I’ve been shying away from this rather wonderful series of photographs, important not only to the history of Greenwich but to the history of Victorian London as a whole, largely because so many of them are so famous they seem almost ubiquitous.

A couple of them, like this rabbit seller (complete with a piece of sacking round his waist to catch the blood…) crop up all over the place – in museums, libraries, books, TV, you name it, which made me think that people already knew what they needed to about the Reverend Charles Spurgeon and the bright idea he had in 1884 to create a magic lantern show of street scenes of everyday Greenwich.

But the other day Alison asked me about it, and it occurred to me that perhaps they’re not as well-known as I’d thought. This is probably down to the usual problem of the only dedicated book about the subject that I’m aware of, a re-working of a 1950s volume by the fine local historian Alan Glencross, being out of print. It is relatively easily found – look to paying about £12 on Abe Books and between a fiver and £15 on Amazon or finding it for a quick snoop free in the reference section of local libraries, but you have to know about books to be able to look.

Our Reverend Spurgeon is quite hard to find on the net because he is the (twin) son of the much more famous “Prince of Preachers,”  Rev. Charles Spurgeon, who founded the Metropolitan Tabenacle. He wasn’t supposed to become a preacher – he’d been intended for a career in commerce, but I guess having a hell, fire and brimstone dad, and a brother destined to follow his father into the family business, coupled with training at his Spurgeon College it was only a matter of time before Charles wanted a pastoral look-in.

He became preacher at the South Street Baptist Church in 1879 (I’m embarrassed that I don’t have a photo of that place to hand; I’ve passed it so many times, but don’t you think that it sounds like it should be in the Deep South of America with a name like that?) and remained there for 24  years.

Like so many middle class Greenwichians then, Spurgeon was fascinated by technology and in particular photography. I don’t have any proof that he was mates with the inventor of The Incredible Noakesoscope but since they were virtual contemporaries and lived a stone’s throw from each other I like to think that D.W. Noakes and Chas Spurgeon used to enjoy a (non alcoholic for Mr. S, of course) drink together over lengthy discussions on dry-plate technique.

Chas started his Grand Project in 1884, with a couple of pals, Mr OJ Morris and (possibly) Mr Sims, a professional photographer from King Street (now King William Walk). The three of them went around Greenwich photographing the all the street scenes that were fit to print.

As Alan Glencross is at pains to point out, the exercise was extremely subjective. He reminds us that these were photos taken for a nice, clean churchgoers’  evening’s entertainment, so don’t expect to see any street walkers, dope sellers, layabouts or other undesirables though I’ll eat my tricorn if they weren’t hanging around Greenwich just as much as ‘nice’ ice cream sellers, jolly crock-sellers or the police showing off their latest ambulance technology:

To me, that just makes the pictures even more shocking. Nice, well-fed, middle class Greenwich folk were quite used to seeing small, shoeless children selling matches or illegally shining shoes in Straightsmouth, and even if it moved them to open their wallets, as Spurgeon intended it certainly didn’t shock them.

Similarly, Alan Glencross reminds us that these photos are in no way ‘candid.’ The exposure time needed in the late-nineteenth century meant that every photo was carefully posed. Some worked rather better than others – this ‘action shot’ of a copper apprehending a small herbert nabbing bricks isn’t going to win any prizes for authenticity:

and ‘extras’ make return visits in photgraphs, over and over again. However fascinating the people are, I love the backgrounds as well – look at this old street car outside the King Billy in Trafalgar Road:

This image of a ‘growler’ (a taxicab, presumably named for the racket it made as it went along?), although it looks as though it was taken at Westcombe Park, is, apparently, more likely to have been at Maze Hill.

I find myself imagining what it must have been like to attend the Good Reverend’s Magic Lantern Show. I’m getting myself all togged up in my tricorn with the cherries on top and my best tweed cape to see the amazing magic lantern show. What am I going to see? The Crystal Palace? Queen Victoria? A nice picture of a kitten? No – just a bunch of  local toughs doing what I see them doing every day.

I mean it’s fascinating for us, seeing a world of more than a hundred years ago that exists only in tiny spits and spots these days, but for the burghers of Greenwich might it have been a bit of a let down? Of course not.  In a time before cinema, the process itself was the draw. What was in the pictures was still relatively unimportant.

Nevertheless Spurgeon was, Alan Glencross suggests, a pioneer. Although not the first to use Magic Lantern as propaganda, no one had commissioned a set of images of ordinary street life before. And as such he is important, not just to Greenwich, but to British social history. 

(Nearly) all human life is here – but what of Spurgeon himself? Well, who is that dapper chap in the boater having his shoes shone in Straighstmouth? What about the guy leaning on the hokey-pokey cart above? In true Hitchcockian style Spurgeon liked to appear in his own shots. Is it just me or does he not look quite like you’d imagine a Victorian Baptist preacher to be?

