society
Nellie Cressall on the Isle of Dogs Part 2, by Jane McChrystal.
Nellie Cressall on The Isle of Dogs
Part 2.
Jane McChrystal.
Link to Part 1.
At the end of part one of this article, we saw the arrival of Nellie Cressall on the Isle of Dogs. The move took place in 1923, two years after her heroic stand during the Poplar Rates Rebellion, and signalled a new phase in her life as an activist, as well as radical changes in her domestic circumstances.
Fifteen Macquarie Way on The Chapel House Estate would become her home for the next fifty years. Previously, “home” had consisted of one cramped accommodation after another in the East End, made up of two rooms lacking both running water and sanitation. Although she declared herself content with these arrangements, Fifteen Macquarie Way must have transformed the lives of Nellie and her family.
They now had a whole two storey house to themselves. The upper floor provided separate sleeping quarters and a bathroom with a fixed bath in place and a gas supply to heat water for it. There would be no more boiling water on the range to fill a tin bath or visits to the municipal bathing facilities.
Downstairs, the back room with a coal-fired range would have formed the centre of family life and activity. The scullery attached was Nellie’s domain, where she did the weekly wash every Monday. While this was an exhausting task, which involved heating gallons of water in a contraption known as a “copper”, and then washing, rinsing and wringing everything by hand, the direct supply of running water to the house must have eased the labour entailed in keeping the family clean and presentable to some extent.
The second room at the front of the house was the place for knick-knacks, the good furniture, pictures, rugs and maybe even a piano, where Nellie, her family and friends could gather for sing-songs and celebrations.
A large back garden gave the children their own space to play in and Nellie somewhere to hang all that washing. In her previous dwellings, Nellie would have stepped straight out from her front door onto the pavement, whereas Fifteen Macquarie Way was divided from the road by a decent expanse of green guarded by a picket fence. Number Fifteen was the end of a terrace of four houses.
The Chapel House Estate was constructed between 1920-23 along garden city lines, with a layout designed by Harley Hackford, Poplar Council’s Engineer and Surveyor. Houses were arranged in small groups set out along curving roads to provide their new residents with a salubrious environment they could only have dreamt of in their tightly-packed, sooty terraces and tenements.
Each house was built of traditional material and ornamental details, such as the brickwork surrounding the first storey window frames based on the neo-Georgian town house, were applied by the architect, Sir Frank Barnes. This style was an unusual choice at a time when other architects tended to employ the model of the rural cottage in the design of garden cities like Welwyn and Letchworth.
This upturn in Nellie’s domestic circumstances coincided with her graduation from rates rebel to seasoned campaigner on behalf of the people of Poplar, a position rewarded with mayoralty of the borough in 1943.
In 1945 she was invited to take her place on the national stage as a member of the British Lord Chancellor’s Divorce Committee, set up to investigate the reasons for a dramatic increase in the nation’s divorce rate towards the end of the Second World War.
A contemporary news-cutting, headed “Motherly Advice” is illustrated with a picture of a police constable showing Nellie the way to a meeting in Westminster. The report that goes with it describes her as a “63 year- old housewife of Poplar, poor area of London’s East End, who brought up a family of seven on £1/2/6 (£1, 12 and a half pence)” and not only manages to erase her identity as a political activist but also get the size of her family wrong. Some things never change.
A speech she made at the Labour Party National Conference at Scarborough in 1951 was nominated by the finest made at the event by Aneurin Bevan. She took the opportunity to praise the radical improvement made to ordinary people’s standard of living since The First World War and deliver a gentle rebuke to younger couples who came and complained to her about the price of electricity and being housed in shared accommodation.
The Island History Trust holds photographs of Nellie attending local pageants, meeting her old friend Clement Attlee and going to Buckingham Palace to meet Queen Elizabeth with a local scout troupe. In 1959 she was made a Freeman of Poplar in honour of her long service to the borough. Naturally her appearance alters with age, but over the years her calm, watchful expression remains the same.
After the move to the Isle of Dogs Nellie’s family grew to eight children. George died in 1951 but she carried on with life as an activist well into her old age. She died in 1973 when she was 90 under the care of one of her many grandchildren.
She is commemorated in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets by the street named after her “Nellie Cressall Way” in Bow.
Post script: Fifteen Macquarie Way today.
On a glorious morning in May I set off across the Westferry Road to track down Nellie Cressall’s former home on the Chapel House Estate. It’s still there and easily recognisable from photographs taken when she lived there. Macquarie Way’s houses were built to last. Designation as a Conservation Area has ensured the preservation of the layout of the streets and prevented developers from constructing anything which would alter the residents’ views from their homes.
Macquarie Way today is even greener than it was when Nellie and her family moved there. The trees on the street are enormous. Looking over fences and boundary walls you see gardens filled with shrubs, bushes and even more trees. Small brown birds are everywhere.
It’s quiet, but busy. Super-market vans are making home deliveries and tradesmen refurbishing houses inside and out. Women, who look as if they’re on their way to one of the Isle’s many Pilates classes, are out and about. A young male Goth, whose black garments are topped off with an embroidered, satin kimono, passes by.
But a lot has changed. Number fifteen’s front garden is rather unkempt with tall grass and plentiful weeds, though the house still looks in good nick. This kind of minor neglect is typical of those front gardens which have not been paved over to provide off-street parking, although in one property a resident seems to have been fly tipping on their own patch.
For many years after the construction of the estate the council would have insisted that residents keep the facades and fences completely uniform, right down to the colour of the front door. Once they started to buy their houses in the 1980’s, under Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme, variations were bound to start appearing on Macquarie Way.
Houses without drives are divided from the street by a variety of walls and fences. House with drives have undergone further modifications, such as the addition of a Georgian-style porch complete with pediment, which would not look out of place in Sunningdale.
But the most dramatic consequence of the Right to Buy scheme is revealed by an internet search of recent property sales in the area. Last year a house in Macquarie way was sold for £900,000. What on earth would Nellie have made of that?
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
You can see more about Nellie Cressall’s life and work at: islandhistory.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/nellie-frances-cressall/ on Mick Lemmerman’s treasure trove of blog posts: Isle of Dogs Past Life Past Lives
There is more information about the history of the Chapel House Estate in Tower Hamlets’ guides to the management of its conservation areas at:
“Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham”, by Jon Bloomfield. Review by Jane McChrystal.
“Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham” by Jon Bloomfield.
Published by Unbound, 2019, ISBN 9781783527169, 285pp. £18.99.
Review by Jane McChrystal.
Although Jon Bloomfield intended “Our City” for a general audience, I think some of our elected representatives could learn a lot from it. Unfortunately, “Our City” isn’t likely to appeal to the kind of populist politician who tapped into a nasty streak of racism in the British population to persuade 51.9% of them to vote for leaving Europe in the 2016 referendum. Nor will it attract the attention of anyone who is only prepared to discuss migration in strictly polarised terms. For everyone else, Bloomfield provides a balanced report on life today for Birmingham’s first- and second-generation migrants and their impact on the city they live in.
For those of us of a certain age, Birmingham will always be linked with Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech given at the Conservative Political Centre in 1968. His speech coincided with an upsurge in support for right wing extremism driven by the National Front, which lasted well into the 1970’s.
The city has been home to Bloomfield for more than forty years and he has worked in various departments of Birmingham City Council, where he also headed its European and International Division at one point, so he isn’t just a detached observer.
That said, “Our City” combines solid research with substantial statistical data, which is brought to life by the material he gathered from forty-six interviews with people, who talked to him about their experiences of life and work in the city.
The group he interviewed come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. Twenty-five have their origins in Pakistan and India, while the rest have their roots in Africa, The West Indies, Europe and China. They talk with Bloomfield about employment, health care, education, city politics, racism, religion, relationships and social mobility. They are largely positive about life in Birmingham and the way they’ve been able to settle and adjust without losing their cultural identity. A number of interviewees show a real sense of pride in their ability to contribute and make a difference to the city they now call home.
“Our City” is enlivened by vignettes drawn from his time as a public servant and Bloomfield’s family background mirrors some of the experiences of the people he is writing about, which surely adds a further dimension to his understanding of their lives.
His grandparents fled from Poland to the East End of London in the wake of the Pogroms unleashed on Jewish people after the assassination of Czar Alexander III. He has followed the well-known migrant path to a better life, pushed along by parental aspiration and hard work during a period filled with opportunities for a sound education and prospects of gaining employment in a worthwhile job.
Bloomfield doesn’t avoid contentious issues and quickly dispatches the well-worn assertion that Eastern Europeans came here with the sole intention of signing on for benefits in Chapter 6 “Doing the Work that Nobody Else Wants to Do”. It was, in fact, Tony Blair’s endorsement of the individual’s right to opt out the European Work Time Directive in 1998, which brought them here, attracted by the chance to work unrestricted hours for wages, which compared favourably with what they could earn at home.
He is clear that the kind of “live and let live thinking” which turns a blind eye to “illiberal practices under the guise of cultural liberalism” (p.175) is at the heart of a number of the city’s problems. He doesn’t have much time for politicians who have consistently refused to address conflict between those who seek to impose their religious beliefs on others and those who operate within the secular tradition, on the grounds that any challenge to the faith of a particular ethnic group amounts to discrimination against the group itself, and believe they should just be left to get on with it.
This supine attitude is particularly problematic in a city where 21.8% of the population follows the Muslim faith and ignores the widespread influence of Imams, trained in Saudi Arabia, who are on a mission to spread Sharia law wherever they go in the world, backed by the bottomless wealth of the ruling Wahhabi Nationalists. It has also fostered the growth of monocultural interest groups within the city’s political system and the cronyism that goes with it.
In a climate where nuanced debate about migration has become almost impossible, Bloomfield acknowledges that is usually the worst-off who experience the sharp end of poorly regulated migration, with the strains it places on housing, education and other services, and is prepared to consider managing numbers of migrants to this country.
If you feel offended by this idea and disinclined to read “Our City”, I’d like to point you to the last chapter “Creating the Open City”, where he states:
“Twenty-first Century European cities are multi-ethnic and they will continue to be so. There is no going back to the 1950’s” (p.229).
He reminds the “they come over here and…” contingent that it was the British Government who actively encouraged migration from India, The West Indies and Ireland to fill staff shortages as the welfare state grew and grew after the Second World War.
Migrants have transformed Birmingham’s cultural landscape, especially the music and food scenes. At the same time, the people who arrived in search of a better life seem to have found it, as Bloomfield’s interviewees attest. They have also come to appreciate the availability of free education and health care together with the freedom of expression they enjoy in the city.
Despite a generally optimistic view of migration and Birmingham’s future, Bloomfield warns politicians, policy makers and all Brummies of the dangers of closing off the city to the outside world. When much of the city’s recent success has depended on investment by European companies, Brexit could have dire consequences for the most disenfranchised members of its migrant communities. A decline in the economy and increased unemployment would hit them hardest, and put the dream shared by generations of migrants everywhere even further out of their reach.
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
Swinging London: A Lifestyle Revolution. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Swinging London: A Lifestyle Revolution
Venue: Fashion and Textile Museum, Bermondsey, London
Dates: Until June 2
If Brexit is the result of a backward-looking nostalgia, the Swinging London of the Chelsea Set was the opposite: it marked a determination to move on from the devastation and austerity left by World War II.
Around half a century on (the exhibition spans 1952-77), the time is ripe for reflection on whether the impact endures as some of yesterday’s bright, young, fun-loving things are among those backing today’s reaction – just as their parents and the more conservative provinces did not inevitably approve of short skirts and psychedelia.
This time the establishment is a driver of disruption that goes well beyond fashion. Conversely, the Chelsea Set – a group of architects, designers, photographers and artists who redefined the concept of youth – were extremely well connected.
The exhibition’s claim that their rebelliousness from previous style led to an inclusive, multi-cultural, liberal society is in question as we ask whether the openness of the sixties and seventies – when Britain voted to join the Common Market – was no deeper than a fashion.
Symbolically, Terence Conran’s Habitat shop has left Chelsea’s King’s Road as the brand in latter years has been taken over and its high street presence drastically shrunk.
