In Honour of Our Lady of Mount Carmel The annual procession from St Peter’s Italian Church in Clerkenwell first took place by special permission of Queen Victoria in 1883 and continues annually. On the third Sunday in July, this years was last Sunday, but in both 2019 and 2013 it was on Sunday 21st July. For this post I’ll use photographs from these two years though I’ve been on quite a few other occasions.
2013
I can’t remember when I first got to know about the procession, one of London’s oldest and most colourful religious festivals, but I think it will have been in the early 1990s when I belonged to a group called London Documentary Photographers, organised by the senior curator of photography at the Museum of London, Mike Seaborne, and became friends with another photographer, Paul Baldesare, who as his name suggests, is of Italian extraction, his father coming to the country before Paul was born.
2013
Since then its been a fairly regular entry in my diary, though I’ve been away from London some years, or had other pressing business. More recently it’s been more of a social occaision, where I’ve met Paul and other photographer friends with perhaps more interest in the Sagra in the street below the church, where Italian food and wine are sold, with wine often being brought in specially from small Italian family winemakers, mostly good and mainly cheap.
2019
I didn’t go last Sunday, mainly because of the amber heat warning. There is little shade and taking pictures means much standing in direct sunlight, something dangerous for any length of time, particularly someone of my age and infirmities. Instead I stayed inside, drinking plenty of water and keeping as cool as possible.
2013
It’s a great event, with lots of people, colourful statues being carried around the streets and a succession of floats and walking groups in costumes largely reflecting biblical scenes of the life of Jesus. There are I think two Jesus’s in the line-up, one with a communion cup leading the first communicants and another carrying a heavy wooden cross.
2019
Photographically for me the climax comes with the release of a white dove or doves, though both the number of doves and how they are set free has differed over they years. But most years recently I think there have been three who have been held in the hands of clergy and supposedly released together. Except the clergy are not always well-synchronised and the doves too have minds of their own. Its hard to get a picture capturing all of them in a single shot.
2019
Sometimes the doves shoot up almost vertically while at other times they speed past the cameras just over our heads. And although we think of white doves as being photogenic, at some points in their flight they look decidedly ugly and even maimed.
2013
Back in the times of film when the cameras I used just took a single picture when you pressed the shutter release you seldom had more than one chance to capture them. Nowadays digital cameras all have modes to take multiple frames and this cuts much of the danger of missing the birds completely. It’s probably the only time in the year I have any use for the 8 frames a second my camera has on offer, though the first time I tried this the camera went into sulk mode and refused to take even a single shot and I had to grab my second camera.
2013
But its also something I’ve now done many times and find it hard to approach in a new and fresh way. Some events evolve enough to make event fatigue not a problem but those that stay more or less the same can’t arouse the same level of interest. Perhaps I might have taken a break this year even if the weather had been less of a problem.
Dancing at the 2019 Sagra
More pictures and details on My London Diary from 2013 and 2019 with a separate group of pictures from the 2019 Sagra.
Although I’d had a strong interest in photography since my early years, probably first inspired by magazines such as Picture Post in my childhood, followed by the gift from a middle-class relative of a large stack of pre-war National Geographic magazines. In my early teens I saved for well over a year from my minimal pocket money and Christmas and birthday gifts to buy a Halina 35mm camera – and then spent more years becoming familiar with it before I could afford to buy a film and pay for it to be processed; it was only a dozen or so years later that I had both cash and the opportunity to seriously take up photography.
That was around 1970, and it was at an interesting period in the history of photography in the UK. One of the key things for me at the time was coming across a magazine on the top shelf at a newsagents called ‘Creative Camera‘ which changed my ideas about our medium.
I can’t now remember which was the first issue I bought, and though I’ve kept my copies from back then I also in the following years bought some of the earlier issues to add to my collection, along with some early issues of another and far more short-lived publication, Album. This lasted only for a dozen monthly issues, and I think I came across it at its end and was one of those who responded to a plea to subscribe at the time of what turned out to be its final issue. This was a great disappointment, and it didn’t help not to get my money back despite the promises. You can now read all 12 issues online.
Much later I heard stories from some of the many photographers who had sent in portfolios to Album and had not had them returned (I never heard anyone tell me their work was returned) about their photographs having been sold without their knowledge or consent. At the time I didn’t myself have any work worth sending.
I didn’t at the time know personally any of the people who were behind these two publications and I’ve found it interesting to watch recently the film ‘Do Not Bend‘ about Bill Jay and more recently to listen to the series of podcasts by Grant Scott ‘In Search of Bill Jay‘, still being added to.