The series of photographs were presented to Greenwich Libraries in 1955, so my best guess is that they are now housed in the Heritage Centre – one of these days I must go and check them out. In the meanwhile it’s well worth tracking down a copy of Grandfather’s Greenwich. I can’t see a reprint happening any time soon…

Just out of interest – I wonder – does anyone know whether this particular Spurgeon and the very fine Darrell Spurgeon, whose histories of Greenwich, Charlton and Woolwich I refer to again and again, are any relation?

I’m coming to the end of the amount of time I can hold onto The Greenwich Theatre Book before the guilt gets to me, so just two posts remain to be told about the extraordinary events of the late 1960s that led to the saving, then re-flowering of Greenwich Theatre.

Today, I’m most interested in the actions of Actor/ Director Ewan Hooper, who was the driving force behind the theatre’s renaissance and, more importantly the funding and how he went about it.

There’s not much about Hooper on the internet – most sites just copy the Wikipedia stub which basically tells us he’s a Scot, born in 1935, who appeared in movies such as Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, Personal Services and Kinky Boots, and best known for a role in Hi De Hi. In the Who’s Who at the front of the Greenwich Theatre Book, he describes one of his earliest memories as sitting in church in Dundee wondering what he’d do with the font if it was converted to a theatre. He didn’t manage that one, but the itch to create seems to have haunted him.

He went to RADA in 1952 (I believe he’s now an Associate Member of the school) which took him rather longer than he had planned to take when the obligatory National Service cut his training in two. He spent a lot of time at Glascow Citizens Theatre and Bristol Old Vic, which put him in mind of creating a theatre himself. Not just any theatre, though, but one which was part of the local community as well as an amenity.

It was the community that drove Hoooper all the way through recreating Greenwich Theatre. Hooper goes on to tell us how they went about the basics of creating the theatre. They canvassed, door to door, asking what people would like to see, and they raised the bulk of the money the same way.

That’s a lot of trudging. I mean – blimey. That’s a lot of trudging. I can’t even begin to imagine that happening now.

We’ve talked about, on numerous occasions, how the lovely old Crowders Music Hall had reached the stage in the 1960s where it was pretty much derelict, used only for storage and up for sale, demolition not only allowed but encouraged. Greenwich council had bought it to do just that, but that if it could be proved that people actually wanted a theatre in the town they’d support Hooper and Co. having a go.

Hooper and his mates had no money – well – not the kind of money you need for that sort of operation, so they did the trudging themselves. They roped-in other volunteers, including Roan school children on their holidays and by the end of the summer they had more than 3,000 pledges to support the theatre.

At the same time Hooper and the Council were having meeting upon meeting, where it was decided they’d set themselves up as a non-profit-making company to organise it.

Ewan Hooper admits he had no idea about fundraising. He says

This theatre was started by actors and teachers and housewives and councillors and school children and some young professional men; with notable exceptions we didn’t have the expertise in the business community to help us.

They formed the Greenwich Theatre Trust and went door-knocking again.

Then disaster hit – or at least, nearly did.

I’ve never properly written about the horrific proposals put forward in the 1960s to demolish Greenwich (yes, you read that right) and build a motorway in its stead. This is largely because it was one hell of a complicated business, and there are many more people (still) around who know much more than I ever will. I’ll tackle it one day, promise. I guess that in many ways though, it was fantastic for Greenwich. There’s nothing like fearing your home will be bulldozed to mobilise people, and out of the battle to save Greenwich’s historic buildings grew new communities (not least the Greenwich Society) historians and a new spirit. We owe those 60s fighters a huge debt.

Of  course, Greenwich Theatre would have been in the firing line. Even if the actual road was re-routed so it didn’t go straight over the actual building, the community that Hooper and Co. were working with so hard would have been decimated. Hooper remembers that morale sagged in those days (understandably), even when the road was looking less likely. So he took another tack. He decided to put a show on, even if it didn’t have a theatre for it to be performed in.

I often wonder what the Green Man must have been like as a venue. The large, ancient pub stood on Blackheath – pretty much where the flats are now, near Rangers House. It’s mentioned many times in historical documents and seems to have been quite a landmark. I always thought it was demolished pre-war or something, but it appears that it was still going strong in the 60s. Hooper decided to try an idea by Peter Kay (no, not that one…) to do the one thing the old theatre was famous for – a music hall, in the large upstairs room at the Green Man. The actors performed free and the money went towards – well, it’s pretty obvious what the funds were for.

It was a massive, massive hit, and continued for many years.

Hooper realised that seeing results was important for morale, so he started community and youth theatres in pubs and church halls, ready to be slotted into the new building when it was finally built, and, as he wrote his piece for the Greenwich Theatre Book, he was just about to realise his dream.

He writes:

And now the theatre is finished, the company is formed and we can show the people of Greenwich that the arts are about freedom and inspiration – not covenants and raffles and jumble sales. Thank you for helping us. Now enjoy your new theatre with us.