The commentary, however, doesn’t dwell on the contradictions and in the tradition of previous displays in this museum founded by Zandra Rhodes, Swinging London speaks primarily to design students of style’s power to lift our collective mood. The appeal that its educational, fashion-history approach also has for the anxious liberal classes, looking for light cultural fare before they hit the humming bars and eateries of Bermondsey Street, is almost accidental.
We begin with the opening of Mary Quant’s Chelsea boutique Bazaar in 1955, when the hottest item in stock was a pair of “lounging pyjamas” for saucy day-wear inspired by Victorian underwear.
The interplay of decades continues as the flapper’s drop waists of the roaring twenties inspire Quant’s 1960-61 flapper-style dresses, which dummies sport against a backdrop of Conran’s slick furniture.
We’re also told to imagine that the slim figures clad in Quant’s designs were nourished by the cooking of Elizabeth David, whose continental cookery books had at least as much influence on the way we eat as Quant and Conran had on changing how we dress and furnish our homes.
I found myself remembering the scene of Michael Caine cooking up a gourmet storm in The Ipcress File, but the Michael Caine of the exhibition is the one starring as Alfie alongside Jane Asher, then Paul McCartney’s girlfriend. Asher’s outfit is a Mary Quant mini-skirt suit in a Liberty print as Art Nouveau meets psychedelia and proves the best designs are relevant to every generation.
Perhaps the exhibition’s biggest surprise is the inclusion of Bernard and Laura Ashley. We discover they explored “urban ruralism” from their kitchen table in Pimlico before decamping to Wales in the early 1960s and their fashion empire began, not with the flowers and frills for which they tend to be known, but with very simple gardening smocks and basic dresses.
They don’t come across as radical now, but they were a liberating leap forward from the prim, restrictive couture of the 1950s.
Barbara Lewis © 2019.
Nellie Cressall on the Isle of Dogs Part 1, by Jane McChrystal.
Nellie Cressall on the Isle of Dogs
Part 1
In 1962 The Westinghouse Corporation made a documentary film exploring the state of the nation as Britain continued to register the aftershocks of war, adjusted to the loss of empire and witnessed the erosion of its status as a world-class industrial nation. Designed for the better understanding of American, Canadian and Australian audiences, the Brits hated it when it was broadcast here – perhaps we didn’t like the somewhat portentous tone – but today it looks like a pretty accurate portrait of what was going on. The makers of “Postscript to Empire Britain” also recorded the voice of one important figure in the history of East End activism, which would never have been heard again, if they had not captured it for us.
About six minutes in we catch sight of Mrs. Nellie Cressall as she enters Mr. Hart’s grocery shop at 114 Manchester Road, The Isle of Dogs. The voice-over describes her, incorrectly, as a former mayor of the Isle and she has been drafted in to exchange opposing views of its inhabitants with the grocer.
Mrs Cressall speaks clearly about the virtues of her close-knit, working class community, whereas Mr. Hart bemoans the people’s narrow perspective and unwillingness to adapt to the changing world beyond the Isle.
Mr Hart gazes steadily at the camera as he speaks, while Mrs. Cressall scans his face as she weighs up his words and carefully considers her responses. She has shrewd eyes. Nellie is the epitome of working- class pride and respectability in her smart two-piece costume and matching veiled hat, finished off with an elegant two-tone handbag.
Nellie appeared in “Postscript to Empire Britain” at the age of 78 when she had been living in Macquarie Way on the Isle of Dogs for nearly forty years. She did indeed hold the office of mayor, for the London Borough of Poplar on behalf of the Labour Party in 1943, but she was part of a much broader history of activism in the East End of London in the first decades of the Twentieth Century and played a significant role.
Her career as an activist began in 1906 when she joined the Independent Labour Party. In 1907 Clement Attlee, future Prime Minister, came knocking at the door of her home in Tomlin’s Terrace intent upon forging a link with the local Labour Party, and so began a friendship which was to last all their lives.
Through her work with George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party between 1932-35, she met Sylvia Pankhurst who had arrived in the East End in 1912 to support his unsuccessful campaign to enter Parliament on the Votes for Women ticket. In 1913 Nellie joined Sylvia’s newly established East London Federation of Suffragettes.
Nellie’s motivation was quite simple. She could not understand why mothers weren’t allowed make important decisions over their children’s lives, such as authorising vaccinations, which fell to the father; why women earned half as much as men for doing the same jobs. She wanted to right these wrongs.
Nellie took part in the amazing work ELFS carried out for the people of the East End during the First World War. As well as continuing to campaign for women’s suffrage throughout, they launched a programme to relieve the privations inflicted by war within days of its outbreak. They provided milk for hungry babies and free medical care for children from a network of distribution centres and clinics. Adults could get nourishing meals from the cost-price restaurants they set up. They ran a toy factory where women worked in decent conditions for fair pay and a nursery run along Montessori lines took care of their children while they worked. Unlike their fellow suffragettes of the mainstream Women’s Social and Political Union, ELFS were staunch pacifists who participated in the anti-war movement.
Perhaps her finest hour came with the Poplar Rates Rebellion of 1921. In 1919 Nellie and George Lansbury were elected to Poplar Council where Labour held majority of 39 out of 42 seats. Lansbury was outraged that the London County Council levied a precept on Poplar’s rate payers equal to that demanded from the inhabitants of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, when Poplar’s residents could afford so little and were in such great need. He refused to pay and was imprisoned along with his fellow councillors: daughter-in-law Minnie, her close friend Nellie, Susan Lawrence, Julia Scurr and Jennie Mackay.
Nellie had five children at the time and was far advanced into another pregnancy with her son, Sam, when she went to jail. The prison authorities put her in the hospital wing, where she was locked in a room next to a woman who constantly cried out in distress and another who committed suicide. She was entirely forgotten for twenty-four hours. When reports of this shocking negligence reached the outside, they stirred up sympathy for the rebels and attracted odium to the London County Council and British government.
Nellie spent three weeks in gaol. She could have been released sooner but she refused to go, compelled by her sense of loyalty to the others, who were to remain inside for a total of six weeks. In the end, she only left prison at the insistence of Harry Gosling, leader of the LCC’s Labour Group.
