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For many, Alan Aldridge epitomised the spirt of the 1960s and 1970s, with his evocative, psychedelic images perfectly capturing the feel and the art of the age. Artist, illustrator, graphic designer, art director and film maker, Aldridge describes himself simply as a ‘graphic entertainer’. And though the exploding colours and shapes of his designs lit up the Swinging London of the sixties, this East End boy admits he was too busy working to really notice what was going on.

Most designers graduate from art school, but Aldridge’s apprenticeship was very different. Born in the East End in 1943, he left school at just 14 to work on the docks. During his teens he drifted from one odd job to another, working among other things as an insurance clerk, a chicken plucker and a fruiterer. But at age 20, with no formal art training, Aldridge picked up a pencil and started to draw, first sketching portraits in Soho, finding work as a freelance graphic artist, becoming a ‘junior visualiser’ at the Sunday Times and graduating to designing book jackets for Penguin.

It was the book jackets that blew people away. Penguins had first been designed as a cheap alternative to the hardback. Though their classically simple covers were design classics in themselves, they were nothing to what Aldridge would come up with. As well as a good read, Penguin readers in the sixties were often treated to an explosion of colour, shapes and ideas, courtesy of Alan’s pen. Aldridge found the idea of new images blasting away the conventional a very appealing one. ‘It was a special period, because the young really felt they had a chance of overthrowing that knackers yard England,’ as Aldridge observed recently.

But though Alan’s unique talent took him to the very heart of what was then the world’s most fashionable city, he freely admits he was ‘too much of a workaholic to be dashing around town’. Aldridge was usually in his studio. He would become Senior Art Director for Penguin Books and in charge of marketing (his pictures the perfect marketing tool of course) but on the way he became good friends with the Beatles. He would act as design consultant for the ill-fated Apple Corps and work with the four on what would eventually become ‘The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics’. Much of what we recognise today as ‘typical’ sixties commercial art, with its cartoon style and soft airbrushing, originated in Aldridge’s studio.

He became fantastically popular with rock’s aristocracy and designed album covers for The Who (’A Quick One’), The Rolling Stones, Pnk Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and many more. He would do the poster for ‘Chelsea Girls’, Andy Warhol’s first commercially successful movie, and would turn his hand to the interiors for London’s Playboy Club, for the House of Blues and the Hard Rock Cafe. This multi-talented artist would also illustrate children’s books such as ‘The Butterfly Ball’ and ‘The Grasshoppers Feast’.

Today, Alan lives a long way from his boyhood East End. One of his most recognisable album covers was for Elton John’s ‘Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’, released in 1975. The record would lead him to Los Angeles to work with Elton on a full length animation of the ‘Captain Fantastic’ idea. The project was never finished. The 1970s were very different times to today, and Aldridge ruefully remembers that the singer’s decision to ‘out’ himself saw commercial backing for the project swiftly evaporate. Alan however remained on the West Coast of America, where he lives to this day. A working artist, he’s as busy as ever.

Now 65, Aldridge is back in his native London for a while at least, with the first retrospective of his work in his own country. Alan Aldridge - The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes, runs at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 2YD from 10 October 2008 to 25 January 2009.

Daniel Farson’s fame in the East End is, these days, largely down to his tenure of the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs. The photographer and TV documentary maker was host to a shambolic though entertaining couple of years in the early 1960s, when the former Newcastle Arms became packed every night and celebs – Lord Snowdon, Tony Bennett, Clint Eastwood, Shirley Bassey, Groucho Marx and William Burroughs to name just a few – visited for a drink.

The venture was to end in headaches, hangovers and debt. But Farson’s life in Tower Hamlets was far more than a brief stint at the Waterman’s. He had arrived in Limehouse in the late 1950s, driven from the West End by the impossibility of finding somewhere affordable to live, and to the East by the possibilities of finding a house by the hustle and bustle of the river.

He found it in Narrow Street. A flat was being converted above a barge repair yard, part of the premises of barge owners, the Woodward Fishers. Farson moved in and began roaming Docklands with his camera, documenting a waterside that has, in the last few decades, disappeared completely. And as he did so he started to uncover the history of the East End. He discovered that his house was Elizabethan, and that it had once been a pub called the Waterman’s Arms. It was a name he was to co-opt for his business venture a few years later.

