Alfred Daniels, Artist
CLICK HERE TO BOOK FOR MY TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS
The Gramophone Man, Wentworth St
“I’m not really an East Ender, I’m more of a Bow boy,” asserted Alfred Daniels with characteristic precision of thought, when I enquired of his origin. “My parents left the East End, because they were scared of the doodlebugs and bought this house in 1945,” he explained, as he welcomed me to his generous suburban residence in Chiswick. Greeting me while dressed in pyjamas and dressing gown in the afternoon, no-one could have been more at home than Alfred in his studio occupying the former living room of his parents’ house. I found him snug in the central heating and just putting the finishing touches to a commission that his dealer was coming to collect at six.
I met Alfred at the point in life where copyright payments on the resale of works from his sixty-year painting career meant he no longer had to struggle. “I’ve done hundreds of things to make a living,” he confessed, rolling his eyes in amusement, “Although my father was a brilliant tailor, he was a dreadful business man so we were on the breadline for most of the nineteen thirties – which was a good thing because we never got fat …”
Smiling at his own bravado, Alfred continued painting as he spoke, adding depth to the shadows with a fine brush. “This is the way to make a living,” he declared with a flourish as he placed the brush back in the pot with finality, completing the day’s work and placing the painting to one side, ready to go. “The past is history, the future is a mystery but the present is a gift,” he informed me, as we climbed the stairs to the upstairs kitchen over-looking the garden, to seek a cup of tea.
Alfred had spent the morning making copious notes on his personal history, just it to get it straight for me. “This has been fun,” he admitted, rustling through the handwritten pages.
“My grandfather came from Russia in the 1880s, he was called Donyon, and they said, ‘Sounds like Daniels.’ My grandfather on the other side came from Plotska in Poland in the 1880s, he didn’t have a surname so they said ‘Sounds like a good man’ and they called him Goodman. My parents, Sam and Rose, were both born in the 1890s and my mother lived to be ninety-two. I was born in Trellis St in Bow in 1924 and in the early thirties we moved to 145 Bow Rd, next to the railway station. I can still remember the sound of the goods wagons going by at night.
One good thing is, I gave up the Jewish religion and thank goodness for that. It was only when I was twelve and I read about the Hitler problem that I realised I was Jewish. Fortunately, we weren’t religious in my family and we didn’t go to the synagogue. But I went to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah and they tried to harm me with Hebrew. We were taught by these Russians and if you didn’t learn it they bashed you. That put me off religion there and then. Yet when we got outside the Black Shirts were waiting for us in the street, calling ‘Here look, it’s the Jew boys!’ and they wanted to bash me too. Fortunately, I could run fast in those days.
My mother used to do all the shopping in the Roman Rd market. She hated shopping, so she sent me to do it for her in Brick Lane. It was a penny on the tram, there and back. But they all spoke Yiddish and I couldn’t communicate, so I thought, ‘I’d better listen to my grandmother who spoke Yiddish.’ I learnt it from her and it is one of the funniest languages you can imagine.
Although my parents were poor, my Uncle Charlie was rich. He was a commercial artist and my father said to him, ‘The boy wants to learn a craft.’ So Charlie got me a place at Woolwich Polytechnic to learn signwriting but I spent all day trying to sharpen my pencil. Then he took me out of the school and got me a job as a lettering artist at the Lawrence Danes Studio in Chancery Lane. It was wonderful to come up to the city to work, and his nephew befriended me and we went to art shops together to look at art books. We drew out letters and filled them in with Indian Ink, mostly Gill Sans. Typesetters usually got the spacing wrong but if you did it by hand you could get it right. It was all squares, circles and triangles.
When Uncle Charlie started his own studio in Fetter Lane above the Vogue photo studio, he offered me a job at £1 a week. Nobody showed me how to do anything, I worked it out for myself. He got me to do illustrations and comic drawings and retouching of photographs. At night, we went down in the tube stations entertaining people sheltering from the blitz. I played my violin like Django Reinhardt and he played like Stefan Grappelli, and one day we were recorded and ended up on Workers’ Playtime.