No-one was more surprised than George Lansbury when Poplar Council prevailed, as he had initiated the rebellion with no expectation of success. Sadly, Minnie never recovered from the ordeal of incarceration. Her health was ruined by a bout of pneumonia while she was in prison and she died a year later, aged 32. A photo of the funeral shows Nellie at the front of the cortege which followed her friend to her grave in the Jewish Cemetery in East Ham. Nellie had the good fortune to go on and live a long life as an activist and become the matriarch of a vast extended family, which included eight children of her own.
Nellie herself was born as Nellie Frances Wilson in 1882 and shortly after, the Wilson family moved to Leyton. The next record of her in the 1901 census shows that she worked as an ironer in a Laundry in the years before marriage. Nellie married George Joseph Cressall in 1904 at St. Dunstan’s Church, Stepney.
Over the next decade they had five different addresses, where they lived in one cramped accommodation after another with their growing family. Such impermanence was a common feature of working-class life and we might look askance at how families coped with this degree of instability and wonder how on earth they managed, especially when their homes had no sanitation or running water. Nellie was more sanguine and recalled living contentedly in “two nice little rooms” during her years on the move. The final change of address in 1923 was to transform her domestic circumstances. You can read about it in part 2 of this article, together with an account of her later years as an activist.
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
Postscript to Empire Britain is available free to view on the BFI website:
player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-postscript-to-empire-britain-in-transition-1962-online
You can see more about Nellie Cressall’s life and work at: islandhistory.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/nellie-frances-cressall/ on Mick Lemmerman’s treasure trove of blog posts: Isle of Dogs Past Life Past Lives
Your Culture is not mine…or is it? America’s tense relationship with high culture. By Stephanie V Sears
Your culture is not mine…or is it?
America’s tense relationship with high culture.
By Stephanie V Sears.
As a half French, half American individual, I give in to a pastime common to double nationals, which consists of regularly comparing both countries of origin. A particularly provoking exercise in the case of France and the United States, because though the two nations share history, values, cultural ties, (in that profound sense of artistic, religious and philosophical influences), they also encounter some mutual irritation and bickering. My intention is to point out these differences, only in so much as they may clarify the decidedly diverging relation the two countries entertain with high culture. While this divergence may, to a certain extent, be explained historically and geographically, it cannot be so entirely.
High culture has been defined generally as” ….all that is best in a culture.”1 And the ruling consensus is that high culture includes all traditional artistic expression – ballet, poetry, theater, opera, painting, literature, classical music, film – of a quality surpassing national frontiers, by way of a universal appeal, even if such artistic work is clearly identified as originating from a particular culture. Leo Tolstoy, for one, noted the importance of a spiritual connection between the author of a work and its recipient.2 The American philosopher John Dewey,3 for another, considered that the individual artist’s creative expression could, by being ‘consumed’ by another person, reveal by the same token the character of that recipient. Finally, high culture is seen as transcending any immediate moneymaking goal.
In the 1964 French film sketch ‘Les Routiers melomanes’ (The music expert truck-drivers), starring Jean Yanne and Paul Mercey, two truck-drivers are doing their night shift together. Wearing wife-beaters, both display, in appearance and language, the plebeian coarseness expected of their profession. Yet as the one not driving, prompted by boredom, turns on a favorite radio station, we discover that they are both highly sophisticated connoisseurs of classical music, deftly able to argue the merits of a Beethoven quartet interpretation, as well as of other classical pieces; even as they continue to intersperse their highfalutin exchange with vulgar invectives directed at passing drivers. They amaze us still more, later on, by discussing the poetry of Charles Peguy, (who, to be fair, is about as easy to read as it is to listen to music by, say, Karl Heinz Stockhausen), with the same passionate expertise and sensitivity. Some of us may laugh at the contrast between blue-collar status and such an unexpected display of rarefied erudition. Some of us may not. Indeed, such socio-cultural discrepancy is not so far-fetched in France, a country renowned for its native infatuation with high culture, French or otherwise. High culture is enthusiastically promoted in public and private schools alike and, generally throughout a society that is close to its culture; literally, at every step, be it in its urban centers or in its countryside. In no other country, that I know of, is public opinion more indulgent and admiring of an individual’s inclination towards high culture. Ultimately, one’s relation to culture is considered to be a personal exchange between artist and recipient, a deeply sincere, quasi-religious one. From a French point of view, therefore, the situation depicted in the sketch ‘Les Routiers Melomanes’, may be considered as less of a joke about the contrast between social status and the expert refinement displayed by these individuals, and more of a poking fun at the native frenzy for culture in any circumstance.
I am almost certain that in the United States the sketch would be understood as a warning against class prejudice and division.
Famous actors Gerard Depardieu and Fabrice Luchini are both from very modest social backgrounds, the former having sojourned in prison in his nearly illiterate youth, the latter having begun his career as a hair-dresser’s assistant. Yet, both have risen today to fame, not only as icons of classical French literature through their enacting of well-known literary characters, but also as legitimate authorities on French literature and poetry.
Over time, French education has also inoculated citizens from former colonies with some of the same passion for French culture, and culture in general, and it is not unusual to find oneself discussing Balzac or Rimbaud, with a Senegalese taxi driver during one’s ride through Paris.
The sheer number of articles and essays published on the United States’ educational and cultural decline – tainted either with suspicion, resentment or nostalgia – as some question the value of high culture or, on the contrary, deplore its abandon, or again, propose a blending together of high and popular culture, or even the deletion of the former, deemed passé – illustrates how, in America, contrarily to France, socio-political ideology has intruded in the arts domain, and how strained and somewhat unspontaneous is the country’s relationship with high culture.
In her 2013 New York Times piece4, Patricia Cohen gives the statistics, from 2008 to 2013, of an overall decline of visits to museums, to the theater and classical music concerts, ballet shows, (despite a slight rise in attendance at jazz concerts and movies). Her conclusion remains, nonetheless, mildly optimistic as she evokes rising costs of tickets for the performing arts, the degree of accessibility to shows, and the availability of modern home technology allowing households to enjoy the arts at home. Daniel Asia, more pessimistically,5 notes ,already for the earlier period 1982 to 2008, a drop in attendance from a previous 13% to 9.3% for classical music concerts, from 12% to 9% for plays, a sharp fall of 50% for ballet. Jazz concerts – spared a decline in Ms. Cohen’s article – show a fall from 10.8% in 2002 to 7.8% in 2008.
