Music Monday: Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and the Critics Group in Beckenham

In musical terms the folk singer Ewan MacColl (1915-1989) is associated in most people's minds with the Salford where he was raised (the subject of his song Dirty Old Town) and the Scotland of his parents with which he so strongly identified. But many of his most creative years were actually spent in the outer reaches of South London.

MacColl seems to have first lived in London for a short period in the mid-1930s shortly after marrying his  first wife, Joan Littlewood. They hoped to pursue their radical theatre ambitions in the capital. In 1936 they lived for a while in 'a borrowed flat on the north side of Wandsworth Common' then 'rented an enormous run-down house at 113 West Side, Clapham Common, paid a month's rent deposit and a month's down, furnished the place with hire-purchase goods and set about communal living' with a group of young drama hopefuls. The money soon ran out and later that year they moved back to Manchester, though Littlewood was to return in the 1950s and become a major figure in theatre, living on Blackheath (where she hosted Brendan Behan - see previous Transpontine post).

In the 1953 MacColl moved back to South London with his second wife Jean Newlove - a dancer and choreographer who he had met through their involvement with Theatre Workshop. They rented a flat at 109 Rodenhurst Road in Clapham Park then later that year rented a flat at 11 Park Hill Rise in East Croydon; 'Old Theatre Union friends Barbara Niven - now a full-time fundraiser for the Daily Worker - and her partner, the social realist painter Ern Brooks, took the flat upstairs'. MacColl and Newlove put up visiting musicians and friends there including the American singer Big Bill Broonzy, folk song collector Alan Lomax and Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid.

Ewan and Jean had two children together, but by the time the second was born - the singer Kirsty MacColl - Ewan had fallen in love with the American folk singer Peggy Seeger. Peggy first lived in London in 1956 and over a couple of years lived as a lodger in Greenwich (16 Crooms Hill) at the home of another influential figure in the folk revival, A. L. Lloyd - as discussed previously here.

In 1959 MacColl and Seeger rented a flat at 55 Godstone Road, Purley before in 1961 taking out a mortgage on the upstairs flat at 35 Stanley Avenue, Beckenham, Kent - where MacColl lived for the rest of his life. This was not just a family home but a productive centre of London folk music. From 1964 to 1972 a group of folk singers met there regularly to study and sing. The Critics Group recorded a number of albums including two collections of London songs in 1966 'Sweet Thames Flow Softly' and 'A Merry Progress to London'. The collective with its floating membership was active in left wing politics, particularly opposition to the Vietnam War.

As described by MacColl biographer Ben Harker: 'The stalwarts who congregated in the Beckenham workroom on one, two or three evenings a week in 1964 were mainly in their early twenties. They were typically from working-class backgrounds, had been caught up in the skiffle craze, and had subsequently renounced American-based music in favour of British or Irish traditions'. Early members included Sandra Kerr, John Faulkner, Frankie Armstrong and Gordon McCulloch, as well as for a short while Luke Kelly of The Dubliners. Children's author Michael Rosen was a later member.

Sweet Thames Flow Softly, written by MacColl, was sung on the Critics Group recording by John Faulkner. A song of a pleasure boat trip from Woolwich Pier to Hampton Court, it has become something of a folk standard, sung by many including Christy Moore/Planxty, Sinead O'Connor, The Dubliners, Maddy Prior and of course MacColl himself. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s MacColl and Seeger ran their own Blackthorne Records from their Beckenham home where today there is a plaque commemorating 'political songwriter and playwright' MacColl.

All quotes above from Ben Harker, Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl (2007)

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'.

Ian McEwan - 'the boundless shabby tangle of London south of the river'

I enjoyed Ian McEwan's latest novel, The Children Act (2014), continuing his close observations of the life of the higher reaches of the urban middle class. While Saturday (2005) was centred around a neuro-surgeon living in Fitzrovia, this book's central character is a judge living not too far away in Gray's Inn.

If McEwan is a London novelist though, he is certainly a north London one (I believe he lives near to the Post Office Tower). And The Children Act features a terrible diss of South London - whether the character's view reflects the author's perspective, you can judge for yourself:

'She had a north Londoner's ignorance of and disdain for the boundless shabby tangle of London south of the river. Not a Tube stop to give meaning and relation to a wilderness of villages swallowed up long ago, to sad shops, to dodgy garages interspersed with dusty Edwardian houses and brutalist apartment towers, the dedicated lairs of drug gangs. The pavement crowds, adrift in alien concerns, belonged to some other, remote city, not her own. How would she know they were passing through Clapham Junction without the faded jokey sign above a boarded-up electrical store? Why make a life here?'

