Van Gogh in South London

As a young man, the artist Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) spent a couple of years living in London. Thanks to his practice of sending regular letters to his brother Theo and others, we know quite a lot about his time here including his movements across South London. The complete letters are available online courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.

Van Gogh drawing of 87 Hackford Road - rediscovered in 1973
(source: wikipedia)

It was in the summer of 1873, while working for an art dealer,  that he moved to lodgings at 87 Hackford Road, Stockwell.  He wrote of it: 'I now have a room, as I’ve long been wishing, without sloping beams and without blue wallpaper with a green border. It’s a very diverting household where I am now, in which they run a school for little boys'. The 'diverting household' was the house of Ursula Loyer and her daughter Eugenie. A year later, Van Gogh declared his love for the latter, and when rebuffed the heartbroken artist moved  with his sister Anna to new lodgings  at the Ivy Cottage 395 Kennington Road - the house of John Parker, a publican. While he was staying there, the landlord's daughter Elizabeth Parker died of pneumonia, as mentioned in an April 1875 letter to Theo:

'I’m sending you herewith a small drawing. I made it last Sunday, the morning a daughter (13 years old) of my landlady died. It’s a view of Streatham Common, a large, grass-covered area with oak trees and broom. It had rained in the night, and the ground was soggy here and there and the young spring grass fresh and green'.

We know that he visited Dulwich Picture Gallery, writing on  4 August 1873) 'I had a nice day last Monday. The first Monday in Aug. is a holiday here. I went with one of the Germans to Dulwich, an hour and a half outside L., to see the museum there, and afterwards we walked to a village about an hour further on. The countryside here is so beautiful; many people who have their business in L. live in some village or other outside L. and come to the city every day by train' (L. is of course London). Exactly a year later he returned to the Gallery with his sister Anna (see note)

After a period in Paris in 1875, Van Gogh also spent much of 1876 living in England, in Ramsgate and then Isleworth. It was during this period that he visited the Gladwell family in Lewisham, who lived at 114 Lee High Rd.  It was a sad occasion, as he wrote from Isleworth (18 Aug. 1876) 'Yesterday I went to see Gladwell... Something very sad happened to his family: his sister, a girl full of life, with dark eyes and hair, 17 years old, fell from her horse while riding on Blackheath. She was unconscious when they picked her up, and died 5 hours later without regaining consciousness. I went there as soon as I heard what had happened and that Gladwell was at home. I left here yesterday morning at 11 o’clock, and had a long walk to Lewisham, the road went from one end of London to the other. At 5 o’clock I was at Gladwell’s.  I’d gone to their gallery first, but it was closed'.

Harry Gladwell was a friend of Vincent's who he had met  while working in Paris. It was his sister Susannah Gladwell who had. Gladwell's father, Henry Gladwell, ran a gallery in Gracechruch Street in the City of London. The six hour walk from Isleworth to the City and then to Lewisham is around 30 km. His route from the City would have presumably been across London Bridge and then down the Old Kent Road, through New Cross and up what is now Lewisham Way. 

Van Gogh wrote home in October 1876:  'One of these days, perhaps, I’ll go to London or Lewisham again', and soon he did. In Isleworth Van Gogh worked in a school and was sometimes sent by its headmaster, Thomas Slade-Jones, on errands such as collecting school fees. He wrote to his parents in November 1876: 'It is already late, and early tomorrow morning I must go to London and Lewisham, for Mr. Jones...I must be in the two remotest parts of London: in Whitechapel - that very poor part which you have read about in Dickens; and then across the Thames in a little steamer and from there to Lewisham'. He added the next day 'I started this morning at four o'clock, now it is two. I have just passed through the old cabbage fields - now for Lewisham. One sometimes asks, how shall I ever reach my destination?'. Wonder where the cabbage fields were? I guess the 'little steamer' crossing could have been at Woolwich.

Later that month he was back in Lewisham again, this time visiting the Gladwells at the end of another long journey: 'I left here at 4 in the morning, arrived at Hyde Park at half past six, the mist was lying on the grass and leaves were falling from the trees, in the distance one saw the shimmering lights of street-lamps that hadn’t yet been put out, and the towers of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, and the sun rose red in the morning mist – from there on to Whitechapel, that poor district of London, then to Chancery Lane and Westminster, then to Clapham to visit Mrs Loyer again, her birthday was the day before... I also went to Mr Obach’s to see his wife and children again [314 Brixton Road]. Then from there to Lewisham, where I arrived at the Gladwells at half past three. It was exactly 3 months ago that I was there that Saturday their daughter was buried, I stayed with them around 3 hours and thoughts of many kinds occurred to all of us, too many to express'. 