In fact, virtual connection to culture often does replace the direct, physical connection that is yet so essential for a full impact of a performance or an exhibit on our emotions. But a more fundamental reason for this distancing with high culture, is, most probably, poor schooling – what the economist and socio-political commentator, Thomas Sowell, calls ‘gimmicky education’, one pervaded by the notion that a student must ‘feel good’ about himself rather than receive a formal education.6 The gradual disappearance of cursive writing from school (though some schools are now bringing it back after noticing the nefarious effects of its vanishing)7, may, all at once, be a symptom of this distancing and underscore a tendency to simply abandon certain cultural habits that used to link the individual more seamlessly to his history. Another cause or derivation of this cultural deficit may be the overall drop in literary reading.8 It is, however, the pervasive ideological discourse on social equality and how to achieve it, that must be held most accountable for this avalanche of sorrowful assessment of a general alienation from high culture.
Indeed, this scrutiny in favor or against high culture in America, reveals the interference of a socio-political self-consciousness in the world of the arts and high culture. The moral posturing employed in this interposition, in an attempt to impose a corresponding social framework, tampers with creative integrity as it proclaims authoritatively what is moral and ‘right’.
This is not to say that all earnest affection and cultural identification with certain American artists has disappeared. In my New England region, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson are examples of such enduring and sincere cultural attachment. And yet…and yet one can’t help wondering, amidst the country’s current cultural climate, if there is not also, beyond a genuine appreciation, the hint of a surrender to politically correct pressure, to a tacit consensus that these poets are ‘safe’ to admire, unlike other great authors.
Jack London, Henry James, (and to include international anglophone authors) C.S.Lewis, Charles Dickens, J.R.R.Tolkien, Joseph Conrad, are all morally condemned for reasons not pertaining to the intrinsic quality of their work. Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, commonly accused of racism, is a case in point. One can’t help wondering why, then, that particular novella has been so consistently studied in America, (knowing that Conrad wrote so many other exquisitely well written stories giving central stage to non-white indigenous characters), if not to select a work that may conveniently support the discourse of pernicious colonial mentality rather than be simply read as great literature.9 The character of Fagin in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, has had the same fate.10 And such damning criticism extends even to music. Richard Wagner is a prime example of unredeemable musical offensiveness.11
The resistance against high culture entails, therefore, the suppression of works regarded as offensive, by first ridding them of a certain majesty and placing them on a level with popular and commercial culture in the name of a more ‘modern’ cultural outlook. Such a process may lead to adapting a great work by selecting parts of it and reducing that selection to an identifiable icon or slogan, that can then be introduced to the realm of marketing and commerce. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and ‘The Kiss’ by Gustav Klimt typify such a process.
The American consumer of the arts is made uncertain of his taste for high culture in an environment in which high and popular culture become increasingly co-mingled, and in which moral criticism, condemnation, are in constant ebullition. The consumer of high arts is directed or pressured towards a more ‘omnivorous’ consumption, implying a less ‘elitist’ spectrum of culture.12 This broadening process, which, by the way, any cultivated and culturally confident individual performs on his own, at his own pace, out of natural curiosity, is force-fed to him by mass media and other forms of public prepping as an exercise in redemption or prevention from ‘elitism’.
The fundamental difference in cultural outlook between France and the United States may perhaps be reflected in the twin expressions: Down to earth and Terre a terre. The former, frequently used by Americans, conveys a positive and enviable quality. The latter, in France, connotes, to the contrary, a certain disdain and suggests a lack of aesthetic, intellectual and ultimately spiritual elevation of the sort that should spring directly from the human heart. In the American expression can be found the influence of a democratically egalitarian ideal. In the French expression can be found the remains of a chivalrous ideal fraught with romanticism, and which America characterizes with some diffidence as ‘elitism’. And yet it is not as if Americans have always been blind to those effects of a certain type of egalitarian idealism on individual self-determination and creativity. In fact, in the American passion for individual freedom and devotion to a certain view of social equality, there is a strange yet fundamental paradox. Ultimately, the two sides seem fated to clash until one is defeated one way or another. It is worrying to see individual freedom being challenged and restrained in the United States’ leading democracy, in a way somewhat reminiscent of regimes vigorously condemned by American principles.
In his time, Henry Adams noted the negative influence exerted by democratic principles on the making and enjoyment of high culture: “What Adams plays upon is important- the hurts that Democracy inescapably inflicts on the intelligent, cultivated high culture, the traditionally artistic sensibility, the individual.”13 The constant moral pressure imposed by the democratic ideal on American society gave birth, as a matter of course, to a suspicion of so-called ‘elitist’ culture and, thereby, of a taste for it. In Henry James’ book ‘The Ambassadors’, that same suspicion felt by the main character, Lambert Strether, is key to the plot in which Strether ultimately succeeds in resisting the seduction of European high culture, seen as the manifestation of a decadent society. To the contrary of Strether, Henry James’ writing, one of the most sophisticated in American literature: “privileges many of the things that American life barely tolerates and certainly has no notion or means of helping to flourish.”14 Davidoff goes on to add that such literature as James’ does not serve the large categories of activism.”15
Though noble and, in many cases, necessary, activism in the United States has also, to a considerable extent, given in to political bias and propagandizing; which, in turn, has led to an abuse of socio-political interventionism. In still more sinister fashion, however subtly it may have been conducted, activism has led to the censuring of individual freedom of thought and speech. Certain types of activism in America that are focused on culture, are clearly over-stepping the line that separates democratic values and the invasion of individual freedom.
Daniel Asia,16 points out that in the USA, popular culture was always taken more seriously than high culture, partly because of the moral approach evoked above. Yet the upsurge of popular culture in the 1950s, instead of melding different racial and economic groups of Americans together, opened the way to aggravating forms of blame and division, and led to what is commonly called ‘identity politics’. Homosexuals, women, Native Americans, African-Americans, demanded to be acknowledged as significant yet, somehow, separate segments of American society. As Michael Sliwinski indicates,17 this popular movement, improperly structured because devoid of intellectual leadership, and which, later, vented its views through mainly virtual modes, gradually led to a phenomenon of protest for the sake of protesting; as if mere agitation and clamoring could culminate in the desired result, whether the result was clearly determined… or not.18 In the 1960s, culture became a political weapon towards change.19 Any residual individual aspiration to experience the arts, unfettered by politics, seemed to gradually dwindle on the American horizon like a lonesome cowboy of the past. Meanwhile, activism seemed to spread like a rash across that previously hallowed ground of creativity.