In defence of Clapham Junction

Obviously this description could just as easily - and probably just as unfairly - be applied to many parts of north London. As for Clapham Junction, I found myself at the station there for the first time in years last week, and thought it was a vibrant convergence point of all the currents of London life on a late Saturday afternoon. There were football fans, wedding parties, shoppers returning from the West End, people heading home from doing sports (I'd been running  cross country). I was up the junction, and it was great.

Bob Hoskins RIP - by the river

Farewell Bob Hoskins, a great London actor, so here he is (mostly) by the River Thames:

By Tower Bridge in the Long Good Friday

with Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday

with Helen Mirren by St Thomas Hospital SE1 in Last Orders

with Michael Caine in Last Orders... scene shot in the Larkhall Tavern in Clapham

on the South Bank in the video for Jamie T's Sheila

with Helen Mirren in the Duchess of Malfi at the Roundhouse in 1981
- went to this on a school trip, it was amazing

See also: Shiraz Socialist; Dangerous Minds

Stuart Hall (1932-2014): Jamaican 'sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea'

Stuart Hall (1932-2014), who died today at the age of 82, was surely one of the most important British-based thinkers of the 20th century. With a few others he pretty much invented 'cultural studies' and his work on multiculturalism and identity is cited throughout the world. He was visiting professor at Goldsmiths in New Cross in the 1990s, and delivered a number of influential lectures there, most notably  his 'Race: the floating signifier' (1997) where he criticises the idea that 'race' is a 'biological' fact.

My personal favourite Stuart Hall quote is from his 1991 essay 'Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities':

'People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children's teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don't grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity - mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can't get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon - Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history'.

In the late 1950s, Hall worked for several years at a school at the Oval, as he recalled in 2009 in At Home and Not At Home: Stuart Hall in conversation with Les Back (from Goldsmtihs):

'when I left university I came to London, I was editing Universities & Left Review [predecessor of the New Left Review], which had an office in Soho. I lived in South London in Clapham in the house of a wonderful old Trotskyist called Jock Haston, and I wanted to stay in London until I went home - still not quite deciding when I’m going. So I thought well, what can you do? Practically, nothing! I couldn’t then drive, so I couldn’t drive a milk float. You can teach. So I got a job in a secondary school as a supply teacher, and you’re sent round to different schools, but my school was unable to retain any of its supply teachers, or  indeed its teachers. So once I’d got in there they never let me go. I was a supply teacher in a school at the Kennington Oval, for quite a while, about three or four years, and I used to leave there, get on a train, go to Soho, and edit the journal, and go back on the night bus - try to wake up in time to get to the Oval for the opening of class'.

The school was a boys secondary modern, so I think may have been Kennington Boys School. I believe the house in Clapham where he stayed with Jock Haston was at 11 Larkhall Rise SW4 (at least that was Haston's address in 1958).

I found a great film on youtube of Hall interviewing CLR James (1901-1989, I think at the latter's then flat in Brixton at 165 Railton Road, SE24 in 1986.

- John Akomfrah's, The Unfinished Conversation, is a three-screen video installation investigating cultural, ethnic and personal identity through the memories of Stuart Hall. It is being shown continuously at Tate Britain until 23 March 2014 (admission free)

New Cross Fire Station Saved - but cuts continue

New Cross Fire Station seems to have been spared the axe, according to the latest proposals due to be considered by London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) on Thursday 18 July. Clapham too has been saved, but 10 stations are earmarked for closure including three in South London: Southwark, Downham and Woolwich.

There has been fierce opposition to the plans published in January to close 12 fire stations in order to implement Boris Johnson's cuts of £28.8 million over the next two years. Banners such as the above (in Pepys Road SE14) have appeared around London. On 22 May, 200 people attended a consultation meeting at Sydenham School and voiced overwhelming opposition to the plans.

While it is good news that New Cross won't close, the proposals will still result in a reduced service across Lewisham and beyond, and in fact the number of proposed job cuts is now being increased from 520 to 552. So the campaign against the cuts will no doubt be continuing.

