Be Magnificent. Walthamstow School of Art 1957-1967

Be Magnificent Walthamstow School of Art 1957–1967

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©Vestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

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Š 2017 William Morris Gallery

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Foreword 05

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The Radical Years of Walthamstow School of Art 1957–1967 09

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Peter Blake’s Memories of Walthamstow School of Art 24

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The Influence of Walthamstow School of Art on Sixties Fashion 36

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The Music Scene in Sixties Waltham Forest 48

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Setting the Scene: Walthamstow 1957–1967 65 Acknowledgements 85

Foreword ‘ There are a couple of ways to avoid death, one is to be magnificent.’

Ian Dury, musician and Walthamstow School of Art graduate

Between 1957 and 1967, Walthamstow School of Art was one of the most exciting places in the country to study art. Fifty years on, Be Magnificent is the first project to mark this incredible era at the School and is the result of a partnership between Create London, William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum.

The outcomes of this project include two stimulating exhibitions and a Summer School. The exhibition Be Magnificent: Walthamstow School of Art 1957–1967 at the William Morris Gallery brings together for the first time the early work of the seminal artists and designers from Walthamstow. At Vestry House Museum, Setting the Scene: Sixties Walthamstow explores the area’s vibrant music and cultural scene. The Summer School, held over a fortnight during the exhibitions, will see alumni and teaching staff return to the original site of the School, now the well-appointed art and design studios at Waltham Forest College, to deliver a series of public talks, screenings, classes, special events and happenings. A group of leading younger, contemporary artists will also be part of this temporary resurrection of the school. The curriculum is experimental, non-accredited, and the School is free and open to students, local young people and to anyone interested in expanding their knowledge of art practice and having a further insight into the history of the Walthamstow School of Art. Our aim in this endeavour is to explore some of the current debates about art education in the UK and build on what we have already achieved in this area. The William Morris Gallery takes inspiration from Morris’s own belief in equality in the arts. He wrote: ‘I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.’ In recent years this principle has been at the heart of our public programme. Create London has also been involved in the setting up of another radical education project, Open School East, which its team helped to establish in 2013 and which provides a free, 5

Left: I’m Crazy Yet

by Ian Dury, 1963, graphite and pencil, 89 x 72 cm Right: The Greenhouse at the William Morris Gallery by Angela Gladwell, c.1964, pencil drawing, 38 x 54 cm

year-long learning and studio-based programme for emerging artists, and a multifaceted programme of events, activities and training open to all.

Over the course of developing Be Magnificent we have met with and spoken with scores of artists who came from the area and were supported and inspired by the School of Art in pursuing their practice and creative careers.

Many of these artists stayed in Waltham Forest, while those who did move away continued to have strong links with the area. The School of Art has clearly established deep roots in the local area; so has the peripheral cultural life it instigated, including the extraordinary popular music programme in Walthamstow Assembly Hall and at the Granada Cinema, the student-led happenings of the late sixties, and the record and clothes shops that sprang up around the School. The effects are still visible today.

Despite this ongoing cultural energy in Walthamstow, an important question to ask now is: what does an area lose when its local art school closes? At a time where the possibility of pursuing an art education is less achievable for a young person without the financial assistance of parents and family, it has never been more important to inspire young people from all 6

backgrounds, and reveal to them the value of an art education. Young people today face daunting demands in terms of paying for their education, making a living and finding somewhere affordable and secure to live. In the sixties, the formative years of late teens and early twenties were an exciting and exploratory time that now seems a world away.

Our hope in celebrating this extraordinary era fifty years on is that we can all begin looking for new ways to enable young people from all backgrounds to live creative and productive lives and to pursue the ambitions and ideas they are passionate about.

We would like to thank Waltham Forest Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund for supporting this project, and the authors of this collection of essays for helping to illuminate this important story.

Hadrian Garrard Director, Create London Kath Cockshaw Head of Museum, Gallery & Arts, London Borough of Waltham Forest May 2017

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©London Borough of Waltham Forest Archives and Local Studies Library

1 Walthamstow School of Art prospectus, 1958– 59

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The Radical Years of Walthamstow School of Art 1957–1967

by Rowan Bain

Between 1957 and 1967, Walthamstow School of Art, a provincial art school in a suburban area of north-east London, cultivated some of the most influential creative talent of a generation. Teachers and students came together in a radical exchange of skills, creativity and ideas. There were painters who were to become established as leaders of Pop Art: Sir Peter Blake and Derek Boshier; Royal Academicians: Olwyn Bowey, Ken Howard and Bill Jacklin; musicians: Ian Dury and Terry Day; fashion designers: Foale and Tuffin and Celia Birtwell; and filmmakers: Ken Russell and Peter Greenaway – all taught or studied there during this period. All point to their time at Walthamstow as instrumental in their creative development, yet this period at the School has never been looked at in detail.

The story of Walthamstow School of Art during the late fifties and sixties is made up of multiple narratives. It tells of the coming together of people with remarkable artistic talents, in one place, during an era in which London’s cultural scene was exploding. It also reflects a national phenomenon: that it was in the art schools of post-war Britain that the benefits of free, universal, further and higher education were most evident.

There was a wide social mix of students at Walthamstow School of Art, many from working-class backgrounds. All were supported and encouraged in their creative development and, as a result, some went on to have a profound impact on the cultural landscape of Britain in the late twentieth century.

The history of London’s art schools is incomplete. It tends to focus on the most established institutions such as the Slade School of Fine Art or the Royal College of Art (RCA).1 The absence of Walthamstow School of Art from the wider history is a fate shared by the hundreds of British art schools that closed down after major reforms to art education came into effect during the 1960s (discussed later in this chapter). Although Walthamstow School 9

2 Exterior of South West Essex Technical College and School of Art, 1960

of Art did not officially close, the distinct identity of the School ceased after multiple building moves and its merger in the 1970s into the North East London Polytechnic, which later became the University of East London (UEL). No official archive exists at the site of the original former building on Forest Road (now Waltham Forest College) and only a small number of documents relating to the institutional history survive in UEL’s archive. The legacy of Walthamstow School of Art therefore remains in the personal memories of those who studied there, and is vital and palpable in the art, music, fashion, architecture, films and literature those ex-students produced.

Walthamstow School of Art (as it was colloquially known and is referred to here) was officially part of South West Essex Technical College and School of Art (SWETC). ‘The façade was as long as its name,’ according to the infamous art faker and former drawing tutor Eric Hebborn.2 Housed in a grand, purpose-built, neoclassical building on Forest Road, Walthamstow (2) SWETC first opened in September 1938, after the merging of the Technical Colleges of Walthamstow and Leyton, together with the Walthamstow Commercial School for Girls and the Leyton School of Art. One of four regional technical colleges in what was then a part of Essex (see Chapter 5), it was formed as the direct result of the Government’s push to provide 10

more technical education in the years preceding the Second World War. By 1947, over 9,000 students were enrolled in day and evening courses at SWETC, studying a variety of vocational and technical subjects. These included engineering, science, commerce, languages and domestic science.

SWETC styled itself as a ‘people’s university’, combining educational and recreational activity in a place where both male and female students could meet and engage in self-expression.3 Despite the agenda of the wider college, the creative, rather than technical, focus of the School of Art set it apart from its institutional partner. Although the School of Art was physically located within the main SWETC building, (3) its independence was further reinforced by the organisational structure, in which the School of Art had its own Principal, with the autonomy to select both staff and students.

In 1951, Stuart Ray became Principal of Walthamstow School of Art, overseeing a period in which Walthamstow was to become one of the top art schools in the country.4 As an artist, Ray was somewhat traditional. His stylistic influence came from the Camden Town Group, a group of PostImpressionist painters active around 1910, whose members included Walter Sickert, Lucien Pissarro and, Ray’s favourite, Harold Gilman. Ray’s paintings and prints captured domestic scenes and landscapes, with such titles as Woman Arranging Roses by Lamplight in Domestic Interior 5 or Monday Morning in North London.6 Although Ray could in no way be considered in the artistic vanguard, he was nonetheless instrumental in Walthamstow’s unparalleled success during his almost two decades as its Principal.

Roger de Grey, President of the Royal Academy, wrote of Walthamstow in Ray’s obituary that it was ‘here that his capacity to teach came into full flower’.7 Ray’s success as a teacher was his personal conviction that talent required nurturing. Most students at Walthamstow first encountered him during an initial face-to-face interview, which he conducted personally with the majority of prospective students.