During the years concerned I lived in Manchester, Leicester and Bracknell, all well away from where things were happening in London, though I did briefly become a member and go to some photographic events at the ICA, possibly still when Jay was around. But I never go to know any of the small clique at the centre of things then, though I came across some of them later through Creative Camera, the Photographers Gallery, which I belonged to for well over 30 years before giving up my membership in disgust, and elsewhere.
Grant Scott has certainly been thorough with his research and has pointed out in the podcasts a number of errors particularly in the accounts of the early years of both magazines by Gerry Badger. But there is a problem common to all such research in that it largely relies on recordings and publications along with some very fallible memories of those key players still living. There is a very large body of writing and recording of Bill Jay himself, and though Scott has already pointed out some of its inconsistencies, I think he has perhaps not taken full account of a deal of self-aggrandisement within Jay’s talks and writing.
And although London with Album and Creative Camera was certainly the epi-centre of a new life for photography in the UK, things were happening around the country in many ways in the 1970s and though Jay certainly was at its centre at the start he left the country having helped light the fuse.
I came to spend quite a lot of time (and money) at the Creative Camera bookroom in London and did later send my work to that magazine, with several rejections before a small group of pictures appeared in the last of their albums.
Jim Hughes wrote about Bill Jay in a post on ‘The Online Photographer’, Bill Jay’s Vision, in 2012, and he quotes from two speeches by Jay that make interesting reading. I’ll end with two short excerpts from these quotes – but do click and read the rest, including Hughes own comments and those by others at the end of the article:
“I have no desire to be considered a photographer. I got into photography because I loved the medium and I admired the people who became photographers.”
“And my big fear is that the histories of photography in the future will be based on the photographers who were saleable through galleries, not through the best photographers in the medium.
“We need people who understand the history of the medium and have standards, who are saying ‘photography has something extraordinarily important to say about our culture, our society, our political system’—these are the things we should be looking at and caring about.”
Bill Jay – ICP Infinity Award acceptance speech, 2008
Most mornings when I sit down to write a post for >Re:PHOTO I start by searching on My London Diary for events I photographed on that particular day (or rather the day two or three ahead when I will schedule the post to appear.)
Occasionally there may be something else I feel moved to write about – some new development in photography, discovery about the history of photography, ethical debate or cataclysmic event – but these seem to come up less frequently than they used to, though I’m not entirely sure why this should be.
Perhaps it’s because I spend more time now looking at my own old work, digitising images I made on film in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and worrying about what will happen to all this work after my death and rather less on going out, taking new work and meeting other photographers. Covid meant that for a long period there were few exhibitions to go to, and I haven’t yet got back into the habit.
My bookshelves have long all been full and overcrowded and I seldom buy new books unless they are by personal friends, and have cancelled my subscription to most of those expensive magazines I could never bring myself to throw away – the shelves once allocated to them are also full. I’m beginning also to wonder about the future of this large library – whether to try and set up an on-line bookshop to sell it, or to try to find some worthy institution to gift it to.
Fortunately almost all of the posts in My London Diary give their date somewhere making it easy to locate the pictures I took on July 19 from around 1999 until 2021 using the Freefind search box on many of the site’s pages. Though in the early years of this period when I was still using film there were many events that didn’t make the site as I hadn’t digitised them, and the search somehow misses the occasional thing.
But searching for ’19 Jul’ and ’19th July turns up events in 2008, 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019 and I open the pages from those years and look through them to see what I photographed on those days. This gives me a choice of things to write about, either picking one or two of the twelve events, or about all those I did on a particular day.
So how do I choose? Perhaps I eliminate some topics I know I’ve already written about too often or too recently. I don’t want to rant yet another time – at least for a while – on Israel’s attacks on Gaza and seasonal events like the Swan Upping which happen on a particular day of the week perhaps don’t merit more than one post through the 7 dates on which they can occur.
Then there are some events I have very little to say about and others where I think the photographs are rather run-of-the-mill. Very occasionally some where what I would like to say might be legally unwise.
So you can choose if you want to read more about any of them – there are more pictures and text about them which I wrote at the time I took them on My London Diary.
The previous episode of this walk was Bermondsey Street & Guideline Stores, 1988, and the first two pictures complete my post on that. Two days later I began a new walk a little to the north in Bermondsey.
This row of frontages, rather tidied up, is still present on Bermondsey St, though I think there may have been considerable changes behind the facades. That at the right of my picture, then No 151 was a part of A E Bickel and Co Ltd, offering ENGINEERS TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT, INDUSTRIAL RUBBER GOODS and MANUFACTURERS OF INDUSTRIAL LEATHER AND CANVAS GOODS. This private limited company is still in business but describes this at Companies House as ‘Buying and selling of own real estate’ and there is a large development, Bickel’s Yard, with a private courtyard to the east of Bermondsey St along the north side of Bell Yard Mews.