Threat confirmed to South London Fire Stations

The threat to a large number of London fire stations first became apparent late last year, with the leaking of a report. Now the threat has been confirmed with the publication of the draft 'London Safety Plan', released today at the London Fire Brigade Headquarters. The draft plan includes proposals to close 12 London fire stations, with the loss of 520 firefighter and office jobs, in order to enforce Mayor Boris Johnson's cuts of £45m.

South London stations earmarked for closure include:

- New Cross;
- Downham;
- Southwark
- Woolwich;
- Clapham.

Along with Belsize, Bow,  Clerkenwell, Kingsland, Knightsbridge, Silvertown and Westminster

It is clear that Peckham was also on the closure list, but has been spared because it would be politically unacceptable to close it at this time as  'This proposal would be under consideration in parallel with the Lakanal inquest (which starts on 14 January 2013)'. Peckham is now instead recommended to have the number of fire appliances reduced from two to one.

Six people died in the 2009 Lakanal tower block fire in Camberwell, with others being rescued by firefighters. Would as many have survived there, and at the Carrisbrooke Gardens fire in Peckham in the same year, if there had only been one fire engine in Peckham and no station at nearby New Cross from which to get back up? Or how about the 12 people rescued from a fire at a hostel in Lewisham Way, New Cross in November 2010?

In 2011/12, fire engines were mobilised from Lewisham's five stations on more than 6,300 occasions. If two of the five close - New Cross and Downham - there will inevitably be less cover available from the remaining three (Forest Hill, Deptford, Lewisham). The London Fire Brigade target is that the first fire engine should arrive at an incident within six minutes of being called - already in Lewisham they miss this target on more than one in five occasions (21%). With fire engines having to travel further to get to areas like New Cross and Brockley this performance can only get worse, putting lives at risk (Lewisham statistics here).

My local fire station in Queens Road in New Cross has been saving lives since it was built by the London County Council in 1894 (the picture below from Ideal Homes dates from 1903- apart from busier traffic outside it looks much the same today).  28 jobs would go there if it is closed.

With my local accident and emergency department also under threat at Lewisham Hospital I do feelthat my safety, and that of my neighbours, is being compromised. More broadly it's beginning to feel like the state is gradually withdrawing from this part of the world, at least in terms of community services and facilities, as fire stations, health services and libraries disappear!

There have already been a few meetings about saving local fire stations, including a public meeting in Peckham last November. Now the campaign will need to really get going.  The draft fifth London Safety Plan will be considered by the  London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority on 21 January 2013. A public consultation will follow, with a final decision due to be taken in June 2013.

The Fire Brigades Union has called for a 'Save our fire service' demonstration on Monday 21 January outside the LFEPA meeting, assembling 1:30 pm at the London Fire Brigade HQ, 169 Union Street SE1.

South East London Fire Stations Under Threat

Tomorrow (Wednesday 7th November) firefighters from all over the country will be converging on London for a lobby of parliament in protest against cuts to the fire brigade. In London, a leaked report due to be considered by the London Fire Authority on 22 November recommends the closure of 17 stations with the loss of 600 jobs. South London will be particularly badly hit - local stations on the closure list include:

- New Cross (Lewisham borough);
- Downham (Lewisham borough);
- Peckham; (Southwark borough)
- Southwark (Southwark borough)
- Woolwich (Greenwich borough);
- Clapham (Lambeth borough).

It goes without saying that this will put lives at risk - by definition the further fire engines have to travel to the scene of a fire, the longer it will take to get there.

A key figure in the decision about London fire brigade cuts is South London Conservative James Cleverly, the Chair of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority as well as leader of the London Assembly Conservative Group (he is the Member for Bexley and Bromley). Having failed to get elected in Lewisham as a councillor, mayor and MP, we hope he's not going to take his revenge by closing down fire stations - at the same time as some of his party colleagues are planning to close down the Accident & Emergency department in Lewisham Hospital (where incidentally Cleverly was born). I'm sure it's just a coincidence that all of the proposed South London closures are in Labour boroughs.

History Corner: Lord Haw Haw

I've mentioned before that William Joyce, who as 'Lord Haw Haw' was the voice of the Nazis' English language radio broadcasts during the Second World War, had once been involved in the Conservative Party in Dulwich. I've been reading more about him in 'The Meaning of Treason' by Rebecca West (1965), who attended Joyce's treason trial at the Old Bailey.