But it is his photographs that tell the true story of the East End in the 1960s*. When he moved there it was as unusual as emigrating – his mother and friends certainly didn’t approve – and it was before the invention of ‘Docklands’ made Tower Hamlets a popular and pricey domicile for incomers. Though he was a curiosity at first, his evident love of the area sound made him friends – and that made it possible for him to get the uninhibited and intimate photographs of normal East Enders going about their work, travelling on the river, and most of all drinking in the pub.

Farson loved a drink, as did his subjects. But he managed to keep a steady hand and had a remarkable knack for getting right into his subject’s face – catching a mood or a moment, sometimes with the subject unaware of his presence, often posing for impromptu portraits.

There are snaps from the making of Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (Farson had a small role as a navel officer, which was unceremoniously dumped on the cutting room floor by his friend Littlewood. There are striking black-and-white images from Petticoat Lane, where the stall holders and punters are far more colourful and interesting than anything on the stalls themselves.

And there are the drinking scenes. Of course it’s far easier to make subjects forget the camera when there is plenty of drink inside them, and these are largely pictures of East Enders having a laugh. Music figures large too. Part of Farson’s grand plan for the Waterman’s Arms was to give a boost to the great East End tradition of singing in pubs – the roots of that other cockney invitation the music hall. And in its brief life, the Waterman’s stage hosted local talent, such as the man who sang Mule Train, banging his head with a tin tray in time to the music; a docker who impersonated Frankenstein’s monster; a cabbie who sang Jolson; and a girl in glasses known as the ‘white mouse’ who sang so off-key she was greeted with cheers whenever she took the stage. The laughter in the pub crowd comes across in every picture.

A photo of Shirley Bassey on stage gives just a taste of artists who joined in. George Melly, Ida Barr, Annie Ross and, on memorable occasion, Judy Garland, all sang at the Waterman’s Arms.
*Limehouse Days – A personal experience of the East End, by Daniel Farson, published by Michael Joseph ISBN 0718132564

Whitechapel painter David Bomberg has been described as ‘the most audacious’ of the young group of East End artists, all born in the 1890s, who became dubbed ‘The Whitechapel Boys’. His refusal to be bracketed as a painter led to conflict, most strikingly when one major patron turned a commissioned work down … forcing a furious Bomberg to go back and have another go. And it also saw him undertake an extraordinary artistic journey, from his early cubist compositions to his later expressionist landscapes.

David Gershen Bomberg was the seventh of eleven children, born on 5 December 1890 to a family of Polish Jews in Birmingham. His father, a leatherworker, moved the family to Whitechapel when David was five years old. A talented artist, he left school to study at the City & Guilds of London Art School in Kennington, then returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer.

It was a solid trade but not one for the young Bomberg. He raised the money to study painting at the Westminster School of Art, with help from the Jewish Education Aid Society and John Singer Sargent. The latter was the most successful English portrait painter of the time, and a geneous patron to other artists. At Westminster, Bomberg came under the tutelage of Walter Sickert. The great British painter would later, improbably, be collared as a suspect in the Whitechapel Murders, but in 1908 he was better known as a major figure in English Art, an impressionist who used London scenes and people as his material. This emphasis on the ‘gross material facts’ of London life made a big impact on Bomberg.

The young painter was now absorbing the work of Cezanne and the Post-Impressionists, whose number included Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec. As the movement mutated into Fauvism and Cubism, with new stars such as Matisse, Derain, Braque and Picasso, Bomberg began studies at the Slade School of Art. It was an astonishingly creative period, with professor of art Henry Tonks (’the most renowned and formidable teacher of his generation’) teaching Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg, Gwen John, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer among others. There was a host of East Enders in there, and Bomberg won the Tonks prize in 1911 for his drawing of Whitechapel artist and poet Rosenberg.