This interview with Ray, a tall, thin, serious man, was a nerve-racking experience for most students, many of whom were the first in their family to apply to study further education. The artist Alan Kidd, who in 1961 applied to Walthamstow aged sixteen, remembers Ray leafing through his finished drawings and dismissing them outright as ‘rubbish’. Ray was however impressed by Kidd’s sketchbook, and fortunately for Kidd he was awarded a place.8 Textile designer Kathy Lewiston, applying in the early sixties to study fashion, was interrogated by Ray about her professed interest 11

3 Women’s craftroom, light metalwork room, antique studio, cabinet-making room and refectory of South West Essex Technical College and School of Art, 1938

©Local Studies Library, London Borough of Waltham Forest

3 Exterior, central staircase, classroom and floorplan of South West Essex Technical College and School of Art, 1938

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in the literature of George Eliot and remembers spotting the trick of being asked what she thought of ‘his writing’. Not to be outwitted, she pointed out that Eliot was a woman.9 At Walthamstow, formal qualifications were not a prerequisite for entry until the mid-sixties, after recommendations made in the 1960 Coldstream Report into national art education. Under that guidance, a new admission requirement of five O-levels was introduced.10 These proposals, outlined in the Report, were at odds with Ray’s core belief that talent, however raw, should be the principal condition of admission. His commitment to this policy was made manifest when he saw the sketches of a road-mender he had met in the street in Walthamstow; on the spot he offered him a place to study art.11 Until the mid-sixties, most art students at Walthamstow applied for the two-year Intermediate Certificate in Arts and Crafts. Like the modern Foundation course, it aimed to provide students with a broad introduction to all aspects of arts and crafts. In 1960, this included the following subjects: Drawing from Life, Pictorial Composition, Modelling, and Creative Design for a Craft.12 Students were then eligible to advance to the two-year National Diploma in Design (NDD) in which they specialised in one of the specific art and design disciplines, such as painting or dress design. Walthamstow also offered evening courses in crafts, such as photography, pottery and life drawing, with which day-course students supplemented their studies.

The emphasis on practical skills such as objective drawing and printmaking was one of the most enduring aspects of the education provided at Walthamstow during the fifties and sixties. The artist Angela Gladwell, who studied there between 1962 and 1966, remembers her teacher Cedric Horner instructing her in printmaking, explaining the process of etching and lithography by going through the steps one by one: ‘No explaining the method in a purely theoretical way, which would have meant little to beginners, but a practical and straightforward method of teaching the subject.’13 The painter and Royal Academician Ken Howard, whose first teaching job was at Walthamstow, encouraged his students to observe what they saw around them, accompanying his students on visits to Walthamstow Market or nearby railway sidings to draw the network of tracks transporting trains from London out to Essex and beyond.14 The rigour and discipline of drawing was further instilled through the many hours students spent in the life-room, where the colourful, celebrated model and later raconteur Quentin Crisp sometimes modelled.

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4 Walthamstow School of Art students modelling clay, 1958

All the teaching staff at Walthamstow during this period were practising artists, many of whom demonstrated this high regard for draughtsmanship and objective drawing in their own artistic output. Teachers Ken Howard, Fred Dubery, William Bowyer, Fred Cuming, Jack Millar and Margaret Green, as well as Stuart Ray, were all members of the New English Club, a group of professional painters whose work is based principally on direct observation of nature and the human figure.15 (8) This style of painting, which can broadly be defined as naturalistic impressionism, dominated British painting from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, but was starting to go out of fashion by the late 1950s. The avantgarde filmmaker Peter Greenaway, who attended Walthamstow 1962–65, recalls a student mantra, ‘Sick, Sick, Sickert!’, his rebellious protest against some of the teachers’ reverence for Sickert, considered by many at that time to be the father of modern British painting. Yet, arguably, the respect for, and emphasis on, process and practical application that many of the teachers instilled in their lessons, made students at Walthamstow proficient in a range of skills and better equipped to test the boundaries of their chosen art form.

Despite some of the teaching staff ’s stylistic traditionalism, there was a 14

Courtesy Laurie Lewis ©Terry Day

6 Crushed Car

by Terry Day, 1960, colour lithograph, 41 x 53 cm

keen awareness of emerging art trends, and Ray and senior staff, such as the painter Jack Millar,16 were concerned that Walthamstow should be seen to be ‘keeping up’. And so, as the sixties began to swing, a new group of emerging Pop Artists joined the teaching staff. Peter Blake, a former graduate of the RCA, was teaching part-time to supplement his income as a painter. He started at Walthamstow in 1961 (see Chapter 2). In 1963, Blake was joined

by Derek Boshier, who like Blake had risen to prominence while a student at the RCA, where he had studied alongside David Hockney, Allen Jones and R.B. Kitaj. (5) Their respective stints at Walthamstow coincided with the new art movement, Pop Art, entering into the national consciousness. Their role as pioneers of Pop Art was immortalised when they featured in the 1962 BBC TV Monitor documentary, Pop Goes the Easel, directed by a Walthamstow School of Art graduate, the filmmaker Ken Russell.

These young artists were joined by other teachers: Derek Hirst, Joe Tilson, Jack Smith and William Green, all practising artists. Not long out of art school themselves, they were to have a major impact on the pupils at 15

Courtesy Gazelli Art House ©Derek Boshier

5 Bill Hayley and The Comets #2

by Derek Boshier, 1960, pencil on paper, 20 x 24 cm

Walthamstow. The relatively small age difference between the new influx of teaching staff and students opened up a dialogue. Blake and Boshier in particular, who had grown up in suburban areas, had their eyes wide open to London’s youth culture and were receptive to the social mix of students at Walthamstow. They captured the imagination of their students, teaching them to celebrate their own experiences in their art. The musicians Terry Day and Ian Dury, as well as the music photographer Laurie Lewis, were all students at Walthamstow in the early sixties and taught by these artists. They embraced the new style, producing prints of tattoo designs and drawing film stars informed by the Pop aesthetic. (7) Peter Blake’s 1962 painting Self Portrait with Badges mirrors the exciting and dynamic atmosphere exprienced at Walthamstow School of Art. Painted just before he started teaching at Walthamstow, it perfectly captures how artistic skill and technique could combine with young, energetic creativity.

The work is a conscious depiction of youth: Blake presents himself dressed in a denim jacket and jeans, wearing trainers and holding a magazine with Elvis on the front cover. Yet the expressive brush strokes and muted palette has much in common with a post-war tradition of painting that Blake, like 16

©Laurie Lewis

7 Don’t Be Cruel, by Laurie Lewis, 1960, etching, 38 x 54 cm

the students at Walthamstow, would have experienced during his own art education (see Chapter 2).

Another work that helps us understand this period at Walthamstow was produced by the artist Bill Jacklin. As a student at Walthamstow, Jacklin had a complex home life. His father was a highly decorated First World War veteran who had suffered gas poisoning during the conflict and developed post-traumatic stress disorder. The disintegration of his father’s health was powerfully captured in Jacklin’s 1963 work The Invitation Card. (9) The ambitious three-dimensional piece resembles a large suitcase; housed inside are a series of six motorised soldiers in various stages of mechanical breakdown. The size of the work prevented Jacklin from transporting it from his parents’ bedsit above Cogger’s florist shop on Forest Road to the Art School nearby, so teachers Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Joe Tilson visited his house where they gave their critique. Blake was to give him the miniature medals that can be seen on the last soldier. Despite its bleak subject matter, the work speaks of youthful creativity and cathartic emotional exploration through making art, and Jacklin acknowledges a debt of gratitude to Walthamstow for providing that spirit.

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8 Studio Evening Sunrise by Fred Cuming, 1990, oil on board

Another teacher to have made a name for himself before arriving at Walthamstow was William Green. Once again, it was Ken Russell who helped Green establish a reputation, through his 1957 film Making an Action Painting, in which Russell filmed Green dragging his bicycle over a canvas to spread black bitumen and liquid paraffin. The comedian Tony Hancock later spoofed this technique in his film The Rebel (1961), in which a struggling artist rides a bicycle over his canvas to create a modern masterpiece. (Chapter 2, 18

9 The Invitation Card

by Bill Jacklin, 1962, mixed media, 26 x 94 x 127 cm.