Joyce  was born in New York in 1906 to a pro-British Irish family, and moved to London in 1921 after spending most of his childhood in Galway.  West's book combines details of Joyce's life with the most incredible condescension to South London. Indeed she even implies that Joyce's South London period partly shaped his destiny as a place breeding frustrated ambition in those to whom traditional routes to power are blocked:

'He came to London before his family; and his destiny sent him down to South London, and there was significance in that. South London is not the London where England can be conquered. It is not London at all, even calling itself by a vague and elided location. 'Where do you live?' 'South the river'. The people on the other bank never speak of their landscape as "north of the river". They may go down east, or up west, but they move within London, where the Houses of Parliament are, and the Abbey, and Buckingham Palace'.

Joyce's first London home was in Longbeach Road SW11, 'in one of those streets which cover the hills round Clapham Common like a shabby striped grey counterpane'. While here Joyce began studies at Battersea Polytechnic. When his parents came to London afterwards he moved into the family home at 7 Allison Grove SE21, 'a house as delightfully situated as any in London. Allison Grove is a short road of small houses which has been hacked out from the corner of the gardens of a white Regency villa in the greenest part of Dulwich'. Ironically the house was destroyed by a German bomb early in the war: 'Nothing remained of it except a hole in the ground beside the remains of a neighbour's basement'.

Joyce was active in the Conservative Party's youth wing, the Imperial Youth League and later the Tory Party proper. He was also involved with the British Fascists from 1923 to 1925, who provided security for Conservative Party public events - Joyce prided himself on being a street-fighter and claimed to have helped the notoriously brutal Black and Tans in Ireland in their efforts to suppress Irish nationalists. It was in this physical capacity that Joyce sustained his striking scarred face during a fight while defending the platform at a 1924 Tory election meeting at Lambeth Baths in Battersea. In 1927 he married and  moved to Chelsea where he remained a Conservative Party activist until 1932 when he joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. He subsequently became its Deputy Leader and Director of Propaganda.

Crystal Palace

In 1933 he was back in South London, living in in Crystal Palace in 'a home which, though cheap and unfashionable, possessed its picturesque distinction. He was staying in a flat in a road clinging to the top of an escarpment in the strangest spot in the strangeness of South London. It was far south of the river, where the tameness of town overspreads hills which, though insignificant in height, are wild in contour; and if it covers them with the tame shapes of houses it has to stack them in wild steepness. But above this suburban precipice the buildings themselves were wild with the wildness sometimes found in Victorian architecture. Outside the windows of his flat in Farquhar Road, two towers ran up into the sky and between them the torso of the Crystal Palace was at one and the same time a greenhouse and a Broad Church cathedral... A little way up the road was the Crystal Palace railway station, the most fantastic in London, so allusive, particularly in its cast-iron ornamental  work, to uplifting Victorian festivity that it wold not be surprising to find its platforms thronged by a choir singing an oratorio by Parry or Stainer.. It was from this flat, on 4 July 1933, that William Joyce addressed the application for a passport which cost him his life'. It was as a holder of a British passport that Joyce was later convicted of treason. His lawyer argued in his trial that he was technically a US citizen and therefore could not be guilty of treason to the British state, but Joyce had spent years arguing that he was British with the passport application the clinching evidence.

Joyce in Germany with his wife Margaret

Joyce split with Mosley in 1937 and founded the British National Socialist League, even more rabidly anti-semitic than the BUF. He moved to Germany just before the outbreak of war in 1939, and worked for the Nazi propaganda effort all the way through to their defeat in 1945. After being captured and brought back to England, Joyce was detained in Brixton prison, Wormwood Scrubs and finally Wandsworth, 'a shabby old prison, black as a coal tip, set among the trodden commons and the discoloured villas, the railway viaducts and the long streets of little houses, which lie "south of the river". The last days of his life in London were to be spent only a mile or two from the house in Longbeach Road where it had begun'. He was hanged for treason in January 1946.

Incidentally Joyce's daughter Heather Piercey ended up teaching in Deptford, trying to atone for his anti-semitism by promoting links between Christians and Jews (see this 2005 interview).

(See also Nickel in the Machine - The Execution of Lord Haw Haw at Wandsworth Prison in 1946, from where I sourced the photos).

Angela Carter, Transpontine author

Angela Carter (1944-1992) died twenty years ago today, one of the great Transpontine writers. She spent her childhood in Balham, had an early job on the Croydon Advertiser, and lived her last years in Clapham.