But he was swiftly moving away from conventionally figurative and representational art. A 1912 London exhibition of work by the Italian Futurists opened his eyes to the abstractions of Severini and Picabia. In 1913 he travelled to France as a guest of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and met Picasso, Derain and Modigliani.

The pace of change of European and English art in the early 20th century was furious, and it is a confusion of movements and schisms. Leaving the Slade in 1913, Bomberg first hooked up with the Omega Workshops of the Bloombsbury Group (whose members included Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, as well as painters Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant). There was a falling-out and Bomberg went on to exhibit with Sickert’s Camden Town Group in 1913. His fascination with the shapes and dynamics of the machine age saw him aligned with Wyndham Lewis’s shortlived Vorticists, but soon struck out on his own, with solo shows.

But despite a successful exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, money was a constant problem. Like fellow student Rosenberg, he appears to have enlisted in the army as much for a solid wage as any patriotic imperative. In 1915 he signed up for the Royal Engineers, transferring in 1916 to the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. In the same year he married his first wife and was sent to the Western Front. The mechanised slaughter of the trenches, which took the life of his own brother, killed Bomberg’s faith in the machine age.

He emerged from the service in 1918 a changed artist and with a commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund. Bomberg was warned to ’steer clear of Cubism and Futurism’ but the resultant work was far too avant garde for the taste of the committee. They rejected the first version of ‘Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company’ as a ‘futurist abortion’. A furious Bomberg was mollified by his wife and persuaded to try again. Now the uniforms were literally correct and the board were happy. But in the new painting Bomberg totes a heavy beam, a metaphorical nod to the pressures of working to patrons’ demands.

The financial burden, at least, lifted with peacetime, and Bomberg travelled widely, visiting Palestine (1923-27), Spain (1934-35), Morocco (1930), Greece (1930) and Russia (1933). He increasingly worked in landscapes and portraits. From 1945, he combined his painting with teaching, and influencing a new generation of young London painters His pupils at Borough Polytechnic, by the Elephant and Castle, included Jewish emigres Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.

Much of Bomberg’s work is in the Tate Collection (to which, many thanks for the images used here), at its various galleries around England. You can see Ju-Jitsu, currently hung in the Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism exhibition, ‘States of Flux’ on Room 2, Level 5 of Tate Modern on the South Bank.
(Room 2)

* Bomberg’s name is remembered in David Bomberg House, on Borough High Street, between London Bridge and the Elephant and Castle. A hall of residence for students at London South Bank University, it marks his stint as a teacher at the insitution in its days as the Borough Polytechnic.

pictures:
Vision of Ezekiel, (the Tate Gallery)
In the Hold 1913-14 (Tate Gallery)
The Mud Bath, 1914 (Tate Gallery)
Tregor and Tregoff, Cornwall 1947 (Tate Gallery)
Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, first version (Tate Gallery)
Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, final version (National Gallery of Canada)

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A century ago the streets of the East End were very different to today, with a vibrant community of street traders, beggars and confidence tricksters employing any and every manner of business to drag them out of poverty. It’s a colourful world that would be lost to us were it not for an astonishing and immense photographic archive, compiled over three decades by one of the great pioneers of the camera.

Of course Francis Frith didn’t only snap the East End. Amazingly, this devout Quaker, former grocer and ace businessman set himself the project of photographing every city, town and village in Britain, as well as undertaking exotic and perilous photo-expeditions to Africa. But it is his pictures of the bootblacks, knife sharpeners, organ grinders and cake sellers of Whitechapel that provide a vivid history lesson in the nature of Victorian poverty.

Frith had established a thriving grocery business in Liverpool by 1855, but had always yearned to travel. He sold up for the enormous sum of £200,000 – around £15m at present values. A man of leisure, and captivated by the new science of photography, he set out to see the world.

He spent the next four years travelling to Africa, using a specially designed wicker carriage that doubled as sleeping quarters and dark room. He laboured for hours in his sweltering dark room, but the results were spectacular. Back in London, he exhibited to the Royal Society and was rapturously cheered.