At the centre of the picture on the corner of Newham’s St is Bermondsey Market Antiques Warehouse, in a Grade II listed early 19th century cloth factory, described as “Brown brick with stone Tuscan cornice and pediment. The building now houses a pan-Asian cocktail bar and grill. You can see from the signs at the left edge of the picture that a great deal of gentrification was in progress back in 1988.
John Felton Rd, Bermondsey, Southwark, 1988 88-10o-31
My walk had ended at the south end of Bermondsey St, where I took a bus towards Waterloo, but two days later I was back in Bermondsey, this time getting of a bus on Jamaica Road and walking northe up George Row. Google Maps does not include John Felton Road, which was a short street running east from George Row and has been renamed Sugar Lane. This wall with a mural around some temporary open space has long disappeared with new building, but it is hard to know why Bermondsey has lost a reference to a man who stood up for his Catholic faith and paid dearly.
Catholic martyr John Felton was given a cruel execution for fixing a copy of Pope Pius V’s Bull ‘Regnans in Excelsis’ excommunicating Queen Elizabeth, to the gates of the Bishop of London’s palace near St. Paul’s. Felton’s family came from Norfolk but he lived at Bermondsey Abbey. His action was seen as a great threat to the Queen continuing to reign, an act of High Treason.
After being arrested and taken to the Tower of London he spoke of his glory in having made the Bull public, and took the diamond ring from his finger and sent it to Elizabeth to show he bore her no personal malice, but insisted she was a Pretender with no right to the throne.
He was tortured on the rack but refused to falsely implicate the Spanish Ambassador in his actions and four days later was drawn on a hurdle to St Paul’s Churchyard where he was hung briefly before being cut down alive for quartering. His daughter’s account of the event alleges that after the hangman had pulled out the heart from his body and was holding it alive he managed once or twice to utter the holy name of Jesus. His severed head and body parts were ‘carried to Newgate to be parboiled, and so set up, as the other rebels were’ as a warning to others. He was beatified in 1886 by Pope Leo XIII.
Felton had been a man of considerable wealth, and his wife had been childhood friends with Queen Elizabeth and a maid of honour to Queen Mary. As well as the diamond rign, said to be worth £400, his plate and jewels, valued at £33,000 were seized for the queen.
East Lane, John Felton Rd, Bermondsey, Southwark, 1988 88-10o-34
This long block of council flats on the Dickens Estate is Oliver House, now at the corner of Sugar Lane and East Lane, though there is no longer a mural on the wall as it was painted over around 2010. It was no great work of art and had faded badly but it seems a pity it has not been replace by something more colourful than a blank brown wall.
St Josephs, Primary School, George Row, Bermondsey, Southwark, 1988 88-10o-21
The Fosters pub on George Row was The George at 19 George Row, on that site since at least 1824. Still open in 1988 on the corner of George Row and John Felton Rd and Flockton Street it closed in 2001 was demolished in 2003.
St Joseph’s RC Primary School remains in use. The Convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Bermondsey was established around 1838 to serve the growing Irish Catholic population in the area and they set up a primary school in the area. Later they educated older children too. St Joseph’s was completed in 1913, and served for years as an All Age Mixed RC School. Catholic education in the area was reorganised in 1949 and it then became St Joseph’s RC Primary School. It now has some extensive new buildings as well as the old school.
George Row, Bermondsey, Southwark, 1988 88-10o-22
The building on my right is Fleming House on George Row, part of Bermondsey Council’s Dickens Estate. At the centre of the picture is the fine warehouse still on the corner of Jacob Street, and at left the seven floors of Peter Butler House, built for Bermondsey Council in the mid-1950s as a later addition to the Dickens estate.
3 Cosas at London University 2013: The protest around the University of London Senate House on Wednesday 17th July 2013 was part of a long running campaign to get all workers at the university decent pay and conditions of service. At it’s root was the attempt by the university to dissociate itself from any responsibility for many lower-paid staff – cleaners, security, catering – whose work is essential to the running of the university by employing them indirectly through outsourcing companies.
These staff work alongside others directly employed by the university who get good contracts with decent provision of pensions, holiday entitlement and sickness pay, but are on rock-bottom contracts, receiving only the statutory minimum requirements. Things are usually made worse by bullying managers from the outsourcing companies who overload the workers and often fail to provide proper safety equipment for the jobs.
Some Unison branches, along with students from the University of London Union and some teaching staff and others from neighbouring London Universities had worked successfully together to improve wages and conditions of these lower paid staff, with protests in 2010-2011 getting the London Living Wage for the workers. They had now joined together to campaign for ‘3 Cosas’ – the three causes of sick pay, holiday pay and pensions, with the Spanish title reflecting the background of many of the university cleaners in London’s Latin-American community.