The South London question is a recurring theme in her writings, none more so than in her 1991 novel Wise Children set in a fictional Bards Road in Brixton (presumably based on Shakespeare Road). The opening paragraphs go straight to the heart of the matter:

'Q. Why is London like Budapest?
A. Because it is two cities divided by a river.

Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks. Put it another way. If you’re from the States, think of Manhattan. Then think of Brookly. See what I mean? Or, for a Parisian, it might be a question of rive gauche, rive droite. With London, it’s the North and South divide. Me and Nora, that’s my sister, we’ve always lived on the left-hand side, the side the tourist rarely sees, the bastard side of Old Father Thames.


Once upon a time, you could make a crude distinction, thus: the rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops while sounds of marital violence, breaking glass and drunken song echoed around and it was cold and dark and smelled of fish and chips. But you can’t trust things to stay the same. There’s been a diaspora of the affluent, they jumped into their diesel Saabs and dispersed throughout the city’.

And of course she knew how to use the word Transpontine! In a review of Iain Sinclair's Downriver (London Review of Books, 1991) she compared Sinclair's East London to her more familiar territory:

'But I never went to Whitechapel until I was thirty, when I needed to go to the Freedom Bookshop (it was closed). The moment I came up out of the tube at Aldgate East, everything was different from what I was accustomed to. Sharp, hard-nosed, far more urban. I felt quite thecountry bumpkin, slow-moving, slow-witted, come in from the pastoral world of Clapham Common, Brockwell Park, Tooting Bec. People spoke differently, an accent with clatter and spikes to it. They focused their sharp, bright eyes directly on you: none of that colonialised, transpontine, slithering regard. The streets were different - wide, handsome boulevards, juxtaposed against bleak, mean, treacherous lanes and alleys. Cobblestones. It was an older London, by far, than mine. I smelled danger. I bristled like one of Iain Sinclair's inimitable dogs. Born in Wandsworth, raised in Lambeth - Lambeth, “the Bride, the Lamb's Wife”, according toWilliam Blake - nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End'.

In a 1977 essay published in New Society, D'you mean South?, Carter reflected at length on growing up in South London (you can read the whole thing in Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, published in 1993), including the girls' fashion styles:

'The girls, I remember, always had wild aspirations to style. Around their fifteenth summer, they spread out all their petals -- like flowers with only one season in which to cram all their blossoming. I recall a giggling flock of girls, some white, some black, at the tube station entrance in 1959. They must have assembled there in order to go "up west" (i.e., to the West End). They were as weird and wonderful as humanoid flora from outer space, their hair backcombed into towering beehives, skirts so tight you could see the clefts between their buttocks, and shoes with pointed tips that stuck out so far in front they had to stand sideways onthe escalators. There was a shoemaker in Brixton who custom-built these shoes to the girls' requirements.


It was a style they had invented all by themselves. They were shackled by those skirts,crippled by those shoes, as if the clothes they had selected symbolised the cramped expectations of their lives in the cruel confinements of sex and class. Their dandyism triumphed over the limitations of their circumstances, and made them objects of bizarre and self-created beauty, a triumph of mind over matter. My mother would never have let me go out looking like that. Hadn't I gone to a direct grant school?


After an absence, I now live in south London again. And the girls, I see, still do have a style all of their own. Last autumn, it was ankle-length, knife-edged pleated tartan skirts, with ankle socks and plastic sandals. This summer it seems to be a decorous punk - tapered jeans,rouge, and a lot of chains everywhere - as if to indicate that, however much things might seem to have changed, everything remains fundamentally the same'.

She also reflected in the same essay on the gentrification of Clapham, presumably in its early stages in 1977:

'When the bourgeoisie got priced out of, first, Hampstead and Highgate - how long ago it seems! - and then from Camden Town and Islington, and the alternatives got priced (who'd have thought it?) out of Ladbroke Grove, there was nowhere else for all, repeat all, the poor sods to go, was there? That's typical south London usage. Every statement is converted to a rhetorical question'.

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.

Schooltime Chronicle

Smiley Culture has been dead now for three months and the circumstances of his death remain unexplained. The Campaign for Justice for Smiley Culture are doing a sterling job keeping up the pressure for answers, as well as raising the wider issue of deaths in custody.