Van Gogh mentioned his friend Harry in a letter in December 1877:  'I hope he’ll be able to go to Lewisham at Christmas. You know that painting by Cuyp in the museum here, an old Dutch family, when he saw that he stood looking at it for a long time and then spoke of ‘the house built on the rock’ and of his home in Lewisham. I, too, have memories of his father’s house and will not easily forget it. Much and strong and great love  lives there under that roof, and its fire is in him still, it is not dead, but sleepeth'.

The No Frills Band & 20 years of South London folk sessions

The No Frills Band are playing at the Birds Nest (Church Street SE8) in Deptford on Saturday afternoon  - April 9th 2016 - so expect some fine traditional folk music. Check facebook for details, but they should be up and running by 4 pm

Last time I saw them play was only last Saturday on the steps outside Carnegie Library on Herne Hill Road, occupied in protest at its planned closure by Lambeth Council.

The band can always be relied upon to turn up at community events in the South London area, but more than that the members of the band have been at the centre of an ongoing series of folk sessions in the area stretching back for over twenty years...

Last night's fun

In 'Last night's fun: a book about music, fun and time' (1996), Ciaran Carson muses on simultaneous Irish music sessions in different parts of the world as 'starry fragments of a great galactic internet which shimmers over all the shebeens of the earth... Across the many time zones the same tune might be bi-located at the same time, in the same time'.

But while the pub session scene might have started out with Irish music, Carson suggests that the origins of the Irish session are in London rather than Ireland. Traditional Irish musicians back home used to mainly play at weddings and other community functions, rather than in the public bar. The large number of Irish migrants who moved to London for work after the Second World War were separated from this circuit so musicians began gathering in pubs to play. This practice of fairly informal drop in folk music pub sessions eventually spread back to Ireland itself.

 

There's an interesting discussion about this history at The Session website, including a list of London pubs that hosted Irish sessions in the 1950s and 1960s. South of the river this included The Admiral Duncan in Deptford (New Cross Road), Duke of Gloucester in Walworth (Gurney St SE17), The World's End in Newington Causeway SE1 and The Black Prince (Kennington Road SE11) - of which only the latter survives.

 

 

 

Mandolins and me

 

My initiation into this scene came when I took up the mandolin in the early 1990s. I had been listening to a lot of Irish and Scottish music, and the instrument had gradually entered my consciousness,  creeping up on me until one day at a now-vanished shop in Camden Lock I just went for it and bought one. I'd never even picked one up before. My first mandolin was made by Ozark in Romania. For some strange reason it featured the design of a palm tree on the front, something I assume is rarely seen in its country of origin.

It was back up to Camden again to learn how to play it. At that time the Working Men's College was a major source for the diffusion of Irish music. Pete Cooper ran a fiddle evening class, whilst Mick O'Connor ran a combined tenor banjo and mandolin class.  His technique was simple - no fiddling around with scales or theory, just learn the tunes. He would stand at the front with his banjo and very patiently play slowed down versions of jigs and reels, with  the rest of us attempting to follow using the hand written tabs Mick supplied. Many of us also brought in cassette recorders (remember them?) to help us remember the tunes for practising at home.

 

Mick O'Connor

 

As we grew in confidence, a group of us started meeting up to play together. We began in a room above a pub in Southwark, the now demolished St George's Tavern, opposite The Imperial War Museum and next  to the Roman Catholic St George's Cathedral on Lambeth Road SE1. Before long we had migrated to the bar downstairs for what became a regular Sunday lunchtime session. There were a couple of experienced musicians, but most of us had never played in public before. Someone came up with the name McGonagall's Revenge, since our shambolic offerings were on a par with the rudimentary poems of the Scottish amateur, appreciated after his death for being so bad they were almost good. The  line-up usually included mandolin, fiddle, guitar, banjo and bodhran, sometimes with more than one of each depending on who turned up. On one occasion we even stretched to uilleann pipes. There was a regular core of people, but anyone was welcome to drop by. Sometimes you would get some random tourists over from the Imperial War Museum joining in - I remember some Swedish guys coming by and singing a song.