Green Party leader Natalie Bennett
Unison nationally had publicly dissociated itself from the protests by some local branches and had failed to support either for the successful Living Wage Campaign or the new 3 Cosas campaign. The Senate House Unison Branch had recently elected branch officers who supported the campaigns but the results of the election were annulled by the Unison union leadership.
This led to almost all of the outsourced workers and some of those directly employed leaving Unison in protest, joining the grass roots IWGB which had been active in its support and now represented a majority of the outsourced workers. Despite this the university refused to engage with the IWGB, continuing to recognise the far more submissive Unison who seem not to care about the low paid workers.
The protest on this day was larger and angrier than usual, as the University had called in police the previous day to handle a student protest – and police had arrested a young woman who had chalked a slogan on a wall plaque, charging her with criminal damage. Chalk was used by the protesters as it causes no damage and is easily wiped off.
The 3 Cosas campaign has received support from branches and officials of other trade unions, including the RMT and UCU, the university and college teachers. And among those who came to give their support was Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett who spoke briefly before have to rush off to a BBC interview.
Outside Stewart House
The protest began just outside the Senate House and as Bennett left the protesters moved into the open lobby area underneath the bottom of the building for a noisy few minutes chanting ‘Sick Pay, Holidays, Pensions, Now!’ and other slogans, blowing whistles and horns and using megaphone siren sounds to the accompaniment of some highly dynamic drumming from the SOAS samba band.
They then walked out from there and marched around the street to the south of the building opposite the British Museum North Entrance where there was a brief rally mainly to make those going into the museum aware of why they were protesting.
They walked back onto the university site for another noisy protest outside Stewart House, then back underneath Senate House where they stopped to listen to a speech from the ULU Vice-President. IWGB organiser Alberto Durango then invited everyone to go across the road and make their presence felt in front of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where the IWGB is just starting to fight for the cleaners there to get the London Living Wage.
After a few minutes there they returned for a final session at the Senate House for some final speeches. The woman who had been arrested for chalking the previous day was one of those holding a No Justice No Peace’ banner in front of a line of security staff blocking the entrance, and there were calls urging the university to drop the charge of criminal damage, and some of those present chalked slogans on the tarmac in a show of solidarity.
End Austerity, No to Racism, Tories Out! The main event I covered on Saturday 16th July was a march and rally organised by the the People’s Assembly and Stand Up To Racism as an emergency demonstration after the Brexit referendum result a few weeks earlier. But I also photographed three other events, two on the edges of this and the first totally unrelated.
Falun Dafa march against Chinese repression – Regent St
I hadn’t been aware that practitioners of Falun Dafa (also known as Falun Gong), an advanced Buddhist practice of moral rectitude, meditation and exercise founded by Mr Li Hongzhi in 1992, were to be marching through London to protest the continuing torture and repression they have experience in China since 1999, and simply came across them as I walked up Regent Street towards the BBC where the People’s Assembly march was gathering.
I think I had first photographed Falun Gong when they took part in the Westminster New http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2004/01/jan.htm Year’s Day Parade back in 2004 but I had taken pictures of them quite a few times since then, both at major events and the regular protests that they hold. They have maintained a small permanent 24 hour protest opposite the Chinese Embassy in Portland Place for many years.
In China, Falun Dafa have been subjected to forced labour, psychiatric abuse, torture and even execution to supply human organs for Chinese transplant operations since they were targeted in an antireligious campaign by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999. In earlier years the party had encouraged the movement and the spiritual practices from which Falung Dafa emerged as an extremist form. While Falun Dafa is a cult with some beliefs that endanger its adherents and many would find abhorrent this in no way justifies their criminal persecution in China.
End Austerity, No to Racism, Tories Out! – BBC, Regent St
The People’s Assembly and Stand Up To Racism march had chosen to start outside the BBC, as I wrote “in the forlorn hope that they might for once cover a protest in Britain properly. Many marching and at the rally showed great support for Jeremy Corbyn as our next prime minister – and the only hope of a future for the Labour Party.” Unfortunately that was not to be – and we are suffering now.
Many of those urging the public to vote to leave Europe in the months leading up to the referendum had represented this as a way we could control immigration to this country, and had deliberately stirred up racist fears. The result had been an increase in racist and other hate attacks, particularly directed against refugees and asylum seekers. Many were on the march to support the human and civil rights and show solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers against the upsurge in racism and hate attacks.
The Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, first announced in 2012 by then Home Secretary Theresa May was cited, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environment_policy Wikipedia, “as one of the harshest immigration policies in the history of the United Kingdom, and has been widely criticised as inhumane, ineffective, and unlawful” with the UN Human Rights Council finding it fostered xenophobia and the Equality and Human Rights Commission finding it broke equalities law – and of course it led to the Windrush scandal.
