctantly closed the school. On Boxing Day 1911, a Tuesday, they cleared out the gamblers and divvied up the last pot. Solomon, Annie and Joe took 4s 6d each (23p). A man called Hermann Leferron handed over a watch, for which he got £2 10s and he left, with the stragglers, at 12.45 on Wednesday morning, the 27^th of December.

But around 2.30am, one Marks Verbloot, who lived in the flat above the restaurant heard groans and began to smell burning. The place was on fire, with the Milsteins still inside. The police forced the door and found the pair, battered to death in their bed, with a strong smell of paraffin pervading the apartment.

Tracking down the card school wasn’t hard. Everyone came forward and every name was soon accounted for – except for 28–year-old Myer Abramovitch. But Abramovitch had barely covered his tracks. The police interviewed Lazarus Rickman, a gambler at the club, who identified a distinctive neckerchief found after the blaze as belonging to the errant Myer. And if Abramovitch had failed to come forward, he was hardly doing a good job of hiding himself. Another of the gamblers, Henry Seychur, was on the corner of Commercial Road and Leman Street on the 28^th when he spotted Myer enjoying a coffee at a stall across the road. Seychur strode over and demanded to know why Abramovitch hadn’t been to see the police, and promptly marched him to the nearby nick.

Abramovitch wasn’t happy, but made no attempt to escape. Yes the neckerchief was his, he confirmed to the detectives. They searched him and found pledged watches belonging to Leferron and Rickman. They then peeled off his suit to reveal Solomon’s blood-soaked garments beneath. It was a gruesome find – perhaps Myer had been hoping to pawn the clothes later.

The trial was a brief affair, opening at the Old Bailey on 7 February 1912 and closing just two days later. The defence claimed Abramovitch was insane, but to no avail. Mr Justice Ridley sentenced him to hang. An appeal failed too, and on Wednesday, 6 March, Myer took the drop at Pentonville, hanged by John Ellis and Albert Lumb.