I can’t begin to imagine how Hooper felt in 1997 when the rug was pulled from under one of the most successful producing theatres around and it lost its Arts Council Grant. It must have hurt even more than the fate of his second project, the Scottish Theatre in the 1980s, another victim of Arts Council funding cuts after just eight years.

When the theatre re-opened in 2000, the goalposts had moved. These days it’s mainly a touring house, though when it does create an in-house production, it’s often superb. But funding, too, has changed. Those old days of begging, door to door would be unlikely to work these days. We are too world-weary to give door-knockers much of an ear. So we just have to support the theatre in the most fundamental way – by going.

Hooper writes:

Because you are vital to us. Obviously if you don’t come, we can’t go on. You are in our minds as we plan our productions. They will grow out of your experiences in South London – and ours. If the plays are rooted in this area, they will have a wider importance too.

I would like to see more South-London oriented productions – which, when they can, I think the current management try to do – I enjoyed the Oxleas Wood show last summer. I had high hopes when they had the deal with the video production company a couple of years ago to record classics for schools. Perhaps something similar can happen again.

I suspect the days of subsidised, year-round, in-house shows are gone forever but we still have a theatre. We need to use it.

It wasn’t called a Civil War for nothing. Chopping off the head of a monarch who, up ’til that point had reigned ‘by divine right’ was a bit of a point of no return. You either thought it was a good idea or you didn’t. I guess the really poor, the grunts whose lives didn’t change whoever was in charge, didn’t get much say in the matter, but for everyone else, choices had to be made.

Who, ultimately, was going to come out of this smelling of roses? Would warty old Ollie Cromwell (‘right but rotten’, if I recall my 1066 and All That correctly) manage to keep the country a ‘commonwealth’ or would the wheel of fortune turn and bring back (‘wrong but romantic’) Charlie? No pressure – you just risked your own head if you got it wrong.

I bet the guys who backed Ollie thought they were pretty damn okay to start with. People like Gregory Clement, Greenwich’s own local regicide, rewarded with Crowley House on the river and a blind eye turned to his looting at Greenwich Palace.

Others, who helped Charles, hide, escape the country and plot his return, must have sweated that they’d backed the wrong horse for a few years.

But tides turn. At the restoration in 1660, Charles wasted no time rounding up and disposing of chaps like Clement.

In a way, though, hanging, drawing and quartering his enemies was the easy bit. The trickier question was what to do with all the people who suddenly came crawling out of the woodwork claiming to have been on his side all the time. Even if he only rewarded the ones he knew had done him service, it was going to be a costly affair.

Here are a few Greenwichians and the job applications they chanced their arms on at the Restoration:

Zachary Platt – wanted to be gardener at Greenwich and keeper of the queen mother’s buildings there, ‘which are now employed to entertain rude and debauched persons to drink and revel on Sabbath days.’ He doesn’t appear again. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to him that Charles actually rather liked drinking and revelling on Sabbath days.

Sir William Boreman – wanted ‘the keeping of the garden and groves which he is planting (that’s Greenwich Park to you and me) with a fee of £100 a year and leave to dispose of the fruit of his majesty’s gardens and orchards’.

He was, of course, successful in his bid – he laid out the park as we know it, to Le Notre’s designs. He got a staff, even down to a professional mole catcher.

W. Ryley – wanted to be granted the ‘old brick tower’ (I’m guessing this is Duke Humphrey’s tower, which stood where the Observatory is now). He also asked for some decayed wood, and two ruined houses in the old Greenwich Palace tiltyard. Unfortunately Ryley’s application meant Charles realised there was value in the old buildings after all. He decided to do something about the old tower and palace himself, selling off the rubble to pay for the Observatory.

Thomas Kilgrew – wanted Keeper of the Royal Armoury. I have no idea if he was successful.

Thomas Audrey – wanted the position of Keeper of Greenwich Park. He thought he had a good chance because it was the job several of his ancestors had held.

Colonel John Skringshire – also wanted to be Keeper of Greenwich Park.

Both these guys were unsuccessful. Charles clearly owed the Earl of St Albans rather more favours and he got to look after Greenwich House and the Park. One Babington, a name I wouldn’t entirely trust if I were a monarch, but who may have had nothing to do with any other Babington, was given under-housekeeper.

Colonel Thomas Blount – wanted – well, anything really. He reckoned he deserved recognition because he ‘set up the bells at Greenwich and hired ringers to ring on the king’s return.’

And this is just in Greenwich. I guess all new leaders have to deal with petitions from people who feel they’re owed something for services rendered, but the sheer stakes involved during civil war make the whole divvying out of jobs for the boys a whole degree scarier. No wonder the merry monarch went to the theatre a lot…

A glorious fantasy of a building, Rothbury Mission Hall somehow seems a bit lost and forgotten, lodged between Blackwall Lane, Mauritius and Azof Roads and a car mechanics -  an area which has never been either glorious or fantastical, even when this exuberant confection of turrets, steeples and stained glass was built.