I took pictures of the people preparing to march and walked with it a short distance down Regent Street before leaving to cover two other events before returning to the rally at the end of the march.
One of the groups taking part in the march were United Voices of the World supporters including some of those taking part in the long strike – then on its 38th day – at 100 Wood Street in the City of London.
Ian Hodson, BFAWU
They had told me they were going to leave the march for a short ‘flash mob’ at the headquarters of the CBRE who run 100 Wood Street which was around a quarter of a mile from the march route.
I’d stayed behind for a few minutes photographing the marchers before I left to run after them. When I arrived they had already gone into t he office foyer and were protesting inside, but the doors had been locked. I took a few pictures through the large glass doors but was then able to get inside for a minute or two as some started to leave. After taking a few pictures of the group in front of the offices I ran off to find a small protest by the EDL which had been organised to oppose the day’s big march with a rally in Hyde Park.
Few EDL members had turned up for the event, well under a hundred, but they were easy to find as there were several times as many police who had turned up to prevent any trouble between them and anti-fascists and were marching as a loose cordon around them down Park Lane.
A few anti-fascist had come to oppose them, but most had left to join the main march after seeing how few of the EDL had turned up. Police escorted the EDL into the park, where they had set up a pen for their protest, but they refused to march into it. After some heated arguments with police the the EDL stewards calmed down the others and they agreed to hold their rally in front of the pen instead of in it.
There was a small incident when a woman walked past on the opposite side of the protest to me and shouted ‘Black Lives Matter’; stewards rushed towards her and manhandled her rather roughly away while a large group of police stood by watching but failed to intervene.
Peoples Assembly/Stand Up to Racism rally – Parliament Square
Jeremy Corbyn was there on a hat
I took the tube to Westminster and joined the crowd relaxing after the march in a sunny Parliament Square. Whereas the Hyde Park rally had been full of bitterness and hate, here the mood was much warmer and positive, though there was considerable anger expressed against government policies by the many speakers.
Zita Holbourne of BARAC and PCS holds up her ‘We Stand with Jeremy Corbyn’ poster
But while I’d been kept out out the small crowd in Hyde Park by police and stewards, here I was free to walk around and people were happy to be photographed. It was a totally different atmosphere.
I didn’t photograph every speaker, but you can see I think thirteen of them in my pictures from the event, as well as many pictures of the others standing or sitting on the grass to listen to them. Perhaps the most interesting was an asylum seeker, brought to the microphone by Antonia Bright from Movement for Justice, who spoke briefly about her experiences in our racist asylum system.
I’d lived five minutes walk from the River Thames for around 35 years before I first saw the Swan Upping, as it takes place in the third week of July, a time when I was always at work.
The flotilla in Penton Hook Lock, 2001
The Uppers begin their journey in Sunbury Lock Cut in the morning and come along my stretch of the river around lunchtime, before they stop for lunch at the Swan Hotel close to Staines Bridge. In the afternoon they journey on towards Windsor, where in ROmney Lock they stand in their boats to drink a loyal toast. Their journey continues upriver for the next four days, ending at Abingdon Bridge on Friday.
It was on the 16th July 2001 than I was first free to view the event, and I got on my bike to wait for them to reach Chertsey Bridge around 11.30am. Back then I was still photographing on film, and most of the pictures I made were on a Hassleblad X-Pan.
2001
I think my pictures from that day give a pretty clear account of how the uppers work to surround the swans and their cygnets and then capture them, lifting them onto the river bank so the cygnets can be weighed and measures and given a quick health check. The swan upping is nowadays seen as “an important element of wildlife conservation” rather than seen as a mostly ceremonial event, though it retains some elements of the ceremony.
I talked to an elderly man with a bicycle who was an important part of the event, going ahead of the swan uppers to find swans with cygnets. Although there are hundreds if no thousands of swans on our stretch of river, there are seldom more than 3 or four breeding pairs. I think Eric was a retired public schoolmaster who took a week to cycle along the towpath with crushed digestive biscuits to lure these pairs into suitable spots on the riverbank where the uppers boats could bring them to land.
Measuring cygnets, Staines 2001
I cycled behind him following so always to be in the right spot, but in more recent years he hasn’t been around and the proceedings haven’t been quite so convenient to photograph. In more recent years it has been just the Queen’s Swan Warden in a little dinghy with an outboard a short distance ahead of the rowers who spots the cygnets and gives the traditional call ‘All up!’