Frith may have been an artist, but he was ever the businessman, and he spotted an opportunity in the increased leisure time of the Victorians. Bank holidays and half-day Saturdays had been made law by an Act of Parliament, and Frith reckoned that the new tourists would want souvenirs to commemorate their days out. The idea of the picture postcard was born, and Frith set out on his epic journey round Britain. It was to take the remaining 30 years of his life.

His pictures of the East End weren’t pretty mementoes of course. But deliberately or not, the sheer number of shots Frith took leaves us with an amazing photo-documentary of life on east London’s streets in the last years of the 19th century. The street traders were often grindingly poor. Selling a few lucifer matches was often a pretext for begging. Bryant and May of Bow employed 700 girls to sell their matches on London’s streets, and Frith’s picture of a shoeless and emaciated Bryant and May vendor paints a thousand words.

His pictures say a lot about the poverty of that age and the wastefulness of ours. Nowadays, we wouldn’t employ knife sharpeners, chair menders and street cobblers – we would simply throw away and buy new. And the growth of casual wear means there would be no employment today for the hundreds of shoeblacks who plied their trade in Tower Hamlets.

East Enders had a bewildering number of morning and evening London papers to choose from – and there were paper sellers on every corner.

Between the 1870s and late 90s, Frith wandered the East End streets with his camera, capturing the baked potato sellers, muffin and gingerbread men, strawberry vendors and the rest who have long disappeared. He also amassed an archive of shots of the bustling Thames, with steamers and good ships putting in and out of the Port of London.

Frith died in 1898 at his villa in Cannes, his mammoth project still growing. The Frith Archive continued to grow for another 70 years, in fact, by 1970 containing more than a third of a million pictures.

You can see more pictures of the East End at the Frith archive on the web, at www.frithbook.co.uk, or contact The Francis Frith Collection, Frith’s Barn, Teffont, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP3 5QP for details of books and prints. Tel: 01722 716376. Email: uksales@francisfrith.com.

When William Holman Hunt
died in 1910, it brought to an end a painting career that had begun more than 60 years before – a career which had brought him renown for
his historical scenes and tableaux from the Bible and the Holy Lands.
Hunt travelled to the Middle East to get the detail just right for his best-known, and most critically appraised work, ‘The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple’. Ironically, the cast of Jewish faces you see staring out at you belong not to natives of Palestine, but to the artist’s East End neighbours – because Hunt could not find any Middle Eastern Jews to sit for him.
A long way up
Hunt may have died a pillar of the artistic establishment, but 60 years before his demise, he had been the enfant terrible of the English art scene. Along with John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he had formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and challenged the very idea of what cons-tituted great painting.
But, unlike Millais and Rossetti, Hunt wasn’t a child of rich parents, and it had been
a long, painful slog for him to even become an artist.
Hunt was born in 1827 into a poor family in Cheapside. From his boyhood he was desperate to become a painter. His father, a warehouseman, was having none of it, and the young William was sent to work as a clerk in the City at the age of 12.
Hunt still practised painting in his spare hours, and in 1844, at the third attempt, he was accepted as a probationer at the Royal Academy School.
Hunt met Millais and Rossetti at the school and introduced the pair to the
writings of John Ruskin, the renowned art critic who was railing against the lush, painterly canvases of the likes of Reynolds, Turner and Constable. Ruskin was urging artists to return to the purity, simplicity and accuracy of medieval painting as it was before the painter Raphael.
The group dubbed themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and set about transforming Ruskin’s theories into paintings.
For Hunt, the painstaking rules they had set themselves meant that his works often took years to complete, as he painted in every blade of grass, every leaf on a tree. Works such as ‘The Awakening Conscience’ and ‘The Light of the World’ took between five and 10 years to complete.