One may legitimately wonder, in such circumstances, what happens to an artist’s freedom of expression, but also to the consumer’s right to his own personal cultural inclination. What happens when whole segments of society forcefully adapt the cultural environment by way of socio-political subterfuges? What happens to that sincere and earnest search for “a shadow of the divine perfection?” (Michelangelo Buonarroti quote)
The direct encounter between artist and individual is increasingly and conveniently replaced by a ‘plug-in’, emotionally atrophied globalism. Easy access to text, image, music, etc, and the consequent fluid virtual traveling of works of art and their swift manipulation by technology, blurs more and more the distinction between the genuine creative act and the consumer; useful, and to an extent, educational, giving quick access to information, virtual engineering also facilitates, with growing shamelessness, the possibility to ‘correct’, according to current acceptable socio-economic norms, any given artistic expression.
American activism employs the ‘soft’ method of victimization to filter its demands. Even nature, in its unsullied grandeur, was once, as a purveyor of personal solace to all, left outside of political debate. But it seems that it is now also being implicated in an environmental activism that does not seek strictly to help preserve nature, but also feeds a political debate with an over-all socio-political message.
In ‘Histoire du Juif Errant’ (1990) the French writer Jean d’Ormesson wrote that one would have to travel very far indeed to no longer be able to appreciate emotions common to all mankind. In fact, unlike much of today’s activism in America, that only pretends to speak for the individual, authors like Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, though considered as social critics of their time and place, spoke, in fact, first and foremost to and for the individual’s sake, wherever he might be.
Any intervening force, be it religious or political, that tampers with a personal encounter between artist and consumer of the arts, is bound to lead inevitably to a culturally impoverished society and a manipulated individual; or, to what Joseph C.Hermanowiecz calls: ‘The Culture of Mediocrity’ (2013). One possible outcome of such cultural activism might be a backlash from a growing portion of society refusing to be herded into a single cultural format. Activism having such a consequence, would, therefore, increase social strife and division rather than achieve the proposed goal of a multicultural harmony.
Cultural activism in the United States attacks a perceived supremacy of European culture as a villain holding hostage the vital innards of American society. One may fear, however, and with good reason, that one form of supposed supremacy may, ironically, serve as excuse to shape another far more inescapable supremacy: of a sanitized culture ruled by a singularly undemocratic globalism. In such a case, individual imagination is bound to wither. If high culture is the self-consciousness of a society18, yet is contained or eliminated by a biased form of censorship, and replaced by cultural standards that fit a certain contrived idea of social harmony, that society is bound to become troubled and emotionally void.
Rather than diligently warn against cultural expressions arbitrarily identified as passé, racist, supremacist – a method which undermines the individual’s right to self-determination – it could be more to the point, and more inclusive, to simply acknowledge the benefits of high culture to everyone.
Through the individual, any kind of cultural encounter is possible. It has been shown that great art welcomes tribute from any kind of individual variant at the intersection of social, economic, educational factors. Here lies the magical appeal of the high arts for anyone, if experienced on the grounds of intrinsic merit; in other terms, at a level where neither ideology, racial/racist considerations, social gradings, nor commerce are given precedence over a work’s essential appeal to an individual.
Authentic human emotion creates bonds that irresistibly breach conventional social types, bringing humanity together far more efficiently than any ideology. And left to its own devices, the power of culture is unstoppable in bringing together, say, a Chinese accountant and the short stories of J.L. Borges, an Ojibwa Native American and the Indian sitar, Mike Tyson and Baroque castrato music.
In summary, to privilege high culture, is, in my humble view, a way to bypass the sadly unsatisfactory bouillabaisse of the multiculturalism offered by media and commerce, for a far more genuine meeting between individuals of different cultural origins and/or social circumstances, bolstered by the highest levels of artistic expression, where they may seek together common values.
Sources
1 Fahad Al Kubaisi cites Tuchman, Gaye, and Fortin 1989
2 ‘European culture’ is an invented tradition/Benjamin G. Martin/January 2017
3 Art as Experience/John Dewey/ 1934
4 A New Survey Finds a Drop in Arts Attendance/ Patricia Cohen/NYT December 2013
5 The Future of (high) Culture in America/Daniel Asia/2015
6 Inside American Education: the decline, the deception, the dogmas/ 201565 Diane Rehm Show with Thomas Sowell/ Washington DC 1993
7 Is cursive handwriting slowly dying out in America? PBS News2014
8 The long steady Decline of Literary Reading/ The Washington Post 2016
9 Out of Africa/Caryl Phillips/ 2003
10 The Faces of Fagin/Paul Vallely/2005
11 As if music could do no harm/ Alex Ross 2014/Can we forgive him?/Adrian Mourby/2000
12 Whatever happened to high culture?/Joseph Epstein/2015
13 Robert Davidoff/Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage/72/2016
14 Robert Davidoff/Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage/133/2015
15 R. Davidoff/Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage/134/2015
16 The Future of (high) Culture in America/Daniel Asia/ 2015
17 Michael Sliwinski/The Evolution of Activism: From the Streets to Social Media/2016.
18 Frank Tommler/Mixing high and popular culture: the impact of communication revolution/ German Pop Culture:’ how American is it?’ U. Of Michigan Press 2004
19 Roger Scruton/ High Culture is being corrupted by a Culture of Fakes/2012
East End Suffragettes: the photographs of Norah Smyth. By Jane McChrystal.
East End Suffragettes: the photographs of Norah Smyth
An Exhibition at the Four Corners Gallery, Roman Road
If you can get along to Bethnal Green in the next three weeks, I highly recommend a visit to this exhibition of photographs. They document a dramatic period in the history of the East London, when Sylvia Pankhurst moved in and set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914 at 400 Old Ford Road, which also served as home to her and her companion, Norah. The exhibition follows on from the recreation of the Women’s Hall at 400 Old Ford Road staged over summer last year at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive (londongrip.co.uk/2018/05/east-london-federation-of-suffragettes-event-at-tower-hamlets-local-history-library-and-archive/).
