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.