Fell for model
Hunt followed many artists into taking a studio in the East End. He may have been successful, but his painfully slow pace of working meant he
wasn’t yet rich, and space and models for his painstaking portraits were both much cheaper east of the City.
Like his Pre-Raphaelite brothers, Hunt soon succumbed to a weakness for
his beautiful models. But
being a religious and high-minded man, Hunt decided to reform and marry East End girl Annie Miller. Both plans ended in failure.
Success at last
By 1854, Hunt’s financial worries had abated a little, and he decided to take a trip to the Middle East.
His plan was to get as close to the source of the Scriptures as he could, and make his religious work as accurate and detailed as possible.
Hunt certainly gleaned a huge amount of detail of
buildings, scenery and vegetation, and he excitedly began
his masterwork. But try as he might, he could find no local people who were prepared to sit for him.
Disconsolate, he returned to his East End studio, where ‘Saviour’ sat unfinished for six more years. In 1860, Hunt realised the answer had been staring him in the face. The Jewish emigrants of the East End had the profiles and features he needed.
They sat for Hunt and, months later, art dealer
Ernest Gambert bought the finished masterpiece for the unheard-of amount of £5,500.

As we approach a new century, few of us today have any links with World War I. The old soldiers at the Cen-otaph get fewer every year, and we are left with images of trench-bound madness and sadness at the millions of young lives wasted.
But there is a legacy peculiar to the First World War – that of a group of young men who combined vivid, first-hand accounts of the horror with a rare poetic skill. Today, the work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke is widely read. But there was one who could have been the greatest of all.
The irony was that the war, having pulled the best work out of Isaac Rosenberg, would snuff out his life before he had the chance to enjoy the certain fame that awaited him.
Unlike the rest of the war poets, Rosenberg died a private. The others were officers, children of comfortable, middle-class English homes. Isaac’s story was very different.
Rosenberg’s family had fled Lithuania at the end of the 19th century, settling first in Bristol, where Isaac was born in 1890, then quickly moving on to the East End of London, lodging at 47 Cable Street.
He was a pupil at St Paul’s School, in Wellclose Square, Whitechapel, moving to Baker Street School in 1900, when
the family moved to Stepney’s Jubilee Street.
Rosenberg was already showing a precocious talent
for drawing and painting – Mr Usherwood, the headmaster at Baker Street, fixed up extra art classes for the lad at Stepney Green Art School. He was also showing skills at verse, composing poetry from the age of 14. His guiding light was Morely Dainow, the librarian at Whitechapel Library, who would recommend books to Isaac, encouraging him and firing his imagination.

But unlike Owen and company, there was no public school and university in which to hone his skills – money had to be made. At 14, Isaac left school to take up an engraving apprenticeship at Carl Hent-schel’s firm in Fleet Street
It may have been a job, but the skills learned at Hentchel’s and further developed at evening classes at Birkbeck College refined his drawing skills. In his time at Birkbeck he won prizes for his nude studies in pencil and then in oils.
Rosenberg’s life was running on parallel lines to that of
fellow artist Mark Gertler – another artistic genius who blossomed from a poor, Jewish, East End family. And in 1911, just like Gertler, Rosenberg finally managed to study art full time, with a scholarship at the coveted Slade School.
Also like Gertler, he suffered ill health throughout his life. In Rosenberg’s case, lung problems brought on by the London smog led him to a rest cure first at Bournemouth, then in the healthy dry heat of South Africa.
In 1914, Rosenberg was recovering at his sister’s home in Cape Town when he heard the news that war had broken out in Europe.
Isaac was slowly finding
success. A commission in July that year from Sir Herbert Stanley paid him £15 for one painting – £15 being the price of a ticket from Cape Town. He could have sat the war out and concentrated on his work, but he immediately set sail for London.
Gertler’s most famous painting, ‘The Merry go Round’ was an outsider’s view of the meaningless madness of the Great War. Rosenberg would view it at first hand.
Most of the young artist’s paintings were lost overboard in a storm in Cape Town harbour. And his luck seemed no better in London, where he applied unsuccessfully for a series of rent-paying jobs.
The irony was that, while struggling to make ends meet, he was now finding renown as a poet as well as a painter.
He signed up in the army in 1915, but before going to the front he published a small volume of poems, ‘Youth’. Both
T S Eliot and Ezra Pound admired Rosenberg’s poetry. Some critics suggest that, had he survived the war, he might have rivalled those two poetic giants in reputation.
He produced some of his greatest work in the long
hours in the trenches. ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and ‘Marching’ compare with the best of Owen and Sassoon.
But on April 1, 1918, Private Rosenberg, 22311, 1st King’s Own Royal Lancasters, was killed on dawn patrol, leaving the art and poetry critics to wonder what might have been.