Smiley Culture's Schooltime Chronicle (1986) was a 12" single released on Polydor records. In my view it's not one his best tracks musically, but it is all about going to school in South London - specifically Santley Primary School in Clapham and Tulse Hill Comprehensive School (as did his friendAsher Senator and, previously, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Ken Livingstone).

Lyrics in full:

Big request to Miss Crane, Headmistress off Primary School. And massive respect to Mr Evans Principal of Secondary. Wherever they may be./

Me junior school was Santley, me secondary Tulse Hill. If I could turn back the hands of time I would be going to them still. Yet to miss couple day dem deh time it was a thrill./

So don't be like me a fool, Youth man go to school, youth man go to school, don't be like me a fool. And tek in dem ya style ca you know culture rule. This ah me school time chronicle. Me school time chronicle Lord /

As a youth in Primary School me used to play marble, conkers, football and even scrabble. The youth that used to lose would always grumble. But tru dem know how me stay dem hav to humble. When play time done teacher blow the whistle. Me come from behind prickle just a kiss up dimple. And me reach a classroom feeling comfortable. So me never used to give the teachers too much trouble. Still the worse time inna me school chronicle. Might sound funny now but to me was terrible. Me did a run down the stairs holding on not to stumble. Should of guessed somebody spit on the staircase handle. Before me coulda say elyak hear the whole school./ El el el el Smiley's got the fever. We're gonna tell the teacher. Injections all over. Can't say we never told ya/

Me school time chronicle. Me school time chronicle Lord /

Ner na ner na ner na Smiley's got the fever. Injections all over. Can't say we never told ya/

Me school time chronicle. . . /

Now to start secondary say it was pure trouble. Cause every school I wanted to go to was full. Stockwell Manor Kennington all had too much pupil. So for Tulse Hill Comprehensive I had to settle. I heard the big boys there were very brutal. But when me reach on dem handle me respectful. With me blazer, shirt and tie me did well official. Every day was the same nice and simple. But the worst thing throughout me school chronicle. El.... was the dinner it was terrible. And every lunchtime this is how the cooks would grumbled/

"I tell you Smiley in our days in school, All we got was a bowl of 'Gruel'. And when we were finished or even before. We'd be going up asking for more". 'MORE' I'm cool! But don't be like me a fool. Youth man go a school. Youth man go a school. Don't be like me a fool. Cause I don't want you to come turn out like me. A hard working raggamuffin M.C. Get intelligent and now run the country. Listen to your teacher go to school weekly. And take little time and think wisely. About your school time chronicle.

Me go a P.E. everything PHYSICAL. Touch a Science Lab me ramp with pure CHEMICAL. We did leve me R.E. because me mind BIBLICAL. Inna Maths everything was MATHEMATICAL. But down ah Computer Studies me did well DIGITAL. Inna English everything was ALPHABETICAL. It might sound like history but it's not HISTORICAL. That me only left school with one O'level

Rail Cuts Campaigns

Campaigns against cuts to rail services in South London are gaining momentum on at least two fronts.

The Save Our South London Line campaign is focusing on Boris Johnson's decision, as Chair of Transport for London, to close the South London Line from 2012. This service runs between Victoria and London Bridge via Battersea Park, Wandsworth Rd, Clapham High Street, Denmark Hill, Peckham Rye, Queens Rd Peckham and South Bermondsey. It is one of the few services that directly links South East and South West London without requiring a journey into town and back out again, and connects among other things the hospitals at Kings and the Maudsley at Denmark Hill with Guys at London Bridge More details of the campaign here.

The Save Our South London campaign includes Southwark Rail Users Group, Clapham Transport Users Group and Lambeth Public Transport Group. They are holding a public meeting this week, Wednesday 30th September (6.30pm for 7pm-9pm) at the Institute of Psychiatry, 16 De Crespigny Park, Camberwell, SE5.

Meanwhile the Forest Hill Society and the Sydenham Society are amongst those opposing cuts to services to London Bridge from Brockley, Honor Oak Park, Forest Hill, Sydenham and other stations on the same line. Southern Railway, who were awarded the South Central franchise this summer, intend to cut evening peak services from May 2010, resulting in a 30% reduction to trains running to these stations (from 6 trains per hour to just 4 trains per hour). Daytime off-peak services will also be cut from 6 to 4 trains per hour, and as from December 2009 there will no longer have any direct trains from Charing Cross, journeys back from the West End will always involve a change at London Bridge late at night. Campaigners have launched a petition here.