 

We had a regular repertoire of songs as well as tunes: 'Back home in Derry', 'the Fields of Athenry', 'The Rocky Road to Dublin', 'Flower of Scotland', 'The Lark in the morning' etc. But in that period singing Irish songs in public was a tricky business even if you avoided the most obvious republican rebel songs. The cathedral next door had hosted the funeral of Terence MacSwiney, the mayor of Cork who had died on hunger strike in Brixton prison in 1920. Every year there was a memorial mass in the Cathedral, with an overspill of veteran republicans into the pub afterwards. In 1993 this coincided with the weekend of the terrible bombing of a chip shop in Belfast Shankhill Road, in which nine people died (an attack which may have involved a British state double agent within the IRA). I recall the nervous landlord in the pub asking us to stick to tunes and to leave the songs alone. During that period too one of our group, a young Irish guy,  was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism of Act - though I don't think it was his music that drew the attention of the police (he was released without charge).

 

There were many other Irish sessions across London. There were some great playing, but the atmosphere was sometimes a bit intimidating - if you had to ask what the tune was, you probably shouldn't have been there. I recall a particularly high speed session at The Telegraph pub on Brixton Hill. I didn't dare get my mandolin out there!

 

Brixton Sessions

 

But the core of what was later to become the No Frills Band had started a different kind of session in Brixton pubs like the Windmill and the Duke of Edinburgh (Ferndale Road SW9). Many of the people had their roots in the local squat/punk scene, and there was less preciousness about the repertoire than in some traditional sessions: a core of Irish tunes to be sure, but also music from around the world.  Well national authenticity in folk music is often bogus anyway - 'Irish music' has always drawn on Scottish reels, Bohemian polkas, Polish mazurkas and English hornpipes, with tunes travelling across borders as readily as itinerant musicians.

 

Last session at the Grosvenor in August 2014
(photo by Mike Urban at BrixtonBuzz)

This session later moved on to The Grosvenor in Stockwell until it closed in 2014, and continues to this day as the No Frills session on the second Sunday of the month back at The Windmill off Brixton Hill, starting at around 7 pm: 'All musicians and all styles welcome. Irish, Welsh, English and Scottish, American old time, bluegrass and western swing, French, Yiddish, East European, Scandinavian, Greek, Turkish, Balkan and more. All abilities tolerated. Come and swap tunes and songs, meet people and learn stuff. Or, do what most people do and just grab a beer and enjoy the music. See you in the Windmill!'. Next one is actually this forthcoming Sunday.

I played a few times in those mid-1990s sessions at the Duke of Edinburgh, but then headed off through a period of house and techno obsession followed by parenthood in which my never more than basic mandolin playing got very rusty. I did have a go at one of the Grosvenor sessions a couple of years ago, and at another session upstairs in the Old Nun's Head. Maybe I'll get back into it again properly some time, when you start playing the fingers remember the tune even when the mind doesn't... 

 

Scores of  musicians must have taken part in those sessions over the past 20 years, passing through and picking up tunes, the definition of a living music tradition.

Magdalena Marmot (Maggie), a regular at those Brixton sessions who sadly died
in Calderdale Royal Infirmary in 2012

[update March 2026 - I saw some footage just now of a session this week at the Sir Colin Campbell pub in Kilburn, with Mick O'Connor still going strong on banjo]

Joan Littlewood (and Brendan Behan) in Blackheath

This year is the centenary of the birth of Joan Littlewood (1914-2002), one of the most influential figures in 20th century British theatre. Among many other things she founded the radical Theatre Workshop and directed iconic plays including Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and Oh What a Lovely War (1963).

Joan Littlewood - not sure when this photo was taken, possibly when she visited a Durham coal mine for BBC in 1938.

Littlewood was born at the Clapham Maternity Hospital, 41 Jeffreys Road, Stockwell and lived as a child at 8 Stockwell Road. In the 1950s and 1960s she lived in Blackheath with her partner Gerry Raffles. The 1958 electoral register has her listed as 'Joan Raffles', though I don't believe they actually married (she had earlier married Ewan MacColl, and was Kirsty MacColl's godmother).