Forty years ago, Swinging London was yet to swing. Everything was in black and white and, in class-bound Britain, fashion photographers were trades-men – polite, smart, seen but not heard.

A new breed of snappers changed all that – Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy, David Bailey and Terence Donovan.

Bailey and Donovan, two kids from the East End, became probably the most celebrated photographers of glamourous women the Sixties produced. But while both moved in the glitzy fashion world of New York, Milan and Paris, they constantly returned to and celebrated their East End pasts.

Both men started their careers in the West End studio of the doyen of fashion photographers – John French.
They were a blast of fresh air, sweeping away the genteel atmosphere of the Forties and Fifties. Brian Duffy remarked on the culture shock the three were to the business. “Before 1960, a fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual!”

Stepney actor Terence Stamp

And they were working class. A decade before they would probably have had to conceal their roots – in the Sixties they could celebrate them. In between fashion shoots for Vogue, and portraits of the characters that made Sixties Britain a creative and artistic powerhouse – pictures in the show include Julie Christie, Francis Bacon, Peter Blake and that other East End boy, Terence Stamp – Donovan was continually returning to Stepney.

The idea of leaving the city he loved for a home in the country alarmed him. “What do I do with it?” he demanded. “I don’t want to take a picture of it, and I don’t want to walk in it.” So he would come back to Stepney each Sunday to see his aunts and uncles, and to revisit the sites of his youth. Taking his camera and travelling alone round the streets of his childhood – marking the bombsites, the docks, the cobbled streets and the characters of an East End that was soon to disappear as the developers moved in.

National service in Singapore

Bailey was doing the same. His early attempts to snap his East End surroundings, on a battered box Brownie, had been a failure. He’d got his first decent camera when he was on National Service in Singapore. And by the Sixties he was at the top of his trade, having broken free of the career path he dreaded. “If you came from the East End there were only three things you could become – a boxer, a car thief, or maybe a musician,” he joked later.

Donovan, too, was grateful he’d broken through the horizons of his childhood, continually surprised he wasn’t “down at Tate and Lyle’s loading sugar”. And in the Sixties, in between fashion shoots of his muse Jean Shrimpton, of Twiggy, of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, Bailey too would often return to Tower Hamlets with his camera.

It became business as well as pleasure. His set of pictures for the Sunday Times in 1968, East End Faces, was a technicolor record of local life, pubs, clubs and kid boxers – among them a youthful “Johnny” (later to become John H) Stracey.

Reggie Kray’s wedding photos

Most famously of all, Bailey became a wedding photographer for the day, doing the honours at Reggie Kray’s wedding to Frances Shea in Bethnal Green.
The worldwide fashion shoots for the likes of Vogue go on to this day for Bailey. Donovan was still photographing the world’s most beautiful women in couture’s most expensive clothes until his death in 1996. The East End they continually recorded is, sadly, largely gone.

“It was a kind of innocence,” says Bailey. “But it’s all gone now. My regret is not taking more pictures at the time.”

The tortured artist, never sure of his own ability while hailed as a genius by others, is a familiar figure. For Mark Gertler, born into desperate poverty in Spitalfields, but to be hailed as one of the greatest painters of the early 20th century, it was a terrible contradiction that would lead to suicide.
Gertler was born in 1891, the child of Austrian-Jewish parents. With the family struggling to make ends meet, Mark had to leave school – and become a breadwinner – at an early age. So it was that he became apprenticed to a stained-glass maker.
But he was already showing a keen interest in art and, in his spare hours, attended classes at Regent Street Polytechnic.
His teachers were quick to spot the youngster’s promise, but to leave regular paid work and pursue a career in art seemed an impossible dream. Gertler’s case was brought to the attention of Sir William Rothenstein, who persuaded the Jewish Education Aid Society to grant Gertler a scholarship for the famed Slade School of Art.
But if Gertler’s artistic talent was precociously obvious, so was the mental instability that would dog him for the rest of his short life. In 1906, in his first months at the polytechnic, he started to suffer long
nights of sleeplessness and days of depression.
Still, from 1909 to 1912 he worked, and shone, at the Slade. Despite the presence of luminous contemporaries
such as Dora Carrington, Paul Nash and CRW Nevinson, Gertler won the first prize for Head Painting.
Gertler may have been plagued by insecurities but he was accepted for his talent by the Bloomsbury set. It was a relationship immortalised in the 1995 film Carrington, starring Emma Thompson as Dora and Rufus Sewell as Mark.