I had been doing some still lifes but I wanted to paint the beautiful old shops in Campbell Rd, Bow, so I went to make some sketches and a policeman came up and asked to see my identity card. ‘You can’t do this because we’ve had complaints you’re a spy,’ he said. It was illegal to take photographs during the war, so I sat and absorbed into memory what I saw. And the result came out like a naive or primitive painting. When Herbert Buckley my tutor at Woolwich saw it, he said, ‘Would you like to be a painter? I’ll put you in for the Royal College of Art. To be honest, I should rather have done illustration or lettering. At the Royal College of Art, my tutors included Carel Weight – he said, ‘I’m not interested in art only in pictures.’ – Ruskin Spear – ‘always drunk because of the pain of polio’ – and John Minton – ‘ a lovely man, if only he hadn’t been so mixed up.'”
Alfred was keen to enlist, “I wanted to stop Hitler coming over and stringing me up !” – though he never saw active service, but the discovery of painting and of his signature style as the British Douanier Rousseau stayed with him for the rest of his life. After Alfred left the East End in 1945, he kept coming back to make sketchbooks and do paintings, often of the same subjects – as you see below, with two images of the Gramophone man in Wentworth St painted fifty years apart.
With natural generosity of spirit, Alfred Daniels told me, “Making a painting is like baking a cake, one slice is for you but the rest is for everyone else.”
The Gramophone Man in Wentworth St, 1950
Sketchbook pages – Cable St, April 1964
Sketchbook pages – Old Montague St, March 1964
Sketchbook pages – Hessel St, April 1964
Sketchbook pages – Old Montague St & Davenant St, March 1964
Sketchbook pages – Fruit Seller in Hessel St, March 1964
Leadenhall Market, drawing, 2008
Billingsgate Market
Tower Bridge, 2008
The Royal Exchange, 2008
Crossing London Bridge, 2008
In Alfred’s studio
Alfred Daniels, Artist (1924-2015)
You may also like to read about
John Thomas Smith’s Antiquities Of Old London
CLICK HERE TO BOOK FOR MY TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS
For good reason John Thomas Smith acquired the nickname ‘Antiquity Smith’ – while working as Keeper of Drawings at the British Museum, between 1790 & 1800, he produced a large series of etchings recording all the antiquities of London, from which I publish this selection of favourites today
Old houses in the Butcher Row near Clement’s Inn, taken down 30th March 1798 – the right hand corner house is suggested to have been the one in which the Gunpowder Plot was determined and sworn
A Curious Pump – in the yard of the Leathersellers’ Hall, Bishopsgate
Sir Paul Pindar’s Lodge, Half Moon Alley, Bishopsgate
A Curious Gate in Stepney – traditionally called King John’s Gate, it is the oldest house in Stepney
London Stone – supposed to be the Millinarium of the Romans from which they measured distances
The Queen’s Nursery, Golden Lane, Barbican
Pye Corner, Smithfield – this memorialises the Great Fire of 1666 which ended at Pye Corner
Old house in King St, Westminster – traditionally believed to have been a residence of Oliver Cromwell
Lollards’ Prison – a stone staircase leads to a room at the very top of a tower on the north side of Lambeth Palace, known as Lollard’s Tower
Old house on Little Tower Hill
Principal gate of the Priory of St Bartholomew, Smithfield
Savoy Prison – occupied by the army for their deserters and transports
Mr Salmon’s, Fleet St
Gate of St Saviour’s Abbey, Bermondsey
Rectorial House, Newington Butts
Bloody Tower – the bones of the two murdered princes were found within the right hand window
Traitors’ Gate
The Old Fountain in the Minories – taken down 1793
The White Hart, Bishopsgate
The Conduit, Bayswater
Staple’s Inn, Holborn
The Old Manor House, Hackney
Dissenting Meeting House at the entrance to Little St Helen’s, taken down 1799
Remains of Winchester House, Southwark
London Wall in the churchyard of St Giles Cripplegate
London Wall in the churchyard of St Giles’ Cripplegate
Figures of King Lud and his two sons, taken down from Ludgate and now deposited at St Dunstan’s, Fleet St, in the Bone House
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at
John Thomas Smith’s Ancient Topography
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana
A Letter From The Gentle Author
Dear Readers
May I express my gratitude to 193 of you who have generously contributed towards publishing Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project book so far.
Over the past three weeks, thanks to your generosity we have raised £15,230, which is well over half of what it will cost to publish the book.