1938 electoral register

They lived in the Mill House, an 1832 mansion on the Heath that was converted to flats at the time:

The Mill House Blackheath
(photo by APVG at Flickr)

 To protect their privacy in the late 1960s they had a plastic wall designed by Guy Hodgkinson at the bottom of their garden, as featured in a 1969 magazine:

From 'Design' (March 1969)

Littlewood played a critical role in the career of Irish playwright Brendan Behan. In September 1958, Behan stayed  in Blackheath. According to 'Brendan Behan: A Life' by Michael O'Sullivan, 'Littlewood had offered Brendan the use of her home to finish The Hostage', which she was directing at Theatre Royal Stratford.  Behan 'spent most of his time in The Dragon pub in Blackheath. He had an uncannny knack for finding like-minded boozers wherever he was in the world'. Not sure whether the Dragon is the George & Dragon on Blackheath Hill - not the nearest pub, but maybe that was the point as his drinking didn't go down well with Littlewood and Raffles who were worried whether he would finish the play on time.

Brendan Behan in Blackheath
(by Oswald Jones) - possibly in the Crown

Fun Palaces

In the early 1960s Littlewood, along with the architect Cedric Price, conceived of the idea of the 'Fun Palace', a never realised building that would be a ‘laboratory of fun’/‘university of the streets’ based on mass participation in art and science. Littlewood’s motto was “Everyone an artist, everyone a scientist.”and the original fun palace design said:  'Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky'.

Writer Stella Duffy* proposed reviving the idea of Fun Palaces to mark Littlewood's centenary, and on 4-5 October this year there will be at least 80 free 'pop up fun palaces', with the Albany in Deptford not only hosting one of them but also helping to organise the national programme (check map for your nearest event). Duffy's co-director is Sarah-Jane Rawlings, who helped to launched Meet Me at the Albany, the Albany’s artist led day club for the over 60s. 

(*Woolwich-born Duffy is of course the author of the great South London novel 'The Room of Lost Things' (2009) set around Loughborough Junction where she lives)

[thanks to Rosalind Hardie - https://twitter.com/adinnieken - for finding Littlewood's address and pictures following my request on twitter]

Roger Moore: South London James Bond

Well a bit of excitement last week about Daniel Craig filming the new James Bond film in Deptford. But the real South London James Bond is undoubtedly Roger Moore.

As recalled in his autobiography My Word is My Bond, Moore was born in 1927 at the Maternity Hospital in Jeffreys Road, Clapham. He lived in Aldebert Terrace, then in Albert Square in Stockwell (number 4, then number 14). He went to Hackford Road Elementary (later Durand Primary) and then Vauxhall Central School.

As a teenager he hung out at the Astoria in Brixton and the Locarno ballroom in Streatham, snogging on Streatham Common afterwards. With his first wife Lucy Woodward (also known as Doorn Van Stein) , the daughter of a Streatham cab driver, Moore moved into a room in her family home at 16 Buckleigh Road, Streatham in 1946.

By 1952 Moore had started acting, and was invited to a party in St Mary's Mount, Bexley at the home of Dorothy Squires. At the time Squires was one of the biggest singing stars in the country, and 13 years years Moore's senior. Before long, Moore had divorced Doorn and moved in with Squires (Moore and Squires pictured below). Moore went on to star in the Saint as Simon Templar, then took on the role of James Bond in the 1970s - starting with Live and Let Die in 1973.

By this time Moore had long since moved on from South London. Squires - who he left in 1961 - stayed in Bexley until her mansion burned down in 1974.

Chris Wood - Hollow Point

At tonight's Radio 2 Folk Awards, the best song award was given to Chris Wood for 'Hollow Point', a sad song about the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by police at Stockwell underground station in 2005. The song mentions his last fateful journey from Tulse Hill and on through Brixton to his death in the tube station.

56a - Films and Zines

56a Infoshop, at the Elephant and Castle, has a few events coming up over the next couple of weeks.

As part of the ongoing Full Unemployment Cinema season, they are screening Rene Clair's 1931 film À nous la liberté on Sunday 19th July at 5pm. According to IMDB it is a 'A famous left-wing satirical comedy about two ex-convicts, one of whom escaped jail and then worked his way up from salesman to factory owner, where he oversees a highly mechanized operation where the workers are reduced to mere automatons. Fearful of being exposed over his past, at first by his friend and later by another gangster, the owner chooses to give his factory to the workers, then escapes with his friend to the freedom of the open road. The production company for 'A Nous la Liberte' was for more than a decade embroiled in a lawsuit claiming that Charles Chaplin had seen their film and plagiarized many ideas from it as he developed Modern Times'. Admission is Free at 56a Crampton Street, SE17.