Darryl Spurgeon describes it as “An extraordinary building of 1893 with a quite fantastic roofline of cupola, thin spirelets and dormers,” and I guess that just about sums it up.

Pevsner has nothing to say about the place, but the fabulous Julian Watson tells me that “according to LAJ Baker in his ‘Churches in the Hundred of Blackheath’ it was built as a Baptist church and was bought by the Congregationalists in the 1890’s.”

According to a short piece in Greenwich Industrial History Society’s site it was built by W T Hollands with the cash stumped up by a splendid chap with the enviable name of Josiah Vavasseur. Vavasseur (can’t you just think of a million nicknames for that…) had a nice little company making recoil-components for naval armaments until he was bought out by another, much bigger manufacturer, William Armstrong, for a very tidy sum indeed. Apparently Vavasseur was rather amused at the source of his sudden wealth and named his architectural contribution to the spiritual welfare of Greenwich’s paupers after Armstrong’s house in Northumberland.

By the time Life and Labour of the People of London 1890-1900 was written, the final volume of which I found in the “everything £1″ box of a secondhand bookshop (you do always check those, don’t you…) it had already become that Congregational mission.

Charles Booth wasn’t impressed. He describes it  as having “a pauperising influence and not effective from the religious standpoint; the Sunday school the principal piece of work, eight hundred children in average attendance; a good deal of money spent on social work.”

It’s been the home of Emergency Exit Arts for some years, a festival-making organisation about which I don’t know enough and would like to know more, not least because the homepage of its website has giant meerkat puppets on it. The building is Grade II listed, but not in a great state.

Whilst digging around the net for this post, I discovered a group called Heritage of London, a pan-London building preservation trust I had never heard of but who seem like A Good Thing. According to HoL’s site, Greenwich Council has offered to sell the building to the Trust, which they will restore, whilst keeping the arts group in residence, which sounds like a win to me.

Thing is, there are no dates on the website, short of the 2012 at the bottom, which could just be an automatically-updated thing. It looks a new site, but the prices – both purchase and restoration – look a bit low to me. It also ‘hopes the building will be workable for the Olympics’, which feels a bit late in the day, frankly, unless work’s been going on and I’ve been hyper-unobservant.

Does anyone know anything more about this? Has work been going on that I’ve missed or was this an optimistic piece of puff from before the recession?

Okay – so part three of Hilary Peters’s fabulous memories of living, working and gardening in Ballast Quay/Union Wharf in the 1960s and seventies. If you recall, she’s found a place to live, persuaded Morden College not to knock it down, built a garden with the help of the local kids and is now a successful gardener working for, among others, St Paul’s and Southwark Cathedrals. Her latest big job is at St Katherine’s dock, where an old East End docks is being transformed into a playground for the gin-palace brigade. her brief is to make the place ‘look like a million dollars.’  But back at home…

Union Wharf never looked like a million dollars. It was a working wharf. I didn’t do much loading and unloading from the river, but I did get a boat. Tamar was a small clinker-built yacht, with a brown sail and an inboard engine. I never got the hang of sailing, but I used Tamar a lot on the tideway, which was quite dangerous enough, even with a reliable engine. I kept her at Bugsby’s Hole (on the peninsula – TGP). She’d have been smashed to pieces in two tides against my wharf and the pieces would have settled on an old shopping trolley.

Tamar was used for gardening though. She was craned into St Katherine’s before they got the lock gates working and from her deck, I planted crack plants in the dock walls. Years later, I’d overhear ecologists exclaiming to each other:
“Gypsophila! Extraordinary! I’ve never seen it seed itself in a dock wall before.”

There were flood scares. I never understood why. The highest tides flooded the footpath outside the Naval College (and still do – on the five-foot-walk – TGP) but never ventured onto their lawns. It was the same at Ballast Quay. Even our cellars were always dry. Experts thought otherwise, so a flood wall was built along the edge of the wharf. It was two foot high and served only to trip up lightermen and ruin the wharf’s effect of grass to the water’s edge. I remember Mr. Robinson (of Robbo’s) looking sadly out of our first floor window and saying ‘times are changing.’

By this time, I had two goats, Tosh and Cud, in a friend’s garden in Blackheath. When one kidded and the other was ill, I nursed her in the back garden at Ballast Quay and she convalesced on the wharf and went for walks to Grot Beach (Pipers Wharf – the bit that’s still a working boatyard – if you’re on the Thames Path it’s the bit that has the giant blue corrugated iron walls – TGP).