Children from a local school wait for the uppers to arrive. Staines 2001
But things don’t really change much year to year and I think I’ve probably taken more pictures of swan upping than anyone needs to. Though when I began the afternoons were always a little less under control after a visit to The Swan, while a ban on drinking in the middle of the day came in a few years later. I might just stroll down to say hello to the uppers as they get to Staines, and if so I’ll have a camera with me, but I won’t really be bothering to take pictures of the event. The last time I did so was in 2013, but the last year I covered it seriously was in 2010 – when I went with them all the way to Windsor to photograph the loyal toast in Romney Lock and the Vintners and Dyers uppers saluting the Royal Uppers a little further downstream.
Digestive biscuits keep the swans by the bank as the boats surround them. Staines 2001
Back then I wrote a little about the history:
It was Henry II who first stole the swans in 1186, declaring that any birds found wild were his. Swans were too much of a delicacy for the common people; later laws prevented anyone except the wealthy from keeping them. These were further tightened in 1486, from when a licence was required from the crown to keep them, and special swan courts set up to administer harsh penalties for those who broke the swan laws.
A myth that Richard the Lionheart (Richard I, 1189-1199) had brought the first mute swans back from Cyprus (or Turkey) was used as a justification for these actions. Licence holders were required to identify their swans by special marks cut into their beaks – there were almost a thousand different marks in the sixteenth century. This became done in an annual ceremony known as ‘swan upping’ which was probably designed mainly to remind the people of the power of the swan owners and the penalties for those who killed swans – up to 1895 you could be sentenced to seven years imprisonment with hard labour, and earlier it had meant transportation and probable death.
The crown still claims all swans on open water, but only exercises this on the main part of the Thames above London. Two of the London livery companies, the Vintners and the Dyers also have licences on this water, and although the swan is no longer eaten at their feasts, having been ousted in public taste by the considerably uglier turkey. One Cambridge college, St John’s, retains the right to serve swan at its banquets though I don’t know if they still do so.
The 2001 account continues on another couple of pages. In other years I’ve taken more pictures, and the quality of the colour has greatly improved since I moved to digital.
If you want to see the upping this year you will find the approximate times on The Queen’s Swan Marker’s page. It begins on Monday 18th July.
Peter Marshall’s Paris. Bastille Day seems a suitable time to write a little again about my photographs of Paris, a city in and around which I’ve spent some time over the years, though always as a visitor rather than a resident.
I first went there in 1966, going to spend a week in a student hostel with a young woman from Hull who I was madly in love with, so definitely seeing the city through rose-tinted lenses, though a little of the shine was taken off by dropping my camera in the lake where we went rowing at Versailles. The camera never really worked properly again, though I couldn’t afford to replace it for another six years.
I think that was probably the only time I’ve been in France for Bastille Day, and we spent the evening at the celebrations in a town square a few miles south of the city centre where our hostel was located. It was very definitely full accordion and dancing and entirely French, but although I remember taking a few pictures there, its probably fortunate that no trace of them remains. People like Doisneau did it so much better.
It was not until 1973 that I returned, with the same woman who was now my wife and with a couple of cheap Russian cameras, A Zenit (Zenith) B SLR, heavy and clunky and a smaller Russian rangefinder camera, I think a Zorki 4. This time we stayed at a student hostel in the Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau in the 1st Arrondisement, which had a grand staircase up to the first floor and a rather less grand one to our room on an upper story, up which we dragged ourselves after spending days walking around the city, often following the walking routes in the Michelin Green Guide.
Fortunately Linda was a fluent French speaker as the guide, then rather more encyclopedic than more recent editions was then only available in French and my O Level was often a little tested. And she could pass as French though often people she talked to took her as being rather simple-minded as she asked about things to which anyone French would know the answer. Most of my visits to Paris have been in her company, though many of the walks I made on later visits were on my own, especially when we had children with us who she took to parks and other children’s activities.
We were no longer students, though still fairly broke, and we still had valid student cards which let us stay in the hostel – in a room so poorly lit by a single bulb run on a lower voltage than it was made for that it was hardly possible to do anything but go to bed when we arrived back – and also to get free or much reduced admission to all the museums. On later visits I found my NUT card as a teacher also got me into many too.
I think I had three lenses for the Zenith B, the standard 58mm f2, along with a short telephoto and a 35mm wide angle. It was noisy in operation and sometimes required considerable force to wind on – and it was easy to rip the film when doing so. The viewfinder showed around 90% of the image. You had to focus at full aperture on the ground glass screen, then stop the lens down to the taking aperture.
The Zorki 4 was smaller and lighter and I’d bought it with the 50mm f2 which was a decent lens. The viewfinder had a split image area for focusing which seemed fairly accurate, but what you saw at the edges depended on where you put you eye to it. The film wound on smoothly and the shutter, having no mirror was considerably less intrusive if not quite to Leica standards.