(2,3)) Green was a maverick teacher and the stuff of legend. He set unusual student projects such as painting on baseball boots and doors and even showed students how to set fire to their canvases. On one such occasion, the smell of smoke during one of his lessons prompted the Principal Stuart Ray to pop his head out of his office to check where the fire was. On seeing Green he warned, ‘Just make sure you keep the flames to below ten feet, Green.’17 This kind of free-spirited teaching was seemingly at odds with Ray’s 19

©The Ian Dury Estate

10 Ian Dury’s timetable for his second year of NDD, Walthamstow School of Art, 196263

own conservatism, yet was in fact encouraged by him. The photographer Euan Duff, who taught graphic design there from 1960-1965, described Walthamstow as an ‘atelier’ system, managed entirely by Ray, in which teachers were trusted to follow a logic of their own, based on expertise and curiosity.18 Reforms brought about by the Coldstream Reports of 1960 and 1970 enforced an unprecedented level of control over British art schools. Following the first report, the existing four-year Art and Design scheme (incorporating Intermediate and NDD levels) was replaced by a one-year Pre-Diploma course (later known as Foundation course) and a three-year Diploma in Art and Design (known as the Dip AD), equivalent to a degree. Seventy-three art schools submitted applications to teach the new diploma.19 Walthamstow School of Art applied to teach the Dip AD in Painting and Fashion.

Following visits from the newly formed National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design, only twenty-nine art schools across the country had their applications approved; Walthamstow was not among them. The reason for this decision remains unclear, but it prompted an outcry from senior staff at the RCA who, writing to The Times newspaper in 1965, expressed 20

their incomprehension that an art school with the level of success that Walthamstow had enjoyed should not be recognised. They presented statistics showing that Walthamstow had submitted more successful candidates to the RCA in the three years between 1962 and 1963 than any other art school in the country.20 At a time when a student’s admission to the RCA was a mark of an art school’s success, this was truly impressive.

Walthamstow School of Art’s inability to award the Dip AD qualification undermined its ability to attract the most talented students. Moreover, the reforms brought about a new emphasis in art education that meant the type of teaching which Walthamstow had been so successful at – honing students’ craft and technical skill while exposing them to the varying teaching styles of practising artists – was replaced by a more standardised system, devoted to individual creative development. As the sixties progressed, students and teachers moved on, many to pursue highly successful careers in the creative industries. While the individuals who studied at Walthamstow School of Art between 1957 and 1967 continued to benefit from the art education they received there, the radical era there was over.

1. T he Slade was founded in 1871 and the RCA founded (as the Government School of Design) in 1837. For the history of London’s Art Schools see Nigel Llewellyn (Ed.), The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now, Tate Publishing, 2015 2. E ric Hebborn, Drawn to Trouble: The Forging of an Artist, Mainstream Publishing, 1991, p.86 3. H arry Lowery, ‘A People’s University’, The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jan. 1947), p.37 21

4. S tuart Ray (1916–1985) first attended the Regent Street Polytechnic before enrolling at the RCA in 1938 to study engraving; after the Second World War he returned to the RCA’s Painting School, then went on to teach in London and Brighton before becoming the Principal of Walthamstow School of Art in 1951. He retired from teaching in 1981 5. S tuart Ray, Woman Arranging Roses by Lamplight in Domestic Interior, c.1950– 1960, lithograph, British Museum, 1999, 0425.8 6. K aren Ray, Stuart Ray, exhibition catalogue, New Ashgate Gallery, 19 May– 20 June 1987 7. R oger de Grey, President of the Royal Academy, in Ray’s obituary The Times, 12 July 1985 8. Interview with Alan Kidd, 20 April 2016 9. Interview with Kathy Lewiston, 16 December 2016 10. h ttp://arts.brighton.ac.uk/arts/alumni-and-associates/the-historyof-arts-education-in-brighton/post-war-curriculum-and-assessmentcoldstream,-summerson,-art-history-and-complementary-studies, accessed 5 April 2017 11. Interview with Peter Polaine, 13 April 2016 12. W althamstow School of Art Prospectus, 1960–61, courtesy The Ian Dury Estate 13. Angela Gladwell, Walthamstow Memories, unpublished, 2016 14. Interview with Ken Howard, 27 February 2017 15. F or a history of the New English Club see Kenneth McConkey, The New English, Royal Academy of Arts, 2006

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1 Peter Blake in Pop Goes the Easel, directed by Ken Russell, BBC Monitor programme, 1961

Š BBC Photo Sales

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Peter Blake’s Memories of Walthamstow School of Art

by Edmund Kirby

‘What was brilliant about Walthamstow,’ says Peter Blake, looking more than a little nostalgic, ‘was that you had teachers like me and Derek who weren’t much older than the students themselves.’

The Derek in question is Blake’s friend Derek Boshier,1 fellow Pop artist and former teacher at Walthamstow School of Art (WSA) who, like Blake himself, was just starting to make his name as the 1960s took off. (1) We’re discussing Boshier and Blake’s experience of art school education while sat in the kitchen of the latter’s west London studio, a homely refuge surrounded by a treasure trove of ephemera amassed from a lifetime at the heart of the art world’s inner circle. ‘That’s a Patrick Caulfield, who came to dinner back when I was living in Somerset,’ says Blake, gesturing to a framed pencil drawing hanging on a wall festooned with relics. ‘He drew a tablecloth, so it has wine stains on it.’

If Blake looks back on his time at WSA with fondness, it’s easy to understand why. Under his tutelage, an astonishing nine students were accepted by the Royal College of Art (RCA), a remarkable achievement in any era. So what was it that made Walthamstow such a hub of creativity? Good teaching and good fortune, according to the artist himself.

‘You had a tremendously good core of “old school” teachers, who taught traditionally, teaching the students drawing and painting work,’ says Blake.

‘People like Fred Dubery, Jack Millar and Fred Cuming.2 So the students got a wonderful grounding in how to do it in a sort of traditional way, but there was also this sort of lively, younger group of teachers.’

And did this ‘old school’ realise how successful their younger colleagues would one day become? Blake believes so. ‘We were making our way [in our careers], Pop Art was beginning to happen, so they knew who we were.’

Blake is not being big-headed. From the stories that emerge of Walthamstow at that time, it’s fair to say it would have been hard not to notice the enfants 24

©British Pathé

2 The action painter William Green filmed dragging a bicycle over his canvas at the RCA, 1957

terrible tearing up the art world. A story Blake tells about a colleague, William Green,3 sums up the anarchic mood of the era perfectly. (4) ‘Bill Green, he was a madman,’ states Blake, with no little sense of affection. ‘He was in the same year at the college [RCA] as Richard Smith and Robyn Denny.4 Bill would pour bitumen on canvases and set light to them.’ (A technique that, according to Blake, almost led to Green burning down St Martin’s School of Art several years later.)

‘Bill also had this technique where he’d take a bicycle and then he’d pour bitumen on the canvas and use the back wheel of the bike to manipulate the paint. He was a kind of Action painter. The Daily Mail heard about this, came to the college [RCA] and, for a laugh, asked him to ride the bicycle over the picture, which he did. That became, like Carl Andre’s bricks, a kind of joke, which in fact Tony Hancock later spoofed. (2,3) ‘But, continuing the joke myself, as the Daily Mail couldn’t get an interview with Bill, I later posed for their photographer with a tiny little picture, about a foot square, spinning a bicycle wheel on it as a gag.’

Such stories have previously prompted Blake to describe Walthamstow as ‘a social phenomenon’. What was it that allowed such progressive behaviour 25

©Ronald Grant Archive

3 The Rebel by Tony Hancock, 1961

to flourish? ‘It was just a kind of coming together at an intersection with all the right elements,’ he replies. ‘There was this tremendously good group of teachers, there were these young kind of rebel teachers, and there were very good students.’

So from Blake’s response, it appears WSA’s success in the early 1960s was due to fortune as much as anything. ‘Yeah, serendipity,’ he agrees, ‘and I think the students were still at that point grateful to be at art school. I mean, quite soon after that they became rather blasé and they’d get into art school but then they’d grumble and become conceptual artists and stuff like that. But [the students at Walthamstow] were still grateful enough that they listened to the teachers and they worked hard.’

So does Blake think the perceived nonchalant elitism of the modern art school student would make a Walthamstow School of Art impossible today? ‘Well, I think in a curious way there was a sense of elitism then, but of a different sort. It wasn’t about being posh or rich, it was about being working class and feisty and mouthy and difficult and tough. Joe Snowdon and Bill West were such good painters. I mean, they painted like Gwen John, really delicate, almost feminine painters, but they were these big hard men!’

Considering then the background of many of WSA’s alumni, it was 26

important that Blake was able to break down the barriers between its teachers and students. Was it something the artist strove for, or did it just happen naturally? Again, Blake seems reluctant to take sole responsibility for the ‘social phenomenon’ that was taking place at Walthamstow at the time.

‘It either happened or it didn’t, you know?’ says Blake. ‘To go back to Bill Green, he eventually got a job at Harrow School of Art. But Bill actually got the sack because he used to go in and just sit in an armchair and not say a word. I mean, he would have only needed to set them a task to avoid it, but he wouldn’t do anything, so eventually he got the sack.’ And was there a reason behind Bill’s academic ‘philosophy’? ‘Just that he was eccentric,’ explains Blake, enigmatically, ‘and that was one of his eccentricities.’