We still have quite a way to go to raise the rest of the budget. So I have extended the deadline by one week, to Saturday 17th May at midnight, to give us more time to reach the target.
It means these next two weeks will be crucial. But I am hoping that – with your help – we will meet our target and the book can go to the printers in mid-May for publication this October. If we do not reach the target in time then we will have to delay publication until next year to permit further time to raise the necessary funds.
Our target represents the total cost of printing, design, photography and digital post-production. The book will include high quality photographs of all the major mosaics, an interview with Tessa Hunkin outlining the nature of the project, commentary on the background to each mosaic by Wendy Forrest, illustrations of the working process by which the mosaics are created, a map showing the locations of the mosaics, and the names of everyone involved.
Hackney Mosaic Project are leading the revival of the art of mosaic in this country with their superlative work and it is an inspiring collective endeavour, bringing together a community of local people in the shared purpose of beautifying the streets of East London.
I want to publish this book because these beautiful mosaics are of the highest quality and I believe they need be recognised and celebrated by the widest possible audience, and for the makers to get the recognition they so well deserve for their phenomenal achievement.
If everyone who has donated were able to persuade one other person to contribute we could reach our target at once.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE & CONTRIBUTE
With every good wish,
I am your loyal servant
The Gentle Author
(You may like to take a look at some work-in-progress pages from the book below)
A Walk With Shloimy Alman
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours
Let us join photographer Shloimy Alman as he wanders the streets of the East End in the seventies accompanied by the Yiddish poet Avram Stencl.
Photographs copyright © Shloimy Alman
You may also like to take a look at
The Queenhithe Mosaic
Queenhithe is a natural inlet of the Thames in the City of London, it means ‘Queen’s harbour’ and is named after Queen Matilda who granted a charter for the use of the dock at the beginning of the twelfth century. This is just one of two thousand years of historical events illustrated in a new twenty metre mosaic recently installed upon the river wall at Queenhithe.
Commissioned by the City of London and paid for by 4C Hotel Group, who built a new hotel on the waterfront, it was designed by Tessa Hunkin and executed by South Bank Mosaics under the supervision of Jo Thorpe – and I recommend you take a stroll down through the City to the river, and study the intricate and lively detail of this epic work for yourself.
You may also like to read about
Laurie Allen Of Petticoat Lane
CLICK HERE TO BOOK FOR TOMORROW’S TOUR OF PETTICOAT LANE
This fellow – so at home he is almost merging with the shopfront behind him – is Laurie Allen standing on a street corner in Petticoat Lane, assuming a characteristically nonchalant posture and watching the world go by. Through his debonaire stance, Laurie demonstrates his confidence, good humour and general optimistic attitude to life.
Laurie grew up in Petticoat Lane and still lives in Petticoat Lane. He is at ease with the current of life in Petticoat Lane, that provides him with unceasing fascination and delight.“Throbbing with wonderment,” is his phrase for Petticoat Lane.
Yet Petticoat Lane does not exist on any map, which is appropriate, because for Laurie it is a mythic land of adventure and romance. Petticoat Lane was renamed Middlesex St in 1830 to define the boundary with the City of London, although everyone still calls it by its earlier name, now used to refer to all the streets of the market. This unwitting act of popular defiance is characteristic of the independence of spirit that reigns here in these shabby ancient streets of Spitalfields, which were long established before the roads beside the church on the more more fashionable side of the neighbourhood even existed.
Laurie grew up in Petticoat Lane in the post war years, in what is now remembered as the hey day of the Lane when it was a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Ask him anything about Petticoat Lane or its history and he will break into a smile of anticipation at the opportunity you have given him to expound upon his favourite subject, Petticoat Lane. “Yeah!” he exclaims to himself occasionally, when a reminiscence comes into focus and the full emotion of the moment comes back into the present tense. Unlike Marcel Proust, Laurie Allen can truly recall times past, because all his experiences stay present here in Petticoat Lane and he can run through them the way barrow boys once ran through the market, shouting “Wet paint!” to part the crowds.