(See also the various discussions on this at 'the glass is half full actually' Brockley Central)

Arthur Rackham - Transpontine Cockney

Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) was an illustrator best known for his work on fairy tales and children's books. He was also rather proud of his South London origins, entitling a 1934 self-portrait 'A Transpontine Cockney'.

Rackham was born in 1867 at 210 South Lambeth Road, where he spent most of his childhood. His family moved a short distance to 27 Albert Square, Clapham Road in 1882 and to 3 St Ann’s Park Road, Wandsworth in 1885 (near Wimbledon Common). They regularly attended the Brixton Independent Church in Brixton Road and Rackham himself attended Lambeth School of Art (1884).


Source: Arthur Rackham: A Life with Illustration by James Hamilton (Pavilion, 1995)

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)

Transpontine TV

I’ve put together a Transpontine playlist of videos on YouTube of music and songs linked to South East London. Take a look at:

Band of Holy Joy - What the Moon Saw (1985) – gorgeous song, the band recently reformed and when I saw them at the Windmill in Brixton last year they were fantastic. Cherry Red recently released a retrospective compilation, Leaves that fall in Spring (see review at Swedish Nurse).

Test Department – Total State Machine (1984) - awesome industrial assault from their Beating the Retreat album in solidarity with striking miners.

Conflict – The Serenade is Dead – live anarcho-punk action from 1985.

(the previous three bands all had connections with Nettleton Road in New Cross)

The Violets - Mirror Mirror (2006) – current Angular favourites.

Linton Kwesi Johnson – It Dread Inna Inglan (1979) - unaccompanied reading from dub poet, ex-Goldsmiths student and long time Brixton resident – ‘no matter what they say, come what may, we are here to stay inna Inglan’.

Squeeze - Up the Junction (1979) – from Top of the Pops, ‘I never thought it would happen with me and the girl from Clapham’. The SE London band played early gigs at The Oxford Arms in Deptford (now the Birds Nest).

Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine (1992) – The Only Living Boy in New Cross.

Shirley Temple (1936) – Old Kent Road – US child start goes cockney in the film Little Princess.

Brain of Morbius (2003) – I'm a Busy Bee and I'm loaded – big in New Cross and apparently massive in Hungary

June Brides (1986?) Every Conversation – live version of one of the greatest 1980s indie-pop songs. The band were based in Lewisham (lived in Courthill Road) and used to rehearse at studios off Creek Road in Deptford.

Windrush to Lewisham

I've been reading Windrush to Lewisham: Memoirs of 'Uncle George' by W.George Brown (London: Mango Publishing 1999), an interesting account of one of the earliest post-war migrants from Jamaica to South East London.

Brown came over on the famous SS Empire Windrush voyage in 1948, and like many other passengers initially lived in temporary accommodation in a deep shelter in Clapham. After several other temporary lodgings he bought a house in 1952 at 79 Lewisham Road and got involved in fighting racism in this part of the world.

As he describes it, ‘I discovered that there were a few pubs in South East London who deliberately refused to serve coloured people. Some were rudely abused by customers of these pubs… In some cases it was so bad that on many occasions the coloured man could only ask someone inside the pub to purchase drinks for him. That person would hand the drinks to him outside the door’. In 1953, Brown joined with others to set up the Anglo-Caribbean Association and Club to provide practical support and social activities for West Indians and their friends. He and colleagues went round to pubs operating a colour bar and demanded to be served, arguing their right to do so with landlords and threatening to publicly expose them in the press if they refused. A similar campaign was mounted in dance halls.

The Anglo-Caribbean Association held its first big meeting in 1954 at the Amersham Arms in New Cross, and held dances and social events at Laurie Grove Swimming Baths and Deptford Town Hall before it secured its own social club in 1959 at 113 Breakspears Road. The following year the club moved t0 229 Greenwich High Road, and later changed its name to the Commonwealth Association and Club. In its early days the Association faced organised racist opposition, its organisers received abusive phonecalls and notes, and in 1954 a sign with a fascist symbol was left outside the the Royal Albert in Blackheath Road where they were planning a meeting. It read 'Keep Briton White' (sic) - spelling was never the fascists' strong point. But thanks to the efforts of W.George Brown and others the overt colour bar was broken down in South East London.

The picture was taken in the Anglo-Caribbean club.