The notion of eccentricity permeates Blake’s recollections, and you could argue that this avant-garde approach to teaching was a key component in getting the best out of WSA’s students. Certainly, in the case of one of Blake’s most famous protégés, the musician Ian Dury,5 it appeared to pay dividends.

‘My big memory of Walthamstow relates to Ian,’ says Blake. ‘I had a curious principle then. I suppose I slightly resented having to go and teach, so I wouldn’t leave the house until 9 o’clock. It was a kind of mad rule I’d made for myself, which was fine when I worked at St Martin’s, because it was just one train journey away, but on my first day at Walthamstow I had to take the District line, then the Piccadilly line to Manor House and then a 123 bus, so I didn’t get there until about 11 o’clock!

‘So I went in, reported, and I think the principal then was Stuart Ray, who said, “Your class have gone out drawing, you’ll have to find them.” Anyway, he told me where to go, so I wandered towards where they’d be drawing. I would have had a hangover, almost certainly, because I drank a lot then. So I went into a pub, on the way, for a drink, a hair of the dog, and there sitting at the bar were Ian Dury and two of the other students. I could tell they were students as they had their drawing boards out, though I’d never met them before. Anyway, I introduced myself, bought them a drink, and we had a couple of beers, then vaguely wandered towards where they were drawing.

And I think Ian never forgot that. He later wrote a song called Peter the Painter that describes me at that point, slightly incorrectly – he glamorises it a bit!’

There’s more than a hint of emotion when Blake recounts such stories of his time with Dury. It’s clear a camaraderie developed between the pair, both as friends and as artists. So does Blake feel fostering talent in students like Dury was instrumental to their later success?

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4 Untitled (life painting)

by William Green, 1958, oil on board, 63 x 77 cm

‘I think so,’ agrees Blake. ‘What I’ve already said is that, if I did something valid as a teacher, it was opening a door to something. With Ian, certainly, I said, “What are you interested in? Paint about that.” Ian was interested in pin-up girls and stuff like that and he then just kind of took that as an OK to do a new kind of art, you know?’ (5) ‘When I was doing work for the Sunday Times, if I couldn’t do it, I’d pass it on to Ian, so he was doing lots of jobs. He always continued painting and was a photographer, too. So in a way he never stopped being a painter who had a band. Whereas a lot of people didn’t continue. I would say [for example] someone like Pete Townshend. He went to art school and was 28

taught by Gustav Metzger and then formed the Who and stopped being a painter, I think.’

From what Blake says, it sounds as though being a painter as well as a performer was important to Dury, despite the distractions of a burgeoning musical career. I wonder if Blake believes this appetite for artistic endeavour was something that was instilled during his time at Walthamstow. ‘I think so,’ he says. ‘This was the door I told you about earlier. I mean, that gave him the opportunity to do it, just the fact that we said “Look, it’s OK to do it... you’re allowed.”’

And from Bill Green burning bitumen in the corridors to Ian Dury’s paintings of pin-up girls, ‘you’re allowed’ might easily be taken to be WSA’s driving philosophy. Because perhaps, at its best, this is what WSA represented: a chance for people from different backgrounds to gain access to the otherwise impenetrable art world. ‘Absolutely,’ says Blake. ‘There was one kid whose family worked in the marketplace at Walthamstow, and he worked the market himself on Saturdays, so there was a very working-class range of people there.’

I remind Blake that Dury himself said it was ‘easy to get into Walthamstow with three O-levels’; so does Blake think that this sense of accessibility encapsulates what WSA represented to people from Ian’s background? ‘Yeah, but I think it was still early enough that people ignored things like that. I mean, I didn’t have any qualifications as such, but it was whether or not you were qualified in art that really counted.’

And Blake certainly knows what he’s talking about. From the age of thirteen, he was steeped in a school of thought that clearly left an indelible mark on his subsequent career. ‘You see, I’d always had a fantastic art education. I went to art school, in Gravesend, where I was taught life drawing, costume life drawing, silversmithing, woodwork, lettering, architecture, anatomy. I mean, it was an incredible education, a general education. It also meant that I was always imparting the same education to my students, you know?’

There’s a pleasing symmetry in the way Blake used his learning to further the chances of WSA’s finest, but it almost didn’t happen at all. It was only thanks to the generosity of Blake’s parents and the circumstances of the Second World War that the artist was even allowed to study.

‘We were a generation who wouldn’t have gone to art school, before the war,’ says Blake. ‘It was a close run thing whether or not I did, because you 29

5 No Guns by Ian Dury, c.196366, graphite and coloured pencil on paper, 56 x 76 cm

left school at fourteen in those days and you were expected to contribute to the family income. As I’d been supported by them, it was a big decision whether they’d let me do it, you see?’

So could it be argued that, were it not for the foresight of Blake’s parents and the outcome of the war, Pop Art wouldn’t have happened?

‘Well, I think this generation of working-class people wouldn’t have gone to art school otherwise,’ says Blake. ‘So you got people like myself and David 30

©Peter Blake. All rights reserved, DACS 2017. Private Collection/Photo: ©Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images

6 Boys With New Ties

by Peter Blake, c.

1955, oil on board, 31 x 76 cm

Hockney, Derek Boshier who wouldn’t have gone, then you have people in the theatre like Terence Stamp and Michael Caine, or photographers even, like David Bailey and Terence Donovan. So we were bringing a different culture into the art world, you know? I was bringing a culture of modern jazz, of having been to the wrestling, speedway and football, which I think is how my Pop Art happened.’

Blake’s eclectic influences and collector’s instinct are clear to see from the crowded walls of the studio. Could it be that this magpie-minded way of looking at the world helped sow the first seeds of Pop Art? ‘Well’ says Blake.

‘The story I tell is, at the end of the war, when I would have been between twelve and thirteen, around the time I first went to art school in Gravesend, there was a junkyard near the station. Having not had any collections at all, no books, no toys, the first time I went in there I bought a painting of the [ocean liner] Queen Mary, a kind of outsider art painting; a papier-mâché tray, which fitted into the interest in Victoriana at that point; and a set of Shakespeare, so I bought a library! Now, I’ve got five libraries dotted about the place.’

Again, Blake cites the landscape of post-war Britain as providing the catalyst for a shift in cultural thinking as artists from all disciplines struggled to make sense of what had come before. Did Pop Art, I ask Blake, represent a rebellion of sorts against the old way of thinking? With the emergence of America as a dominant cultural force, it would be tempting to suggest the influence of the New World was set to overtake that of the old.

‘No,’ he replies, resolute. ‘I think Pop Art in Britain was continuing the tradition of British painting. But a lot of the motifs… if you were going 31

to paint rock ’n’ roll, apart from David Hockney, you wouldn’t paint Cliff Richard, you’d paint Elvis. But it just happened. There wasn’t an enormous interest in American culture. At the ICA, someone would come back from New York with a bundle of Playboys and they’d analyse them and dissect them and intellectualise them, so people like Richard Hamilton6 and Eduardo Paolozzi7 were intellectualising about it while people like myself were actually interested in it! So, like I say, if you were going to paint rock ‘n’ roll it would be the Everly Brothers or Elvis. So it was much more that, an interest in Americana rather than America.’

However, despite Blake’s dismissal of the notion of rebellion with regard to his particular brand of Pop Art, he does acknowledge the movement represented a departure from the methods he had been taught during his time as a student at the RCA. ‘Normally, you still went to the still life room where you set up a Chianti bottle and an apple and stuff, and you did still lives. Or, you went to the composition room where you did compositions and they would be pictures that would be almost set. You’d do a picture with a man walking his dog with the sea in the background. It was prescribed. But I found a space and just thought, well, what happens now? And I started being a painter at that point.

‘With the background of being an illustrator, [plus] a year of very academic work in the life room, really my first Pop Art was pictures like Self Portrait with Badges (7) which were in exactly the same tradition as Ken Howard,8 but the subject matter had changed. It was in the same tradition probably as Walter Sickert. I mean, I was painting music hall pictures and things like that.’

Unsurprisingly, not everyone in the art world was taken with this bold new medium and Blake’s recollections of the inevitable struggles with the old guard highlight the impact Pop Art made on its unsuspecting audience.

‘I was advised to send a picture to the RCA in 1954, which was this magic year I started to be a painter. I sent Boys with New Ties, (6) so the heads were cut off and the ties featured strongly, and the artist James Fitton9 wanted to hang it up. However, at night [the then-president] Sir Mortimer Wheeler10 would come round and take it down, not wanting it to be there because it was vulgar. Then James would put it up again, and I think he won eventually. He put it up at the last minute and it was sanctioned and it stayed up. So there must have been a kind of mood against what I was doing with Pop Art, even though it was figurative and, looking back, very traditional.’