Norah’s photographs show the splendid work ELFS carried out for the people of the East End during the First World War – running Cost Price restaurants for people suffering from food shortages, milk distribution centres for hungry babies and clinics for children with no access to free health care. They even set up a toy factory to provide women with the opportunity to earn a fair wage in decent working conditions. There are processions, pageants and anti-war protests. We also see how the Russian Revolution spurred Sylvia and other members of ELFS on to a wider socialist programme after women over the age of thirty won the vote in 1918.
Her portrayals of East Enders have a warmth lacking in the images created by other photographers who came to the East End to capture a spectacle of poverty and deprivation for the appalled gaze of those who lived outside. Her subjects engage with her as one who lives among them, looking steadily at the camera, without embarrassment or any obvious desire to please.
Four Corners’ exhibition offers us the rare opportunity to view important moments in the history East London history, captured as they occurred, which can usually only be seen at the International Institute of Social History (/www.socialhistory.org/) in Holland, where they are stored.
Contemporaries reported that Norah was every bit as energetic and capable as Sylvia Pankhurst, and yet her contribution to women’s suffrage is very little known. Likewise, there is scant acknowledgment of her place in the history of English photography.
It’s hard to say why this should be, but it could be something to do with Norah’s self-effacing nature, evident in the omission of any credits for the many photographs she published in the Woman’s Dreadnought, ELFS’ official newspaper. Such reticence was not par for the course. Christina Broom, the far more famous photographer of the mainstream Women’s Social and Political Union, etched her name on every one of her photographic plates. Nor was her philanthropic contribution commemorated, unlike that of other benefactors such as William Booth and Richard Green, even though she spent the entire fortune she inherited from her father on the people of the East End.
So far, visitor numbers have exceeded the organisers’ expectations and comments in the visitors’ book are full praise for this skilfully curated assemblage of a unique collection. Originally it was intended for display until 9th February but fortunately for potential visitors it can now be seen for a further week.
Norah Smyth’s photographs are on display at Four Corners
121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN
From 2nd November – 16th February 2019
Tues – Sat: 11.00-18.00 daily. Admission free. Closed Mondays.
www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/East-End-Suffragettes
There is a catalogue to accompany the exhibition written by Carla Mitchell and Helen Trompeteler, which reproduces many of the images displayed and has been an invaluable source of information for this article.
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
Housing Ordinary People in London, by Jane McChrystal.
The Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin once declared “Nothing is too Good for Ordinary People”* and as a founder of the radical Tecton group he designed municipal housing which combined the creation of healthy spaces, where people could live healthy lives, with the expression of his modernist aesthetic.
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Excursion to Limehouse Town Hall, by Jane McChrystal.
| A new municipal HQ for the Borough of Tower Hamlets is being built on the site of the old Royal London Hospital, and it’s due to open in 2022.
Can you imagine anyone marking the occasion by composing An Ode to the Whitechapel Civic Centre? No, I can’t either. But things were different in 1881, when the Parish Council of Limehouse opened the doors of its new Vestry Hall built to serve the 40,000 East Enders who lived within its boundaries. The “Parish magnates”, “Local Board” and “vestry men” responsible for its construction wanted a building fit to impress all who beheld it with the measure of their power and prestige. Limehouse had recently experienced a period of rapid expansion, with an increase in its population of 35,000 over thirty years. Its jerry-built terraces and mean tenements teemed with the dockers and labourers who had flocked there in the hope of finding work in the warehouses of the Thames and factories in the East End. They laboured for low wages in dangerous places and returned each day to wives and children crammed into overcrowded homes blighted by poor sanitation, infestation and disease. But any population, no matter how deprived, needs its shops, pubs and services, so Limehouse was also home to plenty of prosperous business men – landlords, tobacconists, chandlers and the like – of the kind who were keen to get involved with civic life and take control of the apparatus of local government. They weren’t the only ones who wanted a piece of the action. The last three decades of the Nineteenth Century were a period of intense social change, when religious groups, philanthropists and radicals of every kind were drawn to the East End in search of fertile ground for their own particular brand of social reform among the local inhabitants who lived and toiled in such penury. |
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Ode to Limehouse Town HallJA MayAll hail! This bright, auspicious day For Limehouse and the whole East End; Come happy faces blythe and gay, Our town hall opening to attend. Hence for discussions, concerts, balls May it your patronage command; Till like a fountain from its walls Gush mirth and knowledge hand in hand. Chorus So join the chorus with me one and all Who in one gladness share sing away; Proclaim aloud – our new town hall Is opened on this day. The architect with master mind Beholds his skill with praise survey’d Who the foundation witness’d find The stone was well and truly laid, The parish magnates here will meet, Our vestry men and Local Board; Transact their business learn’d, discreet In rooms that comfort will afford |
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| We might expect the two groups to be at odds with each other, but their ambitions were surprisingly similar in some respects, and suited to the spirit of the age, with its insistence on the pursuit of self-improvement and moral uplift.