They came from very different social circles – the upper-class Carrington, Nash and Lytton Strachey, and the poor immigrant from Spitalfields – but Gertler drew on the East End to give terrifying power to his work.
Gertler’s painting ‘Rabbi and Daughter’ (1912) looked back to his childhood. But as he worked among the falling bombs of the first air raids in 1914 and 1915, the horror of the Great War started to permeate his work.
In 1916 he finished his masterpiece, ‘Merry Go Round’ (pictured above) in which he seemed to be pulling all the strands of his short life together.
“With its harsh flickering restlessness, the painting seemed to be a comment on Mark’s life: Whitechapel slum, young artist’s Bohemia, fashionable society, the Garsington intelligentsia,” wrote critic William Rothenstein. “It was impossible, too, to look at these mechanical soldiers going round and round without recalling the horrors of the deadlocked Western Front.”
Gertler’s painting had caught the mood of the times. His close friend DH Lawrence, who was to pen Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote to Mark in 1916: “It seems to me the stark truth one has inside one is all that matters, whether it is paint, or books or life… I saw the Daily Mirror today – the Zeppelin wrecks etc. How exhausted one is by all this fury of strident lies and foul death.”
The painting had a stunning effect on people of the time. Lawrence wrote: “Your terrible and beautiful picture is great and true, but horrible and terrifying. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be too frightened to come and look at the original.”
But Gertler still spoke to his friends of his insecurities. To Rothenstein, he wrote in 1925: “You ask what is the matter with me? It is the greatest crisis of my life… What is my value as an artist? Is there anything there worthwhile after all?”
Gertler’s mental state was not aided by poor health, triggered by his impoverished childhood. He suffered from tuberculosis throughout his life, constantly moving in and out of sanatoriums. And in 1939, with war once again on the horizon, Gertler, overcome by depression and with his glittering early successes behind him, took his own life.

For more information, see:
Film – Mark Gertler, Fragments of a Biography (1981), starring Anthony Sher; Carrington (1995) starring Emma Thompson and Rufus Sewell.
Book – Mark Gertler, Biography of a Painter (1972) John Woodeson.

Daniel Farson’s fame in the East End is, these days, largely down to his tenure of the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs. The photographer and TV documentary maker was host to a shambolic though entertaining couple of years in the early 1960s, when the former Newcastle Arms became packed every night and celebs – Lord Snowdon, Tony Bennett, Clint Eastwood, Shirley Bassey, Groucho Marx and William Burroughs to name just a few – visited for a drink.

The venture was to end in headaches, hangovers and debt. But Farson’s life in Tower Hamlets was far more than a brief stint at the Waterman’s. He had arrived in Limehouse in the late 1950s, driven from the West End by the impossibility of finding somewhere affordable to live, and to the East by the possibilities of finding a house by the hustle and bustle of the river.

He found it in Narrow Street. A flat was being converted above a barge repair yard, part of the premises of barge owners, the Woodward Fishers. Farson moved in and began roaming Docklands with his camera, documenting a waterside that has, in the last few decades, disappeared completely. And as he did so he started to uncover the history of the East End. He discovered that his house was Elizabethan, and that it had once been a pub called the Waterman’s Arms. It was a name he was to co-opt for his business venture a few years later.