32

©Peter Blake. All rights reserved, DACS 2017. Photo: ©Tate, London 2017

7 Self Portrait With Badges by Peter Blake, 1961, oil and paint on board, 127 x 179 cm

Yet, regardless of the initial backlash, the Pop Art of Blake and his contemporaries not only defined the style of their own era but also went on to inspire that of subsequent generations, through their work in the art schools of 1960s Britain. Now, with the art world crying out once more for a cultural response to an ever-evolving society, I wonder if a ‘social phenomenon’ such as Walthamstow could ever occur again.

33

Despite a tone of nostalgia, Blake’s answer is determined. ‘WSA was a moment. It was a moment after the war, because of my generation, because of Pop Art,’ he tells me, before adding ‘and because you still got a very good education in the way of making art.’

1. D erek Boshier – British Pop Artist and fellow lecturer at WSA, who appeared alongside Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips in Ken Russell’s 1962 film Pop Goes the Easel 2. F red Dubery, Jack Millar and Fred Cuming – trio of British fine art painters who taught at Walthamstow at the time Blake was there 3. W illiam Green, British action painter in the tradition of America’s Jackson Pollack 4. R ichard Smith and Robyn Denny, British artists affiliated with Pop Art who studied at the RCA 5. I an Dury, frontman to art rock act The Blockheads and former student at WSA 6. Richard Hamilton, English painter and collage artist 7. Eduardo Paolozzi, Scottish sculptor, considered to be a pioneer of Pop Art 8. Ken Howard, English painter 9. James Fitton, English painter and theatre-set designer 10. S ir Mortimer Wheeler, former officer in the British Army and worldrenowned archaeologist

34

©Foale and Tuffin Archive

1 Jenny Boyd modelling Double D dress designed by Foale and Tuffin, 1966

35

3

The Influence of Walthamstow School of Art on Sixties Fashion

by Mhairi Muncaster

Key taste-makers of the sixties – that archetypal decade of dazzling visual confidence – either studied or taught at Walthamstow School of Art. This incredibly talented group attended the college in the mid-fifties, with five of its number subsequently being accepted into the Royal College of Art (RCA). They helped to shape the future of British fashion as we now know it, defining the youthful, clean and simple look synonymous with the sixties.

Many styles that are now considered clichéd signifiers of the decade were, on their first outings, truly revolutionary. They include the youth-orientated mini skirt, which Mary Quant named after her favourite car, the Mini Cooper; the actress Jean Seberg’s gamine, Paris-Left-Bank-chic cropped hair; Pierre Cardin’s space-age outfits; and, of course, psychedelic clashing colour and pattern. While none of those innovations had East-London origins, working-class Walthamstow, on the edge of swinging London, fostered a hive of inspiring talent, and had a reputation for employing the best visiting lecturers.

In the popular BBC TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, which parodies the world of fashion PR, former model and fashion magazine editor Patsy Stone often harks back to her glory days in the 1960s. Among the emblematic sixties designers, styles and fashionistas she name-drops, Foale and Tuffin are sure of a mention. This is illustrative of the reach this duo had within the decade’s popular culture. Perhaps other names are now more widely known and recognisable (Mary Quant, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton) but, to those in the know, Foale and Tuffin are still highly influential. (8) When Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin discuss their respective backgrounds, it is clear that their families had widely differing expectations of their offsprings’ life paths. Foale came from Ilford in East London and her family were adamant that she would not attend art school, despite the ambition 36

©London Borough of Waltham Forest Archives and Local Studies Library

2 Peter Shepherd (left), unidentified student and James Wedge (right)

she held to be a famous painter. She fought bitterly with them and rebelled.

Saving up her money she successfully earned a place at Walthamstow in 1955. Tuffin on the other hand came from an artistic family in Saffron Walden in Essex. She describes her father as ‘an excellent draughtsman’ who made maps during the war, and her mother as a dressmaker. It was her father’s ambition that she should attend art school; he had been accepted into the Berlin School of Art, but forced to leave owing to illness.

In the same year as Foale and Tuffin was a young man called James Wedge.

James also came from a working-class background, in Woodford in East London. He had joined the navy at an early age but through a correspondence drawing course had discovered an interest in art. He was interviewed by Daphne Brooker, the head of the fashion department, and Peter Shepherd, a professional milliner who also taught at the Art School. (2) Wedge himself began his career as a milliner, before opening decade-defining boutiques.

Within the same year as Wedge, Foale and Tuffin was fashion designer Sylvia Ayton. Growing up in Gants Hill in East London, her father was an accountant at Shell and suggested that she get a job with the petroleum giant.

Luckily her mother realised that this was not the correct direction for her daughter and put forward the idea that she went to art school. She visited Walthamstow, and Mr Brown, the secretary, told her there was a spare place on the dress design course, ‘which is how I got in’.1 (3) Ayton, like her fellow students, was instrumental in shaping British 37

©Sylvia Ayton

3 Sylvia Ayton and James Wedge fitting a model

fashion, working at women’s clothing retailer Wallis for thirty-three years as an outerwear designer. In 1966, after graduating from the RCA, she set up the Fulham Road Clothes Shop with Zandra Rhodes, who had also attended the Royal College of Art, although the pair met while both were teaching at Ravensbourne College. Rhodes designed the textiles and Ayton designed the clothes that they were cut into. Marion Foale remembers that Ayton was technically brilliant even at the beginning of her design career at Walthamstow. Foale recounts how the course leader, Daphne Brooker, required them to produce fashion illustrations, and Ayton was ‘the only one who could do it properly.’ 2 Foale and Tuffin’s recollections of the art school echo that of the former part-time lecturer Celia Birtwell, who taught surface pattern design two days a week from 1965–67. All three attest to the lively social atmosphere of the college and the opportunities for interaction between different artistic disciplines. Foale says: ‘Architecture and anatomy – very important. We had to draw a skeleton and all the muscles, and it really taught you how the body 38

©Caroline Roche. Photo: Max Brooker

4 Daphne Brooker with her daughter Caroline at the Eiffel Tower during a student trip to Paris, c.1958

is built and how it stood up.’ Birtwell emphasises the experimentation that pupils undertook when studying fashion and surface pattern at Walthamstow.

‘I remember we used stickers to create patterns on paper. These were psychedelic patterns, of course. They were very popular. They were then made into paper dresses and photographed.’ 3 In a recent interview James Wedge also talked about the emphasis that was placed on drawing in the fashion department. He described being taught life drawing by Bill Allen. ‘Lots of muscles and anatomy. He would say “open your eyes and look!”’4 Wedge also remembers his first experience of a life drawing class with Stuart Ray. He was told to bring a pencil and paper and arrived to find he was the only student present, with a naked girl standing in the middle of the room. Ray commented, ‘Looks like you are on your own, 39

Wedge,’ and left the room, leaving Wedge to draw. Ayton recalls Quentin Crisp posing as a life model, wearing a jockstrap and with his hair dyed blue.

The collage artist Sofiah Garrard was a student on the textiles course, starting in 1967. (6) She has similar memories of the blue-haired Crisp. She describes being encouraged to draw from nature. She was prompted by her tutors to visit Kew Gardens over the weekend and present the resulting work on Monday. Students also often went to the Victoria and Albert Museum to draw from the displays.