Neither camera needed a battery. There was no exposure metering or autofocus and it was up to the user to set the appropriate aperture and shutter speed. On a thin cord around my neck I had a Weston Master V, and in my camera bag its Invercone which enabled it to measure incident rather than reflected light when possible. Again this was battery-free, using a large light cell which generated a current, though this limited its sensibility. Weston meters had an outstanding reputation among photographers and film-makers but in later years I replaced it by a more sensitive meter that could measure much lower light levels and even flash.
Despite the rather primitive equipment and my own lack of experience, the 1973 Paris work resulted in my first portfolio published in a photographic magazine the following year which included several of the pictures in this post, all of which come from that trip.
By the time I returned to Paris I had more modern equipment, mainly working with Olympus OM Cameras, at first the OM1, later the OM2 and OM4. On some trips I also took a Leica M2 a range-finder with a much better viewfinder than the Zorki. More recently I’ve photographed in Paris with various Nikon DSLRs and a Leica M8.
One of my earliest attempts at a book was made from the pictures I took in 1973, with the image above on the cover, but it only ever got as far as a single dummy, made by stitching together images printed on 8×10 resin coated paper.
In 1984 I took a couple of weeks working on the project ‘In Search of Atget‘, inspired by the pictures I’d first come across in Paris museums during that 1973 visit. I later showed this work and in 2012 self-published the book which is still available in softcover or as a PDF on Blurb. A second book, of colour pictures, ‘Photo Paris‘ taken in 1988 is also still available on Blurb.
There are also some accounts of my visits to Paris mainly for Paris Photo since 2006 on My London Diary. It’s now been some years since our last visit, though every year we promise ourselves a visit and one day it may happen.
PIP, NHS, Trident & Wood St Cleaners – On Wednesday 13th July 2016 I photographed two protests about the inadequate and badly run Personal Independence Payments for disabled people, a protest supporting a cross-party bill to save the NHS from privatisation, a party against replacing Trident and the longest running strike in the history of the City of London.
PIP Fightback at Vauxhall – Vauxhall
The hardest part of photographing the protest at the Vauxhall PIP Consultation Centre was actually finding the place, hidden away in a back street. This was one of around 20 protests around the country at the centres where ATOS carry out sham Personal Independence Payments ‘assessments’ on behalf of the DWP.
The assessments are almost solely designed to save money for the DWP, enabling them to ignore medical evidence of need and are carried out by people who are given a financial incentive to fail claimants. They often mean that genuine claimants lose essential benefits for months before they are restored on appeal. They have led to many becoming desperate, with some needing hospital treatment and a few have committed suicide after being failed.
NHS Bill protest at Parliament – Old Palace Yard, Westminster
Labour MP for Wirral West Margaret Greenwood was later in the day presenting a ‘Ten Minute Rule Bill’ with cross-party support to stop the privatisation of the NHS and return it to its founding principles.
People from various campaigns had come out to support the bill, which although it had no chance of progressing into law did lead to a greater awareness of the privatisation which is slowly but apparently inevitably putting our NHS into the hands of private, mainly American, health companies, and eroding its basic principles.
Among those who came out to speak was Shadow Health Minister Diane Abbott.
Campaigners from Mental Health Resistance Network (MHRN), Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Winvisible (Women with Invisible and Visible Disabilities) and other supporters met outside the Victoria St offices of Capita PLC, one of the companies along with ATOS responsible for carrying out the shoddy cash-saving PIP assessments.
In particular these assessments are unfair on many claimants whose conditions vary day to day including many with mental health issues. The assessments make no allowances for this and fail to take any account of the medical evidence in coming to their conclusions.
After protesting for some time on the very busy pavement where there were a number of speakers, Paula Peters of DPAC led the group out into the the middle of Victoria Street where they stood with banners and in wheelchairs blocking traffic.
They then marched the short distance to the DWP headquarters in Caxton St, holding a further protest with speakers in the road outside.
Finally they marched past the Houses of Parliament to College Green where the media had set up their ‘Westminster village’ crowded with cameras for Theresa May becoming Prime Minister. Police stopped them as they tried to go onto the grass in front of the TV cameras, and for some time they stood along the side before finally ignoring the police and going on to the green. Where the TV crews ignored the protest.
CND members and supporters were today lobbying MPs against plans to replace Trident at a cost of at least £205 billion.
In Parliament Square they had organised a ‘Trident Mad Hatters Tea Party’ and there were various Christian groups with placards placards stating the opposition by churches of the different denominations to the replacement, with Buddhists from the Battersea Peace Pagoda adding their support.
Finally I went to the heart of the CIty of London where a rally was taking place in support of cleaners belonging to the United Voices of the World union employed by anti-union cleaning contractor Thames Cleaning at the 100 Wood St offices managed by CBRE.