With Tosh and the hens on the Wharf, the place began to look a bit rural and I suppose it was giving me ideas. Something was. We flourished as St. Katherines Dock flourished and bought a Dutch barge. We ran a café in the hold, selling our produce and advertising our gardens. We weren’t successful. St Katherines wasn’t popular yet. Still, it was only a matter of time before we needed more produce. For that we needed more land, so I asked the PLA if they had any waste land (can you imagine such a thing as ‘waste land’ now? – TGP)

They lent me Surrey Docks, which had closed in 1970. Acres of scrub, abandoned water and old dock buildings! I took the hens and goats and bought more of both. Local kids again joined in and their parents started an allotment scheme (the current Surrey Docks City Farm is on a different site – it was moved in 1986 – TGP)

Surrey Docks Farm was an expanded version of Union Wharf Nursery Garden and we still did the odd gardening job to pay for it. Its effect on Ballast Quay expanded too. The neighbours gave me their cauliflower leaves, cabbage stalks,  stale bread, roast joints… We had to wade through offerings to get to the front door.

As city-farming took over, the greenhouse became redundant. We clad it to look more like a Kentish barn and the wharf became the Tea Garden. (We had to apply for Change Of Use)

The plane tree was still quite small. When its roots reached the river it suddenly grew like mad and broke up the paving stones which we had laid for the tea garden. But in those days the paving stones were covered in tables and chairs, which extended all along the top lawn. Customers even came by boat. In winter we lit a brazier by the shed. Then the neighbours’ talents for baking and giving really came into their own. People came from all over London (and indeed from Western Australia) to eat our cakes. They queued up for cream teas at 11 in the morning. A notice on the gate said Dogs Welcome.

Along with the kindness and warmth, another great feature of SE London was the bickering. The kids quarrelled with each other and formed rival gangs. Their parents quarrelled about whose cakes were best, whose made most money, who was cleanest, quickest, most efficient. Some put up posters and others tore them down. Some wouldn’t join in because others were in, and others took over and blamed everyone else. Rivalries dating from Victorian times were dug up and picked over. All human life was there.

But oh, don’t you wish it was still happening? Home made cakes and tea in the cutest garden on the riverfront? Sigh…

And of Hilary now?

I am a part-time hermit. I live in a fantastically beautiful gatehouse (In the West Country, I believe – TGP) and carry on the eighteenth century tradition of being the estate hermit. I look after the building and I have made another garden.. Hermitting includes hospitality, so I show people the building if they want to see it, and have people to stay.

I do, and sometimes teach, pegloom weaving. Recently, I have started a Social Enterprise called Cards From Prison, using art by prisoners.”

Hilary only occasionally gets back to Greenwich, but she has said that next time she comes back she’ll have a rummage around to see if she can find some pictures for us. In the meantime, though, this extraordinary woman does have one other project that will interest anyone who loves Greenwich. She is the editor of the magazine Follies which is how I came to be in contact with her – the next edition will carry a feature about the Rotunda (not by me, of course, by someone who knows what they’re talking about…)

I am delighted to have ‘met’ her. Thank you Hilary, not just for these memories, but for what you have done for Greenwich.

Today, I’m going back to Hilary Peters’s fabulous memories of Ballast Quay Union Wharf in the 1960s. Just to recap, she’s walked along the river until she found a Georgian house where she might be able to build a garden, persuaded Morden College (who own a lot of the land round there) not to pull down the gorgeous little houses there, and rented one of them for the princely sum of £7 a week. Now, she’s going to build a garden…

I now had a key to the huge wooden gates, though they were hard to open. I could go in and direct the clearing up. It was my very first taste of landscaping, an activity which makes you feel like God.

Lovells’s end crane reached over my wharf, so it was used to remove the barrels of bitumen, railway sleepers and general grot that accumulates on disused wharves. There was a huge cast-iron grab, too, which I wanted to use as a flower pot but that went. If I’d saved it, it would have gone where the plane tree now is. It must have been 6ft tall and 5ft diameter.

I was soon joined by a gang of local kids, desperate for something to do. And there was lots to do. Just picking up the broken glass took days. One of the kids knew of a young cherry tree in the garden of a house that was being pulled down in Banning St. Another had a father who had a key to the water mains. All of them could climb like monkeys. I was alternately blamed for leading them astray and praised for my social work. Together, we spread the topsoil and planted the grass. The cherry tree went in at the end by the pub, the railway sleepers made plant frames. The residual grot was mounded up and covered with soil.

I took this picture in January of the cherry tree – it’s not at it’s best – give it a few weeks and it will be back to its lovely self, but as you can see, forty-odd years have been kind to it…

Our neighbours were wonderful. They would knock on the door and give us food – sandwiches, roast meat, cakes, pancakes, smoked cod, hot cross buns, summer pudding, batter pudding, bread pudding, mince pies. Every time of year had its special food.

Then the greenhouse was built and I called myself Union Wharf Nursery Garden.

I maintained the gardens at Amen Court for St Paul’s Cathedral and the garden round Southwark Cathedral, where the Borough Market was still a real vegetable market and the garden was for drunks to have a sleep. (Plus ça change – TGP) Covent Garden was real market too, which I used, getting up at 4am and driving my mini-van straight into the Piazza.