Memories of those days are not exclusively of studying and producing work, of course; they encompass the whole experience of student life, including living away from home. Ayton remembers in detail the Warner Estate flat that she stayed in while living in Walthamstow. ‘It was red brick and overlooked the park. In the morning the little old landlady made me marmalade and toast and Camp Coffee, and that’s what I had every morning for a term.’ She then moved to somewhat spartan premises in Palmerston Road. ‘There was no light, only a candle in a tin with oil.’ 5 Sofiah Garrard remembers all the students visiting a Victorian baths close to the college on a Sunday. ‘It was everyone’s one bath of the week and the students all took their clothes and bath sheets to wash.’ They then strung the washing up in Lloyd Park to dry.6 Birtwell places a strong emphasis on the social aspect of Walthamstow School of Art, where all of the tutors knew each other well. She describes the college as being a ‘grand and fabulous building’.7 Because it also housed a catering department, tutors met for lunch and were served ‘really delicious food in the main hall on the ground floor, silver-service meals.’ Ayton also recalls the ‘big refectory which served tea in enormous mugs which I shared with Sally [Tuffin].’ 8 Undoubtedly Daphne Brooker, a former Vogue model who was leader of the fashion course, had a huge influence on the method of teaching and thus on the students. (4) Tuffin praises Brooker’s fighting spirit which reputedly played a part in five of the ten places on the Royal College of Art’s fashion course going to Walthamstow students, something that had never happened before.9 Brooker’s daughter, Caroline Roche, remembers her mother being profoundly interested in the welfare of her students. ‘She was not interested in her own career, and she was not political. She was a passionate teacher and passionate about her students.’10 Ayton talks of Brooker encouraging her students to work hard: ‘There were evening classes every night. We had 40

©London Borough of Waltham Forest Archives and Local Studies Library

5 Students in the textile design studio, 1960

homework which was given out every Friday. It would be an assignment, like “design a theatre suit”, and would be due in on Monday.’ 11 The opportunities that were afforded to the Walthamstow students would amaze the art students of today, and appear to have had a profound affect on the direction taken by Foale, Tuffin and Ayton, which in turn affected the direction of British fashion in the 1960s. The students describe being taken to Paris for the spring shows. Sylvia Ayton says of the experience, ‘When we were at college we all went to the collections. Givenchy and Balenciaga – Balenciaga was the ideal.’ 12 Paris’s simple chic, and the influence of the Left-Bank style, is referenced by Foale and Tuffin and clearly visible in their pared-down youthful design and fuss-free silhouettes.

41

©Sofiah Garrard

6 Design for a fabric by textile student Sofiah Garrard, 1968

Caroline Roche recalls being included by her mother on these trips to Paris – the Walthamstow students would babysit her. She says, ‘We would take the boat-train. My mother would take me everywhere with her. She would go to the press offices of each of the major designers and fight for tickets for her students to the shows. She would then give these out to the students she thought would benefit most.’ 13 The cohort who progressed from the Walthamstow School of Art to the Royal College of Art went on to set up their own shops, all of which were influential in the fashion scene. ‘Experiential boutiques’ – that is, where visiting the store is a stimulating experience in itself – are closely associated with fashion in 1960s London. The swinging London boutiques were places that young people would go to socialise, not just shop.

42

©Sylvia Ayton

7 Design for a striped dress

by Sylvia Ayton, 1955

While still specialising in millenary, James Wedge was offered a workshop at Liberty, from which he supplied other outlets as well as that celebrated palace of design. Wedge quickly identified that a revolution in fashion meant that young people did not want to dress in the same way as the generation before them. He says, ‘I just thought boutiques were the thing for young people. So I just plunged straight in and got it very cheaply. It was a joint thing with [model, photographer and later novelist] Pat Booth.’ 14 They called their shop Top Gear and used a target symbol on their bags. This symbol is 43

instantly recognisable as a Mod icon, and is still used in fashion today. The band the Who were later to commandeer it for use as their own logo.

These boutiques are closely linked with the ‘Youth Quake’ movement.

The term was coined by Vogue Editor Diana Vreeland, and has come to define the popular youth fashion, music and culture scene of the 1960s. It feels completely appropriate that this new movement was pioneered by young people who were initially educated in the working-class area of Walthamstow, who self-identified as ‘non-academic’ and ‘not art school people’.

Foale and Tuffin made a conscious effort to pull away from the fashion of the generation before them, and being art students seems to have played a part in defining their quirky style. They talk of ‘feeling different’ and making their clothing from unusual fabric. The two famous streets in latersixties London that became populated with boutiques were Carnaby Street, near which Foale and Tuffin had their 4 Ganton Street shop, and the King’s Road, which James Wedge chose for his boutique Top Gear. Wedge recalls the Rolling Stones shopping there. Foale and Tuffin remember walking up and down Carnaby Street and noting what young people were wearing.

They were also influenced by what they saw on the streets of Paris, taking inspiration from ‘those Left-Bank girls’.15 Sofiah Garrard describes the young fashion of the sixties in terms of generational rebellion. ‘Before these London boutiques opened, you dressed like a child until the age of twelve. You were then expected to dress like an adult. I always hated the clothes for sale in department stores, so my mother made all of my clothes.’16 One of Garrard’s first acts of defiance was to stop wearing shoes, to the chagrin of her parents.

Sylvia Ayton has a similar view of fashion before the sixties: ‘Daughters would dress like their mothers.’ In that context she too considered herself ‘a rebel’. She was very sure that she wanted something else from her wardrobe; her clothes needed to be more modern. She made clothes for Pauline Fordham’s shop Palisades (the epitome of ‘experiential’ retail, with jukeboxes, what-the-butler-saw machines and wall designs by another Walthamstow graduate, Pop artist Derek Boshier); and she supplied Wedge’s boutiques, Top Gear and Countdown. Then, in 1966, she and Zandra Rhodes opened the Fulham Road Clothes shop. ‘Joe Cocker played at the opening, and we had lots of silver and lights,’ says Ayton. She remembers making the clothes in the back of the shop as Rhodes entertained in the front. ‘We used to hide in the back from the bailiffs, too.’17 44

©James Wedge

8 Marion Foale (left) and Sally Tuffin (right), 1967

The Fulham Road Clothes Shop closed down only two years after opening.

Ayton ruefully recalls the chronic problem of shoplifting that the pair faced.

Models would come in to try the clothes on, borrow them and never return them. Eventually all the merchandise had to be attached to the rails with wires – but shoplifters brought wire cutters with them and continued to steal.

James Wedge also cites shoplifting as the reason that his two boutiques closed down. Foale and Tuffin closed their boutique’s doors in 1972, after ten years 45

of trading. Their reasons had less to do with thieving customers than shifting priorities as a result of having children.

It would seem that this youthful, rebellious decade, during which massive style changes were made at an unprecedented pace, burned bright and then faded away. Yet many of the shapes, cuts and attitudes that we now take for granted emerged in that explosion of creativity.

1. Interview with Sylvia Ayton, 12 April 2017 2. Iain R. Webb, Foale and Tuffin. The Sixties. A Decade in Fashion, 2009, p.25 3. Interview with Celia Birtwell, 3 April 2017 4. I nterview with Marion Foale, Sally Tuffin and James Wedge, 19 August 2016 5. Interview with Sylvia Ayton, 12 April 2017 6. Interview with Sofiah Garrard, 16 April 2017 7. Interview with Celia Birtwell, 3 April 2017 8. Interview with Sylvia Ayton, 12 April 2017 9. Iain R. Webb, Foale and Tuffin: The Sixties. A Decade in Fashion, 2009, p. 26 10. Interview with Caroline Roche, 10 April 2017 11. Interview with Sylvia Ayton, 12 April 2017 12. Ibid.

13. Interview with Caroline Roche, 10 April 2017 14. h ttp://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/i/james-wedge, accessed April 2017 15. Iain R. Webb, Foale and Tuffin: The Sixties. A Decade in Fashion, 2009, p.27 16. Interview with Sofiah Garrard, 16 April 2017 17. I nterview with Sylvia Ayton, 12 April 2017 46

1 Pen and ink drawing of Viv Stanshall from the sketchbook of Laurie Lewis, 1962

©Laurie Lewis

47

4

The Music Scene in Sixties Waltham Forest

by Neil Meads ‘ There were just so many places to play. That’s what was special; you could see live music every night of the week!’

Tony Tutton, the Beaucrees1

As the sixties began, Walthamstow wasn’t short of venues. There were the big three, the Granada, the Assembly Hall and, in winter, the Leyton Super Baths (now a Tesco). (7) At the Baths, 3,000 could dance to DJs and bands, with a little extra bounce courtesy of the boards that covered the swimming pool below. A young Welsh singer born Tom Woodward had his first London outing here, fronting a band as ‘Tommy Scott’, before his surname was changed once more to Jones.

In the summer, the Coronation Gardens would take over from the Baths, while pubs like the Bell and the Common Gate had local bands several nights a week. At the same time, a rich seam of young creative talent was enrolling at the South West Essex Technical College and School of Art and students were organising their own clubs and concerts.

In 1959, one such student, Ian Dury, boarded the Green Line bus that would, for the next four years, take him from the mundanity of his mum’s in Upminster to the School of Art and the joy of like-minded people.