James Brown

So farewell James Brown... dead on Christmas Day, what an exit. I made a Christmas CD for friends this year and included his great 'Santa Claus go straight to the Ghetto' (could have put the Belle & Sebastian version on, but much as I love them no one can really cover James Brown).

The James Brown sound will always remind me of my early days in South London, just after I'd moved to Brixton in 1987. I used to go to Dance Exchange at the Fridge, with Jay Strongman DJing. It was the pre-house 'rare groove' period, with the music dominated by James Brown and his associates - among the biggest records were Brown's own 'Get Up Offa That Thing' and others made by members of his band, particularly Maceo Parker (Cross the Tracks - Maceo & the Macks) and Bobby Byrd (I know you got soul).

As well as the Fridge, there were other smaller clubs playing similar music in the area - there was Wear it Out upstairs in the Loughborough Hotel in Brixton, and Dance Chase above the Alexandra at Clapham Common. Another important night was Wendy May's Locomotion at the Town and Country Club in Camden, playing a mixture of funk and northern soul.

Soon electronic beats would begin to squeeze out the 1970s funk sound, but James Brown provided the DNA for the next wave of dance music through the endless sampling of loops from his band (where would Public Enemy and many others have been without them?). There is always hyperbole when somebody dies, but I can honestly say anybody's who's been out dancing in the past 40 years should raise a glass tonight to the Godfather of Soul.

Punk in South London

I wasn’t sure about reading ‘Punk Rock: an oral history’ by John Robb (Ebury Press, 2006). Sometimes your love for things can be ruined by them being over-mythologised and analysed, and I’ve rationed my reading of punk books on this basis. This book is quite refreshing though as it is entirely in the words of people involved in British and Irish punk up until about 1984. Along the way, some of the myths about punk are quietly demolished. For instance the notion of punk emerging in opposition to all previous musical trends doesn’t hold water when you find out that most of the key players were obsessively involved, if only as fans, in all kinds of pre-punk scenes – not just Bowie and Pub Rock (the approved influences), but also the 70s underground of Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies.

So what about South London connections? Well the Bromley Contingent of Siouxsie, Billy Idol and co. has been well documented before, as have the Croydon connections of The Damned, but I hadn’t realized that the latter’s Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible met while working at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls, taking in everything from Jerry Lee Lewis to Mrs Mills. The Damned rehearsed in a Bermondsey warehouse owned by their early manager, John Krivine (who was also behind the shops Boy and Acme Attractions)

The Sex Pistols first proper rehearsal was upstairs in the Rose and Crown in Wandsworth (John Lydon had earlier made his way to the Crunchie Frog pub in Rotherhithe for a rehearsal in August 1975, but the rest of the band failed to show up). A key early gig was the following February at Andrew Logan’s Valentine’s Night warehouse party at Butler’s Wharf in Bermondsey, featuring Jordan jumping on stage to have her clothes ripped off by Lydon, who then started smashing up the equipment. The gig had an electrifying effect on Mick Jones and Brian James, seeing the Pistols for the first time and inspired to follow suit (eventually forming The Clash and The Damned respectively).

TV Smith and Gaye Advert of The Adverts started out in a flat in Clapham when they first moved up to London from Devon, while Colin Newman of Wire lived in a ‘very rough squat in Stockwell’. Don Letts, a key figure in the punk-reggae crossover as DJ at the Roxy club ‘lived in a house in Forest Hill with five other rasta brethren: Leo Williams who was later in Big Audio Dynamite and Dreadzone, JR, Tony and my brother. We were really the staff, the doormen at the Roxy’. Mark Perry of Sniffin’ Glue and Alternative TV gets his say (‘We were working class kids from Deptford. We weren’t middle class ponces from Bromley or Chelsea’).

The book follows through to second wave of punk bands and its various sub-genres such as anarcho-punk. It also attempts to rescue the reputation of Oi bands, misunderstood as right wing skinheads when they were actually working class socialists if the book is to be believed. In this category come Deptford’s The Business, whose guitarist Steve Kent recalls ‘I was living in Deptford in the early punks days. Some friends of mine found out that punk groups were playing at the famous Kings Head in Deptford, which later went on to be the subject of the Conflict song. We had a punk gang down there on Friday and Saturday nights, which was the punk night, and there would be bands in the punk room’.

Above all the book conveys the excitement of rapidly expanding possibilities, of Do it Yourself mayhem and violent reaction from shocked patriots and passers-by.