By 13th July this had already become the longest-running strike ever in the City of London and it continued into August. The UVW say:
As days became weeks, the inconvenience for white-collar workers at 100 Wood Street rightly turned into a major embarrassment for their employers, and especially for CBRE, the managers of the building. City of London police were called many times, security staff were intimidating, and the tenants were barely coping with a trickle of the former cleaning operation. Eventually, after a surprise flashmob in the CBRE’s lobby, and then a big march to mark the 50th consecutive day, the decision was taken after 61 days to raise all their pay to the London Living Wage!
Clean Air and Fair Pay – 2019. Two protests on Friday 12th July 2019 over different issues in different parts of London meant I had to leave the first before the rally at the end of the march.
XR East London marches for clean air – Bethnal Green
The march from Paradise Gardens at the centre of Bethnal Green to Hackney Town Hall was the initial event in a weekend of play, protest and education which Extinction Rebellion East London had organised under the title ‘East London Uprising’.
Paradise Gardens was an obvious and appropriate if ironic meeting point for this march calling for the urgent action on the environment we need if the planet is to remain habitable. Although this has been protected commonland since 1678, this public green space is a thin and rather neglected strip between the busy Cambridge Heath Road and Paradise Row, a narrower street lined mainly by Grade II listed houses. It used to be simply a part of Bethnal Green Gardens which are on the east side of the main road but got its current name from Paradise Row – and the northern part of the gardens across the traffic-clogged road became Museum Gardens.
Until shortly before this protest this small area of park had been closed as it was being used by contractors for nearby construction work, with the proviso that they restore it after their work was finished. This appeared to largely have been done, and had not affected the main attraction of the area, the dozen or so large trees along both edges.
When I arrived, people were still getting ready for the march, though most were simply standing around and waiting, some were getting their faces painted while the marching band were practising playing together, and the march stewards were getting their instructions. But finally people lined up behind the main banner with its message ‘THE AIR THAT WE GRIEVE’ and moved onto the fume-laden Cambridge Heath Road.
Air pollution is a huge problem in London, with many areas well above the EU’s legal limits for various pollutants much or all of the time. Traffic is a major source both of gases such as nitrogen oxides and also particulates, and moving towards electric vehicles, though an improvement will not solve the problem as much of the most dangerous particulates come from tyres and brakes. We need to cut traffic, by reducing the need for movement, shifting hugely to public transport and moving to using bicycles, electric bicycles and scooters particularly for shorter journeys.
Air pollution is said to be responsible for almost 10,000 premature deaths in London each year, and a much larger number suffer from serious lung and other conditions from it, greatly reducing their quality of life and creating a heavy burden and costs for our healthcare system. But encouraging people to adopt healthier means of transport needs much more spending on making these safer and more convenient.
The march up one of the area’s busier roads was largely uneventful, though it will have delayed many on their journeys through the area, but it will also have made many people in the area more aware of the problems. Those who drive in London are used to delays, with an overcrowded system in which any minor problem can cause lengthy delays – and as a bus passenger it isn’t unusual I often find myself getting off and walking when I’m in a hurry.
I left the march shortly after it moved across the border from Tower Hamlets into Hackney and was going up Mare Street towards the Town Hall. I was sorry to have to miss the childrens’ assembly which was to take place there at the end of the march, but wanted to be sure to be in time for the protest at Senate House in the centre of London.
IWGB welcome new Vice Chancellor – Senate House, University of London
Most of the workers carrying out essential but low paid jobs at the University of London are not employed by the university but by contractors who provide their services to the university. This outsourcing results in the workers being poorly paid, often bullied and employed with only the minimum legal conditions of employment.
For years they have been protesting to be employed directly by the university and so get the same pay and working conditions as other staff in similar jobs that are on the payroll. In particular they want the same sick pay, holiday pay and pensions, and of course the London Living Wage.
Their campaigns have met with some progress – and three years on many have been brought in house, but the university dragged its feet for many years, spending large amounts on extra outsourced security staff and refusing to talk with the unions representing the low paid workers. Although trade union legislation means that as employers have to recognise unions, neither the contractors who employed these workers nor the university in whose premises they worked were willing to recognise or negotiate with their unions.
Progress has only been made by direct actions such as this by the grass-roots trade union IWGB, and by strikes by the workers. They had tried to meet with the new Vice-Chancellor Wendy Thomson but their request had simply been ignored.
After a rally at the main gates and a protest outside Student Central (the former University of London Union, closed down by the University because it supported the workers) the protesters returned to Senate House. A small group pushed down some flimsy barriers with the extra security unable to stop them and the rest surged in after them to dance noisily in protest in the yard in front of the locked entrance to Senate House.