Appearing on the Parkinson TV show in 1981 – as miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and a sparkling Diana Dors looked on – Dury reminisced about how he and his fellow students gleefully dived into the emerging bohemia: ‘I used to go to Walthamstow Art School for four years and we’d go up to Soho every weekend and during the week sometimes. Marquis of Granby, Duke of York, the Café bar down Old Compton Street…’ 2 They were infatuated with ‘art, jazz and marijuana’, as Will Birch’s Dury biography put it.3 The social scene centred on one local boozer in particular. According to the renowned free-jazz drummer Terry Day, who joined the school in 1962 and became Ian’s life-long friend: ‘The Bell 48

2 Joe Snowdon, Richard Conway, Alan Ritchie and Terry Day, c. 1963 3 The Bell pub, Forest Road, Walthamstow, c. 1965

49

©The Ian Dury Estate

4 Ian Dury’s notebook featuring ideas for the poster to promote Tubby Hayes

was the main hang-out for all of the gang – Joe Snowdon, Alan Ritchie, Richard Conway, Arthur Ranson, Stanford Steele, even my cousin and his Walthamstow mates.’ 4 Viv Stanshall, of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah fame, was also a contemporary of Ian’s at the Art School. (1) It was in a local pub that Pop Art pioneer Peter Blake, then a twentynine-year-old on his first day as a tutor at the school, found his missing class, Dury included. The pair shared a passion for American music and jazz, for Ronnie Scott and the likes of Walthamstow’s own Johnny Dankworth. Dury told BBC TV’s Newsnight that his tutor told him to focus his visual art on the things he loved: ‘I was painting a boring picture of Walthamstow market, and Peter said, you like rock ’n’ roll, wrestling and pin-ups, why don’t you paint pictures of them?’ 5 Later Dury and his friends started their own jazz club at the Art School, organising dances and booking artists they admired, like clarinettist Acker Bilk. In March 1962, as Acting Social Secretary of the student union, Dury was offered the services of the Beatles for £400, but instead it was the jazz great Tubby Hayes who appeared at the college dance. (4) The Beatles would have to wait; but Walthamstow’s treasured jewel, the now Grade-II* listed Granada, was well used to hosting the stars. As far back as 1949 the local Mercury & Post reported on the pandemonium that accompanied two shows by the Ink Spots: ‘Four coloured gentlemen all the way from Hollywood… were given the greatest reception ever accorded a 50

6 Ian Dury’s ticket for the Tubby Hayes concert on 30 March 1962

©Vestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

5 The queue for tickets to see the Beatles at the Granada on Hoe Street on 28 June 1964

©The Ian Dury Estate

stage turn in Walthamstow.’ 6 When Cliff Richard visited in 1958, a girl fell from a ladder attempting to clamber into Cliff ’s first-floor dressing room through the window.

The main stage was extended in 1957 by filling in the orchestra pit (paradoxically to accommodate the visit of Count Basie and his Orchestra).7 This was perfect timing for the phenomenon of the rock ’n’ roll package tour, where promoters would cram as many top names into a two-hour extravaganza as possible and head out to tour the theatre circuit.

The Beatles’ two Granada dates may be the borough’s most famous concerts, but they had actually played Waltham Forest six weeks earlier, in Leyton. What’s more, Leyton very nearly had the Fab Four when the four still included Pete Best. According to Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles – All These Years, in December 1961 Sam Leach, a Liverpool concert promoter, planned to show them off to London bigwigs at the Leyton Super Baths.8 Unfortunately, he booked the Beatles before checking the availability of the venue. Consequently, on 9 December 1961, the Beatles’ first gig in the south of England took place instead in Aldershot, in front of eighteen people.9 East London’s turn came on 8 April 1963. While Cynthia Lennon was alone in Sefton General Hospital giving birth to Julian, his dad, John Lennon, was in London for one of the band’s first gigs in the capital, at Leyton Super Baths.10 (7) 51

7 Leyton Super Baths, Leyton High Road

8 Poster for the Beaucrees’ first live performance.

The spelling was checked for all future shows

On 18 May 1963, the Beatles set out on tour again, as support for Roy Orbison. But, by the time they reached the Granada, Walthamstow a week later, growing Beatlemania had propelled them to the headline slot. ‘We came down into Hoe Street, and it was absolutely packed, with girls mostly,’ recalled Walthamstow resident Linda Green. ‘As soon as the Beatles came on, they were up on their seats screaming. I didn’t; I was not the screaming type.

But I remember the thrill of it all.’ 11 (5) On 24 October 1964, the Beatles paid the Granada a final visit and 6,000 tickets went on sale two months before the concert. ‘I was fourteen years old, and with several friends from school, we queued all night outside to buy tickets,’ former East London resident Lesley Blavins told BBC News. ‘The police kept the waiting crowd across the street until the cinema had its last show. Then they stopped all the traffic and allowed us to rush across the street to form another queue for the night.’ 12 Local bands also had the chance to play on the same stage as bands like the Beatles, as Tony Tutton, singing drummer for the Beaucrees, from Chapel End in Walthamstow, recalls: ‘We were booked for the matinee the day after the Beatles. We sat in their dressing room thinking: last night they were in here, having played to thousands of screaming fans.’13 ‘Beat contests’ were another opportunity for local groups to shine. On 19 February 1965, the Assembly Hall hosted ‘Waltham Forest’s Grand Beat Contest’ featuring nine local beat groups, each one representing a youth club, school or church. The Mixers of Kilkenny Youth Club triumphed, beating 52

©Harry Hammond/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

9 The Beatles with Gerry and the Pacemakers and Roy Orbison in a backstage dressing room, 1963

the Alexander Patton Band (Universal Youth Group), Colts (St Saviour’s), Easy-Beats (Sidney Burnell School), Five Merlins (Leytonstone Youth Club), the Mariners (William Fitt Secondary Modern School), Pacifics (Marsh Street Youth Club), Red, White, Blues (William Elliott Whittingham School) and the T.N.T.s.

For Walthamstow’s post-war ‘bulge babies’ the youth clubs dotted across E17 provided a place to dance, catch the latest bands and meet the opposite sex. Greenleaf Road, Marsh Street, Priory Court, Spruce Hill Baptist Hall, St John’s Church, the Kilkenny, Grove Road’s Athan Club... A church youth club may not sound like the epitome of sixties cool, but for bands like the Beaucrees they were hugely important. (8) ‘St John’s Church Hall was honestly like our Cavern Club,’ says Tony Tutton. ‘We’d fit well over a hundred people in. There was such a buzz in Walthamstow, with bands everywhere. On Carr Road alone there were kids 53

©Martin Heath

10 The Beatles on stage at the Granada, 1964

from five different groups. At our height, we were playing eighteen gigs a month. But it was tough, as we all had day jobs and you often wouldn’t get home till three in the morning.’

One much-loved club was run by Mrs Rose Finesilver, originally from her home on Elmsdale Road, Walthamstow. Opened for young Jews, the Contemporary Youth Club also welcomed plenty of non-Jewish kids, and Rose would organise music events to raise funds. Master of comic horror rock ’n’ roll Screaming Lord Sutch once played there, but local musician Alan Miles heard rumours of a much bigger name: ‘She contacted band manager Andrew Loog Oldham, asking him if he’d let the Rolling Stones play at the Assembly Hall. They obliged, playing for the cut-price fee of £150 [28 September 1963].’14 Another big name, David Bowie, was for a few short months a member of a Waltham Forest-based band, the Riot Squad, although the story sometimes gets confused due to the existence of two bands called Riot Squad in the general locality. One emerged from the Spartans, a country and rock group originally formed at St Egbert’s College in Chingford, and soon recruiting two Walthamstow boys. Several line-up changes later, they became the Riot Squad, supporting the Rolling Stones three times. However, this Riot Squad never featured Bowie.

The one that did – though Bowie was credited as ‘Toy Soldier’ – split 54

©Terry Day

11 Ian Dury and Terry Day in the canteen at Walthamstow School of Art, c.

1962

up when their contract with rock svengali Larry Page ended, only to be resurrected with a new line-up drawing on members of an existing local band, the Chevrons.15 The Chevrons’ Hammond player Butch Davis recalls: ‘We were playing for £20 a night when [Riot Squad founding member Bob Evans came to see us in Edmonton. He said he knew [maverick record producer] Joe Meek and he could get us a contract. We jumped at the chance!’16 And so another Waltham Forest Riot Squad came into being, featuring two Walthamstow boys, Butch Davis from Cleveland Park Avenue and Terry Clifford from Billet Road, joining Tottenham’s Del Roll and Rodger Crisp, and vocalist Nero Gladman from Chingford. The band recorded over twenty sessions at Meeksville Sound Limited, Joe Meek’s legendary studio (and home) on Holloway Road. Pye put out four Riot Squad singles, the last of which, ‘Gotta Be a First Time’, would be Meek’s final release. On Friday, 3 February 1967, he killed his landlady, Violet Shenton, with a shotgun and then turned the barrel on himself.

After seeing out their remaining bookings, Nero, Rodger, and Terry left Riot Squad. Auditions were held for replacements, but no suitable singer was found. Bob Evans, however, remembered playing with a young vocalist called David Bowie and his band at the Marquee the previous summer. To his surprise, Bowie agreed to help, despite his having already signed a solo deal.