The wharf housed a shifting collection of plants and trees, and occasionally our neighbours, who had no tradition of using a garden like a London Square. They just kept giving me food in exchange. And when I kept hens in the shed (free range on the lawn during the day) and gave them eggs, they wanted to pay me as well.

On one occasion, a hen disappeared, and then another. There was a large Dutch coaster moored against the wharf (at high tide, the captain’s cabin was a few inches from the shed.) I went on board to mourn my loss. The captain denied all knowledge of hens, wharves and even ships. Most Dutch people speak perfect English but this does not apply to sailors accused of theft. He understood nothing. Soon after, they left on the tide, and there on the sea wall, was the corpse of my second lost hen, carefully returned, though dead. I assume they ate the first one…

I started to work at St Katherine’s Dock, designing garden after garden as the development progressed, salvaging blocks of granite and York stone. They form the basis of ‘the rockery’ in the garden at Ballast Quay, now covered in ivy. All my dockland gardens had a fig tree because I liked the one at Wapping Pier Head so much. To me that huge fig tree against the Georgian houses in Wapping summed up the powerful mix of industry and beauty that my gardens struggled to recreate. Eating the figs in Ballast Quay is an unforeseen bonus.

Any plant that managed to put down roots through the paving slabs became a symbol of new life. The ferns and buddleias that grew out of the dock walls at St. Katherine’s were a language hardly anyone understood, certainly not the architects, who wanted me to make the place look like a million dollars. They actually said so.

But while the architects of St Katherine’s Dock were doing their best to appeal to the gin-palace owners they hoped would colonise that part of the Thames, Hilary already had her eye on another piece of real estate, one that would appeal to a completely different sort of customer. But I’ll leave that for next time…

The fabulous black and white shots, by the way, are by Richard Proctor whose photographs of Greenwich, taken back in the 1980s, really seem to capture something of what the wharf was like in much earlier days…

Yup folks, I’m still enjoying the Greenwich Theatre Book – an incredibly slim volume that punches above its weight and provides a really excellent base for further digging. It’s made all the more mysterious by the fact that I can hardly open the thing for fear of it falling apart (it’s not mine or I would be far less careful…), so I can only dip in occasionally.

Today’s post isn’t really about Greenwich Theatre – or not the building, at least. But a brief mention in the book made me look again at another Greenwich venue. Over the years there have been a fair few places of entertainment, ranging from the highbrow (not many of them, ‘fraid) to the rather less salubrious establishments (plenty to see there…) From trestle-stages to purpose-built palaces, serious legit-stuff to – well, a few things the Lord Chamberlain would have got a bit hot under the ermine collar about. But by far the most popular of all were the music halls of Victorian Greenwich.

I’ll come to a big one that only died about forty years ago another day, because today, I want to concentrate on one that survives – in fact I understand it’s the oldest surviving purpose-built music hall there is – though it’s a mere shadow of its former self.

Where is it? Well – it’s here:

Still can’t see it? Look up – at the rooms spanning the bridge between the Admiral Hardy and – well, the other side. The Clarence Music Hall was incorporated into the original design of Greenwich Market by Joseph Kay when Greenwich was being gentrified in the 1830s, presumably as a sop to the working classes whose houses were being bulldozed to make way for it.

Admittedly the market had got a bit out of hand, with pushcarts and market stalls all over the place – up alleyways, blocking roads, stuffing every courtyard with stinking vegetables, animals being slaughtered any-old-where and generally annoying the toffs.

Joseph Kay was put in charge of making the new market pretty – and, from what’s left of it, he did a good job. There was a designated slaughterhouse area, room for stables for the stallholders’ horses and, of course a good, large central bit for the stalls themsleves.

The Admiral Hardy was one of the first pubs up and running in the complex and they decided to use the upstairs room spanning the market’s trendy new entrance as a music hall. The Royal Clarence Theatre opened in 1839. I’m assuming it was named for William IV (the erstwhile Duke of Clarence) who was popular in Greenwich, ostensibly because of his life as a sailor before becoming king, but probably as much, if not more so, because of his saucy former life and his openly living with a mistress. Greenwich has always liked characters.

The entrance was at Number 7a and you had to climb the stairs to get to it, adding to the back-room salaciousness of it all. If it had started out as trying to be a legitimate theatre (which I can’t see that it ever did) it definitely wasn’t after 1845, when it gave up even trying to sound posh and just called itself the Clarence Music Hall.

It was run by the Mitchell family, who also owned the pub, until 1860, but it carried on after they gave it up, until it was forcibly closed by the authorities for being too popular. It used to cram 250 people in to a 46ft x 24ft room and even the Victorians, not known for being particularly obsessed with safety, thought that might be a few too many.

However the room still existed, and continues to exist, despite two remodellings of the market – 1908 and 1958.