The following weekend sees DO YOU REMEMBER ZINES? - 56a ZINE LIBRARY LAUNCH and BENEFIT WEEKEND. It starts on Saturday 25th July with a Launch Party at The Grosvenor (17 Sidney Road, Stockwell SW9- 7.30pm start) with music from Jean Genet, Husbands, Chaps and Candy Panic Attack, as well as zine stall from Cherry Bomb Comics, Ricochet Ricochet, 56a and more tbc.

The next day (Sunday 26th July at 56a Crampton Street, SE17) there will be a pancake breakfast from 12 noon, followed by an afternoon of workshops, discussions, exhibition, zine library browsing and general hanging out. Specific activities confirmed will include self published comics discussion, practical squatting and bike fixing workshops. Crashspaces available for weekenders. More details at 56a website.

Posties and Cleaners

A couple of South London-linked tales of workplace activity... good to see that the threat of recession hasn't cowed everybody:

- Hundreds of postal workers based in Brixton, Stockwell and South Lambeth refused to deliver the BNP's European election leaflets. The Royal Mail drafted in agency staff to get them delivered instead (South London Press29.5.09).

- There is a tube cleaners demonstration next Monday, the call follows: ' JUSTICE FOR TUBECLEANERS - DEMONSTRATE AT CITY HALL MON 1 JUNE 4PM. On Thursday, the London Mayor increased the London Living Wage to £7.60 an hour. Tubecleaners know they won't see this increase without a fight. Despite the Mayor's commitments to a living wage for cleaners on the underground last summer, it took months for the increase to kick in, and some contractors are still refusing to pay even this.Join the RMT picket of City Hall to call for this living wage for all tube cleaners, as well as for free travel to work / sick pay / decent pensions / 28 days' annual leave / an end to third party sackings. Monday 1 June 4pm outside City Hall (on the south of the river between Tower Bridge and London Bridge). Bring banners, placards and noisemakers!'

Vinyl Underground: Watching the Detectives

Vinyl Underground: Watching the Detectives by Si Spencer and Simon Gane (2008) is very much a self-consciouslly Londonist graphic novel. It talks of 'London, city of mobs and murder, massacres and mysteries' and is crammed full of the kind of references that suggest the authors have spent many hours listening to the Robert Elms show.

Harry Beck's 1931 tube map? Check. Fictitious locations in Phyllis Pearsall's London A-Z? Check. Mention of 'psychogeography of London'? Check. Brooding image of the river? Yes, several, for example: 'countless ghosts, teeming like tadpoles in the murky poison of the Thames'.



The tale features a cool gang of 'occult detectives' and avengers hanging out in an abandoned tube station, tracking down child killers in between DJing at Northern Soul nights in Stockwell. Its plot takes it starting point from the real story of the discovery of a child's dismembered body in the Thames, but the suspected ritual killing turns out to be something else involving London gangsters...

Can anybody suggest other Londonist (particularly South Londonist) graphic novels? By this I don't just mean stories set in London, but those in which the city itself - or a particular location within it - is a key element. Alan Moore's From Hell is an obvious example, as to a lesser extent is his V for Vendetta. But there must be many others.

Pre-Raphaelite South London (2): Ford Madox Brown and Emma Hill

The Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown and his lover (later wife) Emma Hilll lived in Stockwell in 1851/2. His famous picture The Pretty Baa Lambs was painted in the Stockwell garden. Brown recalled: '"The Baa-lamb’s picture was painted almost entirely in sunlight which twice gave me a fever while painting. I used to take the lay figure out every morning and bring it in if it rained, my painting room being on the level with the Garden. Emma (his wife) sat for the lady and Kate (his daughter) for the child. The lambs and sheep used to be brought every morning from Clapham Common in a truck. One of them ate up all the flowers one morning in the Garden, and they used to behave very ill. " (I haven't been able to find the address of the Stockwell cottage - anybody know?).

Source: Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (London: Quartet, 1985)