Consider this statement made by one of the speechmakers at the opening ceremony of the Hall reported in the East London Observer of 2nd April 1881 where he pointed out that “…the Parish of Limehouse was rising in dignity and importance” and then added he “…trusted it would also rise morally, socially and intellectually”. Now compare it with the original aim of the Seaman’s Mission operating on East India Dock Road a ten minute walk away, declared by the Reverend David Roe upon its foundation in 1843. “…to minister to the spiritual needs and promote the social and moral welfare of seafarers and their families in the vicinity of the Port of London”. Both sides also agreed on the value of learning, but diverged when it came to the question of having a good time. The Reverend Roe provided his sailors with sober pastimes – praying, reading, classes in seamanship – offered in the hope of keeping them on the straight and narrow, whereas JA May’s is all for “concerts”, “balls”, “pleasure” and “mirth” gushing from the town hall’s walls for the benefit of those “…happy faces blythe and gay”. I became aware of the Town Hall on a regular journey from Limehouse to Aldgate on the 135 bus along the Commercial Road, where it stands in the shadow of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St Annes Church, distinguished from neighbouring terraces of shops, flats and low-rise social housing by its tall arched windows and imposing portico framed by granite pillars. The use of Suffolk brick and Portland stone embellishments for the facade in the construction of a building which cost more than £12,000 ruffled local feathers. How could a Parish Council spend so much of its rate payers’ money on a monument to their own pride, when so many of them had so little? Over time, boundaries have been redrawn and boroughs merged and renamed, while the Town Hall has served many different purposes. During the Nineteenth Century it functioned as the seat of local government and hosted the balls and concerts envisaged by J. A. Mays in his ode, but at the same time pulled in so many orators from the emerging labour movement that by the early Twentieth Century “to Limehouse” became synonymous with delivering any kind of rousing, radical speech. The Town Hall then served as a medical practice and an infant welfare centre. It was bombed during the Blitz and remained out of commission until repairs were completed in 1950. In the post-war period it has housed the National Museum of Labour History, the Wapping Neighbourhood Centre and a shelter for homeless people. Finally, in 2004 it was taken over by the Limehouse Consortium Trust and remains in its care to this day. The view of the Town Hall from the top deck had stirred my curiosity about what happens inside now, so I hurried along when it opened its doors to the public on Open House Sunday in September to be greeted by Olivia, a Trustee of the consortium and helpful, friendly volunteer guide for the day. She described the vital role played by the Consortium in the preservation of the building’s fabric and their determination to save it from conversion into yet another block of luxury apartments. She told me about the Consortium’s mission to foster community arts through projects such as Fabricworks, which trains disadvantaged local women in the design and manufacture of textiles with a view to helping them become part of the organisation’s production team or find work in the wider world. The interior of the Town Hall and its fittings are well suited to the practical nature of the activities that take place there today, but traces of the splendour to which its founders aspired are still apparent in the intricate iron work of the bannisters flanking the central staircase, the elaborate plaster work swags which ornament the grand assembly hall and sunburner lamps embedded in its ceiling. The opulent Persian rugs, Moroccan leather chairs and mahogany desks which originally filled its rooms “that will comfort afford” are all gone. The town hall’s exterior was designed by Arthur Harston with nods to the Italian Renaissance palazzo, but it gives an impression of strength and solidity rather than classical harmony. Maybe this is something to do with the more usual commissions undertaken by its architect – hospitals, asylums and workhouses. What it lacks in elegance it makes up in spades with its history and the contribution it makes to community arts today. |
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| You can make a one-off donation to the Consortium for the upkeep of Limehouse Town Hall or become a friend and make regular contributions. There are also opportunities for volunteers suited to individual skills and talents.
You can find more information and details of forthcoming events on the Town Hall’s website and Facebook page. “Within These Walls: The Story of Limehouse Town Hall”. A pdf available on the Limehouse Town Hall Website was an invaluable source of information in the preparation of this article. The Ode to Limehouse Town Hall was reproduced from material on display at the Assembly Hall on Open House London, 22nd September. Jane McChrystal © 2018.
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ODE TO LIMEHOUSE TOWN HALL CONTINUED |
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Here commerce too may plume its wing, Ships, colonies and trade be scann’d, The graces meet, the Muses sing And toll and pleasure wealth expand. The great and good from time to time, The seeds of wisdom here may sow; And thousands learn that truth sublime To ”know thyself” enough to know. Limehouse Town Hall646 Commercial RoadLondon E14 7HAWebsite: www.limehousetownhall.co.uk Facebook page: www.facebook.com/LimehouseTownHall |
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Elf Lyons, ChiffChaff. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Elf Lyons,
ChiffChaff,
The Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh,
Dates of run: until August 27,
Director: Aitor Basauri.
What do you do when life gives you lemons? Make lemonade is the wrong answer, says Elf Lyons, who is the product – and that’s not too economic a term – of father Gerard Lyons, former economic advisor to Boris Johnson, artist mother Annette Lyons and the Philippe Gaulier clown school on the outskirts of Paris.
A good economic answer is you can get a far better return if you don’t squander your best resource in one go and instead put the lemon in a jug of water and get a pub crowd to bet on whether it’s possible to balance a pound on it.
Better still, in the spirit of Elf’s artist mother, is to attempt the impossible and make lemonade without any lemons. You might fail, but the endeavour will be interesting.
Elf Lyons’ hour-long show, a look at economics that is as light as the song of the chiffchaff bird, has solid ingredients, as Elf has clearly picked up economic theory by osmosis.
Where she achieves the all-but impossible is in making a fringe audience care about the difference between Milton Friedman’s monetarism and John Maynard Keynes’ preference for stimulating economies through government expenditure, but, in this apolitical space, it’s unclear which works best.
The father who looms so large in the show and has been among the audience might even envy his daughter’s crowd appeal, but she’s the first to acknowledge her debt to him and the jibes are loving.
One of my favourite lines was her reference to how, as an economics lecturer, he tells his audience what he’s going to tell them, then tells it to them, then reminds them what he’s just told them. “He’s not a nuisance,” she insists; he only lectures people when asked.
If his approach is male and authoritative, Elf’s is to hide behind a Liza Minnelli persona, complete with a baby-girl accent and a skimpy sparkly dress. The joke’s on us, if we think she’s betraying generations of feminism; she just wants to have fun with her femininity and why shouldn’t a woman with a cute voice and a clown’s endlessly rising eyebrows know all about economics?
One woman who does emerge badly from it all is Theresa May, imagined by Elf cowering at the bottom of a drain with the rest of her government.
Trump also gets a slight as his tweets, along with antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea, rank among life’s unpalatables in Elf’s rendition of “My Favourite Things”.
She also transforms the hit “Downtown” into “Downturn” and boogies along to “Let’s Get Fiscal”.
She’s not quite the only female clown or the only comic to joke about the economy that the Edinburgh Fringe has produced, but she is a standout it’s hard not to appreciate whatever your views on Brexit.
In the inclusive atmosphere of her show, that most divisive of issues gets only a silent reference in the form of a small elephant, lurking at the back of the stage and patterned with the stars of the EU member states.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
Plastic: A never-ending story. Review by Barbara Lewis.
June 22, 2019 by Barbara Lewis • art, drawing, ecology, economics, exhibitions, installations, society, year 2018 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, drawing, ecology, exhibitions, installations, society •
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