Each time, whatever happened to the inside of the market, Joseph Kay’s exterior stayed, and, thanks to its being part of the very fabric of the outside, the music hall has stayed too, an airy, high-roofed affair with windows both sides, onto the street and the market below. Its raison d’etre now gone, it became a bit of everything, as such places tend to be, including an engineering workshop. In 1964 it was converted to a TV/Film studio. I don’t know for whom. It’s far too early for Greenwich Cablevision.

A 1991 book by Darrell Spurgeon says it was, at the time he was writing, mooted to be a museum, but it would seem that that money started talking. It became the Time Bar and then of course, INC with those Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen designs and the erotic wallpaper. At least I assume the erotic wallpaper’s still there – haven’t been in ages, since it’s now not open except as ‘Clarence Hall,’ a space for hire. At least it’s kept the name…

There’ s much more music hall to be had around these parts, but for now, if you fancy finding out at least a flavour of what the old halls would have been like, I note there’s going to be an evening of music hall at Greenwich Theatre on 11th March.

It’s always depressing when someone asks ‘what do you know about such and such,’ you google it and all you can find is your own bloomin’ blog.

At least when I did exactly that a couple of days ago, the references were in the comments section and the person who asked me about it was someone who could actually furnish me with some answers.

As I’ve often said, it’s easier to find ancient history about Greenwich than it is to find stuff from the 20th Century, so it’s always something special when I ‘meet’ someone who was a mover and shaker in the community at a time when – well, to be honest, I was just too darn young and arrogant to care about history.

I’ve been talking to the fascinating Hilary Peters, whose extraordinary memories of Greenwich quaysides, the docks, the gangsters, the petty criminals, the local characters – and her own remarkable contribution (teh next part of which  I will come to, I promise – you’ll all know it…)  in the 1960s and 70s are not the only thing worth discussing.

Today’s post is a ‘partial’, though, because this is a recent local character – and I think there is much more to be said about a woman for whom, when I googled her, the only comments that came up always had the word ‘wonderful’ in front of her name. I’m hoping that you folks will chip in with memories (I’d LOVE a photo…) to go with what Hilary’s told me about Wendy Mead. Hilary says “there won’t be anyone of our generation who doesn’t remember her,” so I have high hopes.

Wendy kept a shop at the bottom of Royal Hill, in a Georgian Row. If you’re looking for it now, forget it. The council compulsorily-purchased it and pulled it down, which makes me think it must have been where the Burney Street Garden is now and, of course, where Doug Mullins had his dairy. From what I’m hearing, Doug’s not the only chap who should have a plaque.

For Wendy’s wasn’t just a grocery store, though “her smoked streaky was unsurpassed in South East London” and her cheddar the ‘best in the capital’, which is quite a claim.  It was something more. There was a front room where the usual buying and selling went on – and a back room where “there was always someone in tears.”

I came across this little pamphlet recently and couldn’t decide whether to be excited or just plain depressed. It was written in another Jubilee year, 1977, but in very different times – times when mutual building societies were still something to be proud of. The past 35 years have seen them asset-stripped by the greedy in the 1980s – first demutualised, then sold, and now, in Greenwich’s case, closed.

It’s all a far cry from the spirit in which this booklet was written, which in its turn was created as an update to a previous volume, written twenty five years before that - Greenwich Building Society – The First Hundred Years.

The author, Gerald Brown, the society’s Chief Executive weaves the Greenwich institution’s history around a more general history of the Building Society movement, dating back to the earliest one in Birmingham back around 1775. They started as small thrift-clubs to help members – well, build houses, actually. They were fixed-term – designed to stop after all the members had paid back the money they’d used to build specific houses, but around 1840 the first ‘permanent’ building societies were born, more like those (few) we have left today.

Greenwich was amongst the first towns to join the building society bandwagon. The first Society in London was the Greenwich Union, though the only records about it are court reports of a member being sued for non-payment, and his accusation that the Society was an illegal and mischievous institution. Had the member won that particular case, the whole Building Society movement would have been dead in the Thames.  He lost.

The Borough of Greenwich Building Society, came into existence in 1843. At the time of writing, they still held the minute books from 1852-5. I don’t know what happened to them; I hope they’re safe somewhere. Several founders of that institution were also responsible for the Industrial Building Society in 1852, which eventually became the Greenwich Building Society.

Keeping up?  I’m not convinced I am, but hey. It’s further complicated by the fact that  societies were all organised on a part-time basis so was quite normal for people to be on the boards of several building societies and even do each other’s books.

The trustees were local community worthies. Here’s Dr. Prior Purvis, Chairman of the Board for 47 years:

He was on the board of several societies and a trustee of the Literary Institution in Royal Hill (where The Greenwich Society for the Acquisition and Diffusion of Useful Knowledge met…) and at least three building societies met there too.

