Tag: Shakespeare

A Damp Sunday in Hull – 2018

A Damp Sunday in Hull: My poston My London Diary for Sunday 29th July 2018 begins with the question “What do you do on a wet Sunday morning in Hull?” and goes on to answer it, and a second post shows how we spent a slightly less damp afternoon in the city. The pictures here with one exception are from that day.

A Damp Sunday in Hull

Hull, thanks to the remarkable generosity of Thomas Robinson Ferens, (1847 – 1930), a Methodist, “industrialist and philanthropist, for whom ‘Reckitt’s Blue made Ferens’ gold'”. He lived simply and gave this wealth almost entirely “to worthy causes. In 1920 he was earning £50,000 a year and giving away £47,000 of that, and still teaching Sunday School every week.” Thanks to him Hull has a university with the motto “Lampada Ferens” (carrying the light of learning) and more to the point for wet Sunday mornings, one of the finest municipal galleries in the country, though I had plenty of time for breakfast before it opened at 11 am.

A Damp Sunday in Hull

I didn’t photograph the fine exhibition then showing in the gallery of the work of Käthe Kollwitz or any of the other work on display, but went on to meet my wife in Hull Minster where there was an exhibition by the Mission to Seamen and the statue shown above of Lil Bilocca made from issues of the Hull Daily Mail by Gail Hurst. Bilocca was the leader of Hull’s Headscarf Revolutionaries, the Hessle Road Women’s Committee who took direct actioin after three Hull trawlers, St Romanus, Kingston Peridot and Ross Cleveland, sank with the loss of 58 lives in freezing North Atlantic seas around Iceland in January and February 1968.

A Damp Sunday in Hull

They fought the trawler owners – and at times the fishermens’ union – to get better safety measures and went to Downing St and persuaded Harold Wilson and his Labour government to review the industry and bring in safety measures which saved thousands of lives. For which she was blacklisted and subjected to a campaign of abuse and hate until her early death in 1988, but is now widely recognised as a hero for her campaign.

A Damp Sunday in Hull

The rain had eased off after lunch as we walked along Spring Bank and through Hull General Cemetery on Spring Bank West to Chants on a combined nostalgia trip and on the Larkin trail.

One of the surprises on Spring Bank was the return of Shakespeare, a TV repair shop which I had photographed in the 1980s but more recently had become a Portuguese grocers and, more recently a multicultural food shop. Though it was only the former shop sign and was soon to be covered by a new once for the food store.

And in the cemetery which has been cleared a little – it now has friends, whearas before the council were more its enemies – I was pleased to again find the Monument to Cholera Victims. The 1849 outbreak in Hull killed 1,860 – one in 43 of the city’s inhabitants.

A short detour took us past Linda’s former home and through the Northern Cemetery to visit her family grave and then it was on to Newland Park, a wandering street in which Philip Larking lived in two houses. The entrance to the street has a plaque on the Larkin trail, and the second house he owned there has a plaque and a large toad.

Newland Park is Hull’s most expensive roads, close to the University, and as well as Larkin was also home as another plaque records for 9 years of De Eva Crane in whose house her the International Bee Research Association was formed.

Architecturally of more interest is West Garth, a large ‘Arts & Crafts’ house designed by John Malcolm Dossor (1872-1940) who later became Lord Mayor of Hull. It has a ‘butterfly’ design, with wings at 45 degrees leading off from the central panelled entrance hall. The ground floor room closest to camera was the billiard room, with a full-size table and a bar.

Taken while staying at West Garth in 2008

At the rear the wings enclosed a loggia, which was south-facing and acted as a sun trap, where we took afternoon tea when staying there – my wife was for some years a frequent visitor and I sometimes accompanied her. The building also had a fine library, and five large bedrooms. When sold for £620,000 on September 1, 2017 it was Hull’s most expensive house sale for the year, considerably more than the second most expensive (also in Newland Park,) which sold for £450,000.

West Garth had been the childhood home of one of our friends and he moved back to Hull in later life, first buying Larkin’s first home in Newland Park (and where I think his lawnmower killed a hedgehog) and later moving back into West Garth, spending his last years trying to restore it to its original state aiming to get it listed, but sadly he died before the work was completed.

Our day ended at another of the locations on the Larkin trail, with dinner at the Royal Station Hotel. Originally built together with the station in an Italian Renaissance style, it opened as the Station Hotel in 1849, gaining the ‘Royal’ after Queen Victoria visited in 1853. We had stayed there on a previous visit to Hull, but on this occasion were at a more modern and cheaper venue a few minutes walk away.