But it is his photographs that tell the true story of the East End in the 1960s*. When he moved there it was as unusual as emigrating – his mother and friends certainly didn’t approve – and it was before the invention of ‘Docklands’ made Tower Hamlets a popular and pricey domicile for incomers. Though he was a curiosity at first, his evident love of the area sound made him friends – and that made it possible for him to get the uninhibited and intimate photographs of normal East Enders going about their work, travelling on the river, and most of all drinking in the pub.

Farson loved a drink, as did his subjects. But he managed to keep a steady hand and had a remarkable knack for getting right into his subject’s face – catching a mood or a moment, sometimes with the subject unaware of his presence, often posing for impromptu portraits.

There are snaps from the making of Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (Farson had a small role as a navel officer, which was unceremoniously dumped on the cutting room floor by his friend Littlewood. There are striking black-and-white images from Petticoat Lane, where the stall holders and punters are far more colourful and interesting than anything on the stalls themselves.

And there are the drinking scenes. Of course it’s far easier to make subjects forget the camera when there is plenty of drink inside them, and these are largely pictures of East Enders having a laugh. Music figures large too. Part of Farson’s grand plan for the Waterman’s Arms was to give a boost to the great East End tradition of singing in pubs – the roots of that other cockney invitation the music hall. And in its brief life, the Waterman’s stage hosted local talent, such as the man who sang Mule Train, banging his head with a tin tray in time to the music; a docker who impersonated Frankenstein’s monster; a cabbie who sang Jolson; and a girl in glasses known as the ‘white mouse’ who sang so off-key she was greeted with cheers whenever she took the stage. The laughter in the pub crowd comes across in every picture.

A photo of Shirley Bassey on stage gives just a taste of artists who joined in. George Melly, Ida Barr, Annie Ross and, on memorable occasion, Judy Garland, all sang at the Waterman’s Arms.
*Limehouse Days – A personal experience of the East End, by Daniel Farson, published by Michael Joseph ISBN 0718132564

More than 50 years ago, a young trainee pilot got a job in the East End while he was waiting to win his wings – ironically, mending roofs shattered by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. James Page-Roberts never did finish his wartime career as an RAF pilot – he was invalided out with TB – but his war work started a life-long love affair with Docklands.

Between 1949 and 1969, Jim combined a varied career as a medical student, theatre designer, sculptor, painter and journalist with his love of photography. He even built himself a house in Limehouse – you’ll find it tucked in a corner of Limekiln Creek, at the bottom of Three Colts Street. From there he ventured to chart in pictures the fast-changing Docklands. Now brought together in his new book, Guide To A Dockland Of Change, the photos are linked together in a series of four walks, leading from St Katharine’s Dock in the west to Limehouse in the east. This may be a slim volume but you’ll get your money’s worth as you flick between the detailed maps, cross-referenced with 57 numbered photos and background information on each one.
As you stand on the lip of St Katharine’s Dock, your map will direct you to the photo of the same scene but 35 years before.
The accompanying notes will tell you that the curiously shaped bollards there are captured Napoleonic cannon, upended, with a cannonball rammed in the mouth. And an ordinary part of Horseferry Road is brought to life as the stretch where casual dock labourers used to wait to be called “off the stones”. Under this system, the company would hire just enough bodies needed for the work of the day, precipitating an almighty scramble on the narrow strip of cobbled street.

As you walk down Wapping High Street, in those days the hub of the working docks, you will be struck by the contrast between photos of the bustling fifties and sixties and how quiet it all appears today. The overhead walkways, cranes, and huge boats are now all gone. But for every vanished detail, there is something that links the 30-year-old snap with the view today – a crooked lamppost, a distinctive archway and the buildings themselves. Jim also gives an expert appraisal of the pubs and cafes you pass on what could be a long and thirsty walk. With an excellent index, you’ve no chance of getting lost and a detailed bibliography means readers can dig deeper into the people and commerce that made Wapping and Limehouse such a dark and romantic quarter of London.

Guide To A Dockland Of Change, written and photographed by James Page-Roberts, Mudlark Press ISBN 0-9530517-0-6. The book costs £4.95 plus £1 post and packing per copy and can be ordered direct. Make cheques out to Mudlark Press and post to Mudlark Press, PO Box 13729, London W6 9GN.