Now  Harriet, are you sitting comfortably? Because I’m about to mention your great, great grandfather. For those who don’t know who Harriet’s great great grandfather was, and who know about my pathological aversion to family history of all kinds, I made an exception in the case of Harriet’s great, great grandfather Henry Richardson because he was such a character and seems to have had a finger in just about every 19th Century Greenwich pie. This document seems to also have him as an insurance agent, as well as printer, stationer and historian:

Building Societies were just another Greenwich pie to him. He was Treasurer of the Society until a rather public spat broke out where both he and Dr Purvis were forced to resign over letter-of-the-rules stuff, though I suspect that he still made some money since both sides of a weirdly vicious-but-at-the-same-time-punishingly-dry argument went on to have their own set of amended rules printed, presumably by Richardson. The opposition was led by local ironmonger, gas fitter and bell-hanger, Josiah Haycraft.

The spat ended at a meeting in the Concert Room in Royal Hill, on 20th April 1865, when the members voted in favour of Purvis and Richardson. Richardson didn’t re-take his position but Purvis did, and stayed there ’til he died. I assume Haycraft went back to bell-fitting.

The real power behind the throne, though, seems to have been this slightly scary-looking chap:

This is Peter Blake (obviously long before he went onto Sgt. Pepper fame and fortune…) Local schoolmaster (at Maze Hill, Drapers and Church Fields) turned estate agent, Blake set up a network of agencies, and presumably had good reason to encourage building societies. To his credit, he did press for a series of regulatory laws, and his evidence at a Royal Commission helped lead to an Act in 1874.

By 1873 the Society had more than 450 borrowers and by 1886, £207,000 of assets. But much like today, the markets fluctuated and the crash of the (fraudulently managed) Liberator Building Society in 1892 was a serious blow to establishments like the one in Greenwich. It took until the turn of the 20th Century for things to right themselves, but the big expansion was still to come.

The inter-war years of the 1920s and 30 saw a huge boom in building – and funds for building societies. I note from the lists of people involved one F.J. Simpson, Town Clerk of Greenwich on the board. I’m sure I’ve seen his name somewhere. Is it on the plaque inside the Arches leisure centre?

In 1935, the Lecture Hall in Royal Hill was to be demolished for the Borough Hall, and they needed new premises, which they found in Greenwich High Road. They bought the place for £1600, and one of the partners’ brothers Mr P.B. Dannatt, a local architect  responsible for some of the Roan School buildings, did the modifications.

On  24th January 1945 two partners, Mr Dannatt and Mr Jackson were both injured by a doodlebug at their own offices in Nelson Road. Thankfully for them, it wasn’t too serious, but the Westminster bank building was badly damaged and I suspect that’s the bomb that did for Richardson’s shop, too.

You would have thought that after the war, building societies would have done very well, given the amount of homeless people, but homeless also often meant jobless and although there was a massive fund in the building society, there were few loans being made.

When the author joined the Industrial Building Society in 1952, he was worried about the negative connotations of the name, thinking that people might think they only lent money for industrial buildings. It had come for two reasosn – 1) that the word Greenwich was already in use by another Society and 2) it referred to the ‘industrial classes’, but the world had moved on.

After a series of unsuccessful merger talks and half-name changes, the Greenwich Building Society was finally renamed a hundred years after it was formed.

The 60s saw mergers a-go-go, with the Greenwich Building Society subsuming pretty much all comers. It seems to have been a bit cutthroat, even then. At the time of writing, Gerald Brown is proud to say that the Greenwich Building Society was always the larger of whichever two companies were merging. This was not always to be the case.

P.B. Dannatt’s son remodeled the Society’s offices in modern style in the 1970s – I think it’s pretty obvious where they are, in case you weren’t sure before:

So what went wrong? Well, I guess it continued to be a dog-eat-dog world and eventually, after having swallowed up so many smaller fishes in a relatively small pond, the Greenwich Building Society finally found its pike. The Portman, one of the few mutuals left in the 1990s, took it over in 1997 and swam around in a slightly larger pond for a while before finding a pike of its very own. The Nationwide stepped in and – well, if you don’t know that sorry story, I am sure Darryl at 853 will be only too happy to enlighten you..

Just one last thing.

Right at the very end of the book, Mr. Brown mentions his personal wine cellar, situated in the basement of their extended offices, a perk of which I wholeheartedly approve. He points out that the building was, after all the Three Tuns public house, so it’s only right and proper. He mentions that on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the company’s founding, he’ll be taking out a bottle of 1961 claret, imported by Lovibonds and, ‘politicians permitting, drink the health of the Greenwich Building Society.

I wonder – what happened to that wine cellar? Did Mr Brown drown his sorrows in claret to mark the passing of the company five years short of 150 years since its founding, in 1997? Did he hold out for 2002 and make a fist of remembrance with those who knew it – or is it still out there?

It would have been 160 years old this year. If it’s still unopened, now’s as good as ever. There’s probably not much hope in holding out for a return of a building society…