For the last sixty years, Laurie has lived in a small flat in Wentworth Buildings, fifty yards round the corner from Wentworth Dwellings where he grew up. Introducing his account of life in the three rooms his family inhabited, he described collecting firewood from the Spitalfields Market and his childhood wonder at the faces he saw in the flames.“It had a mystical quality about it,” he told me, raising his head a little as if to avert the heat. The abandoned bombsites were a paradise for young Laurie, and he christened them with evocative names to enrich his adventures there. Raising his eyebrows for dramatic effect, Laurie told me of China Town at the end of Middlesex St, Black Panther over in Devonshire Sq and the American Hole in Leman St, confiding their names as cherished secrets.
When Carol Reed came to Petticoat Lane in 1955 to film his classic movie of the East End, “A Kid for Two Farthings” – set against the vibrant life of the market – Laurie was given half a crown by one of the producers, as one of three boys running around the corner of Wentworth St in the background of a street scene. But the revelation to the eleven year old Laurie was fifties sex kitten Diana Dors, a platinum blonde in a cashmere sweater. Even today he winces to speak of this goddess. “All we had seen were our mothers and sisters, we had never seen a woman that shape before!” he admitted, tenderly raising his hands to his chest with prurient pleasure.
Walking through Petticoat Lane with him today you will be introduced to people worth meeting like Abdulla Fadli, ex-attendant at the former Goulston St baths for thirty nine years. Yet Laurie also recognises those that have gone who are still vivid in his mind. “The characters, the sights and sounds of Petticoat Lane are equal to any I have ever seen.” he informed me authoritatively, in the present tense while speaking of the past. There was Mary Green, selling pickled herrings from the barrel, yet she never changed her greasy stinking clothes. There was Prince Monolulu, the horse tipster who dressed like a primitive tribesman, calling “Pick a horse! Pick a horse!” knowing that one had to win. There was the soulful beigel seller crying, “Buy them hot – because when they’re gone, they’re really gone.” There was Jack Strong, a crockery seller who could fan out a set of plates like playing cards, throw them up in the air and catch them again, still in a fan. There was Jackie Bryan, selling dresses, calling out, “Buy one and I’ll get you into modelling, buy two and I’ll get you into films.” A topical spot of patter when”A Kid for Two Farthings” was being filmed round the corner.
Yet in spite of the compelling life of Petticoat Lane, Laurie saw all his contemporaries leave one by one, “People would get married or take a job out of the East End. The old boys and girls stayed on while the younger elements all moved out to North London to make a better life and buy a house.” outlined Laurie philosophically. “There’s only a couple of us left now.” he admitted with a grin.
I wondered if Laurie’s affectionate memories were a reaction to the poor living conditions that existed in Petticoat Lane, but he is insistent that this is not the case, “I knew nothing better and I wanted nothing better,” he said plainly, looking back over the intimacy and richness of experience that binds him to this place. Seeking an uncontestable example,“It’s just magic when you live with your mum and dad, and have your mates come and call for you to do something nice.” said Laurie.“It didn’t suit me to exit stage left. The East End is my life, I feel comfortable in my bolt hole.” he confirmed, “Even after all the changes, it has still got a lot going for it.”
Laurie Allen’s Petticoat Lane is a place that belongs to him. He is the least alienated person you could meet in the city. “I like people and people seem to like me.” he added, speaking the truth with a modest candour, as if this were explanation enough.
From “A Kid for Two Farthings”
Diana Dors on Petticoat Lane, 1955
New photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Hackney Mosaic Project’s Magnum Opus
We have now raised over £11,000 donated by 142 readers to publish a book of Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic but we still have quite a way to go, and only a week left. Click here to learn more and support publication of Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project
Tessa Hunkin
On Hackney Downs, you can view Hackney Mosaic Project‘s magnum opus, an entire open air theatre covered with a vast lyrical tableau of wild creatures which won Mosaic of the Year 2014 from the British Association for Modern Mosaic.
I visited Tessa Hunkin, the inspirational designer and leader of the project, while she applied the finishing touches of grouting in advance of the unveiling. “It suits us to have our workshop here in the Pavilion on Hackney Downs,” Tessa confided to me, “because the park attracts people from the local community who feel excluded through illness, loneliness or other problems – they see a friendly place and they come and join us making mosaics.”
“We like to do big mosaics, it inspires us to work on an epic scale,” Tessa admitted to me recklessly.
The first visitors arrive to admire the completed mosaics
The model for the design
You may also like to read about