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City colour

The 1km wide strip of TQ32 in our National Grid includes a section of the City of London, from a little to the west of St Paul’s Cathedral to a few yards east of the Monument, with the Thames at its south and the Barbican and Moorgate at its north, a little over a square kilometre of “the square mile”, perhaps two fifths of the city. So its not surprising that I took quite a few pictures in the City during the period I was putting colour prints into the albums that make up my ‘London Cross-section’, from roughly 1986-92. Though as you will see if you look at the album TQ32 – London Cross-section, they are mainly from just a few small areas that I found of most interest. Here is just a small initial selection of them with some comments.

Pig, Office, Lower Thames St, City, 1991 TQ3280-031
Pig, Office, Lower Thames St, City, 1991

Walking around the City now you often find yourself going past the windows of large offices filled with people staring into screens, but back in the late 1980s and early 90s this was more of a novelty. Also something of a novelty was this pink inflatable pig on a windowsill. The real watershed for the City came in 1986, with the ‘Big Bang’, on a Monday in October that year when the City of London was deregulated, with face-to-face share dealing replaced by electronic trading. I don’t know what business this office was dealing with but the idea of pigs seemed appropriate to the getting of snouts in the trough as so many in the City found themselves in clover.

Doorway, Little Britain, City, 1986 TQ3281-001
Doorway, Little Britain, City, 1986

Lawrence & Co. (Estd. 1897) Ltd. were once blouse manufacturers at 7 Little Britain, a street (and area) at the edge of Smithfield, but the peeling paint and corrugated iron on this doorway seemed to me to symbolise something about the state of the nation, the larger Britain, and their was the City of London Recorder and myself also a recorder.

You can still walk along Little Britain and indentify a few of the doorways I photographed, though what is left are simply facades, and the atmosphere is largely but not entirely lost.

Heroes Memorial, Postmans Park, City, 1986 TQ3281-116
Heroes Memorial, Postmans Park, City, 1986

In 1887 prominent painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) proposed the erection of a memorial to commemorate the heroic self-sacrifice of ordinary people who had died saving the lives of others as a part of the commemorations of the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, but it was not taken up.

Some years later in 1898, the vicar of St Botolph’s Aldersgate suggested to Watts that the memorial could be built in Postman’s Park, the former churchyard adjoining the church and a wooden loggia was built to shelter a wall with space for 120 ceramic memorial tiles to be made by William De Morgan, though only 4 were in place when this was opened in 1900.

De Morgan gave up ceramics in 1906 after making only 24 tiles, and Watt’s widow, Mary Watts was unhappy with new tiles made by Royal Doulton, and rather lost interest. Only 53 tiles had been added by 1931 when work ceased. When I photographed it the display was in fairly poor condition, but has since been repaired and in 2009 the first new tablet was added.

Roman Wall, Barbican, City, 1992TQ3281-068
Roman Wall, Barbican, City, 1992

I walked through the Barbican quite often and occasionally took photographs as I was involved in a group called ‘London Documentary Photographers’ which had been founded by Mike Seaborne, then curator of photographs at the Museum of London and which regularly met there, as well as organising several photography shows at the Barbican Library.

I like this picture because it encompasses so much of the history of the city of London, with a section of its Roman Wall, the tower of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, one of the few medieval churches to survive the 1666 Great Fire (though the tower dates from 1682 and the church was reconstructed after being gutted by bombing in the Blitz of 1940) as well as the taller tower from the Barbican Estate, built between 1965 and 1976 on an area devastated in the war.

Shakespeare, Garden, Aldermanbury, Love Lane, City, 1986TQ3281-019
Shakespeare, Garden, Aldermanbury, Love Lane, City,

Shakespeare, on this plinth in St Mary Aldermanbury Garden, Love Lane is another reminder of the city’s history – as is the garden. The church here was destroyed in the Great Fire and rebuilt shortly after to the plans of Sir Christopher Wren. It was gutted again during the Blitz in 1940, leaving only the walls standing. In 1966 these were shipped to Fulton, Missour and restored as a memorial to Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in that town in 1946.

The area was laid out as a public garden after it was acquired by the City of London in 1970 and is often quite full at lunchtime with city workers eating their sandwiches.

Shakespeare’s bust, by Charles Allen (1862 – 1956), is part of a memorial from 1896 to John Heminge and Henry Condell, fellow actors of Shakespeare who after his death in 1616 collected his works and published them at their own expense in 1623, thus making them available to later generations. Without them his work would have lost.

TQ32 – London Cross-section.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.