Butch Davis recalls: ‘When Joe Meek died, we were a mess; we needed 55

©Acid Jazz Records

12 The Toy Soldier EP by the Riot Squad featuring David Bowie, rereleased

by Acid Jazz Records in 2013

Bowie. We were recording a 1962-type sound, but it was 1967. He brought a folder with all his stuff, his material. He was just full of creative ideas, mime, painting your face… He was a star. His charisma shone out to the audience.’17 (12) After an intense four days at the Swan in Tottenham rehearsing Bowie’s tunes and a few covers, the new-look Riot Squad made their debut as support for Cream at a youth centre in Basildon on 17 March 1967. By now Bob Evans had moved into a ‘group house’ in Wallwood Road, Leytonstone. In 2004 three reel-to-reel tapes of the band rehearsing there went under the hammer at Bonhams auction house, for a guide price of £3,000–£5,000.18 In all Bowie played around twenty gigs with the band, transforming them both visually and musically, before departing as suddenly as he’d arrived.

The American singer James Brown made his live European debut on 12 March 1966, not in the glitzy West End but on Hoe Street, Walthamstow.

The promoter Arthur Howes had flown to America to book Brown, but when 56

ŠMandrake Paddle Steamer/Brian Engel

13 Poster designed

by Brian Engle for Mandrake Paddle Steamer at Waltham Forest Technical College and School of Art on 31 May 1968

57

14 Walthamstow Assembly Hall

managers at the Top Rank chain saw a tape of his live show, Howes was told they wouldn’t want such a ‘wild and inflammatory performer’ in their halls.19 The Record Mirror’s Peter Jones was just one shell-shocked reviewer of the Walthamstow show: ‘Out into the cold streets of Walthamstow, ears ringing and apparently not working properly; eyes definitely out of focus; legs a trifle shaky. I’d seen, heard, experienced the James Brown Show.’ 20 Steve Ellis, from north London Mod group the Soul Survivors, recounted his experience in the 2013 book Mods: The New Religion: ‘James Brown was fucking unbelievable. He absolutely blew my socks off. I came out after that gig, and I just thought, My God that’s how good I’ve got to be.’ 21 The battles between Mods and Rockers in Margate and Brighton are well reported, but East London saw its share of the action. Outside Walthamstow’s imposing town hall, the smell of two-stroke oil would be in the air, amid the noise of scooters buzzing round the fountain. The Assembly Hall and Leyton Baths were two venues where bands favoured

by Mods, like the Who, the Small Faces and the Kinks, played. Inevitably tensions flared into trouble.

In Buttons: The Making of a President, a 1971 book about a Rocker who went on to become London’s first President of the Hells Angels, ‘Buttons’ describes the scene at Leyton Baths: ‘A system of segregation developed between our Rockers and the Mods. We covered the front of the hall near the stage, and the Mods hung around in the dark at the rear of the hall. There used to be 58

©John Smith

15 The Spectrum Light Show team: John Smith, Dawn Ludford and John Gorman

a lot of close-quarter fighting sometimes with knives, and people would stumble out of the baths cut and bleeding.’ 22 Alan Miles played there in 1965, and he believes the violence threatened the future of the venue itself: ‘The scene in Walthamstow deteriorated after 1967. Maybe it was inflation or the bad economy? The council were concerned about the violence and eventually stopped holding concerts there. A couple of years later, the Bell lost its music licence too. People went to the Lord Palmerston for a while, but it wasn’t the same.’23 Towards the end of the decade, the number of concerts put on by the students’ union dramatically increased. Acts that might loosely be described as ‘hippy-ish’, like Country Joe and the Fish, Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, Fleetwood Mac and Roy Harper, were mainstays at the Technical College Hall.

The film director John Smith arrived at the School of Art in 1969 and started to provide the in-house light show for the college hall. After one gig, the local Guardian newspaper spluttered that ‘young people openly took drugs and pornographic pictures were screened at a pop concert held by Waltham Forest Tech students’ union.’ 24 Smith describes it in less lurid terms: ‘Spectrum Light Show was a few school friends and me. The light shows were mainly psychedelic boiling inks, combined with graphic slide projections and 16mm film loops, with motorised wheels going in front of the projection. We did at times use a few 59

images of glamour models and in one case a picture of one of our mums topless sunbathing in the garden, but it was tongue-in-cheek and mixed in with inks, textures and images.’25 They provided the backdrop for a host of top names with one notable exception: ‘I was always disappointed I didn’t do Pink Floyd [7 November 1969],’ says Smith, ‘but they had their own light show. The college hall had a balcony that we would project from. Tickets weren’t cheap, so one benefit was anyone working on the light show got a free ticket. So we’d give friends jobs carrying an extra bulb or a bag of slides and have our own party on the balcony.’26 (15) On the same bill as Pink Floyd that night were the wonderfully named Mandrake Paddle Steamer, formed by Martin Briley and Brian Engel, two graphic design students at the Art School, later joined by Martin Hooker and Paul Riordan. Their name came from the narcotic mandrake root, and because a paddle steamer seemed like the last thing you’d find in Walthamstow. In a 2003 interview, Briley said: ‘We didn’t want anyone to realise we were just four boring upstarts from the suburbs of East London.’

(13,16) ‘Before the Floyd gig, we rehearsed and timed ourselves to make sure we had enough material for the thirty-minute set. On the night we were pumping so much collective adrenalin we shot through it in about ten minutes! We all looked at each other and decided no one would notice if we did it all over again!’27 After signing to EMI, they released one single, ‘Strangle Walking Man’ which went on to become something of a British psych-rock classic. It was also one of the first recordings to use Abbey Road’s swanky new eight-track studio.

Displaying a penchant for Viking mythology, Mandrake set up ‘Asgard’, a weekly ‘scene’ at the Railway Tavern in Stratford. The sleeve notes for the reissued single describe a night at Asgard: ‘In a freaked out atmosphere, fiendishly illuminated by Pale Green Limousine Light Show, the band and regular guests like Sam Apple Pie would play, and everybody would get heartily stoned.’

The band Sam Apple Pie also hailed from Walthamstow (and, while Friday at the Tavern was Asgard, Wednesday nights belonged to Sam’s Bottleneck Country Blues Club). Led by Sam Sampson, the irreverent band were particularly popular live, with a following attracted by what local historian Bill Bayliss described as ‘a mix of twelve-bar good-time blues and boogie 60

©Mandrake Paddle Steamer/Martin Briley

16 Mandrake Paddle Steamer on Orford Road, Walthamstow, c. 1968

music, interspersed with humour’.28 They played at the very first Glastonbury Festival and released two LPs, the second of which was named in celebration of their hometown. Long before Messrs Harvey, Coldwell, Hendy and Mortimer came East 17, the album.

In 1973, the final live performance took place at the Granada, then divided to fit in three screens. However, the Assembly Hall soldiered on, and in 1976 Walthamstow School of Art graduate Ian Dury returned there for the final gig of his band Kilburn and the High Roads. The Sex Pistols were a late addition at the bottom of the bill, and from the stage wings John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) absorbed Dury’s mannerisms and style, right down to his razor-blade earring.

In the audience was Pete Stennett, who was so inspired by the Pistols that he transformed his fledgling record shop, Small Wonder, into one of the destinations for the next emerging youth movement: punk was underway, and Walthamstow would be at its very centre.

61

1. Interview with Tony Tutton, the Beaucrees, 17 March 2017 2. Ian Dury, interview on Parkinson, BBC Television, 1981 3. Will Birch, Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography, Pan, 2010 4. Interview with Terry Day, 26 March 2017 5. J ulian O’Halloran reporting on Peter Blake exhibition at Tate Gallery, Newsnight, BBC Television, 1983 6. ‘ ‘Inkspots’ thrill audiences in Walthamstow,’ Walthamstow Mercury & Post, September 1949 7. D avid Jones, Chris Anderson, Colin Jeffrey, ‘Granada Hoe Street: Diamon Jubilee Brochure’, 1990, http://www.brind.co.uk/html/CINEMAS/60th. html, accessed 23 March 2017 8. M ark Lewisohn, The Beatles – All These Years (Extended Special Edition): Volume One: Tune In, Little, Brown, 2013 9. T ara McGinley, ‘The Beatles Play for 18 People in Aldershot, 1961,’ http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_beatles_play_for_18_people_ in_aldershot_1961, accessed March 2017 10. B eatlesBible.com, ‘Julian Lennon is born’, https://www.beatlesbible. com/1963/04/08/julian-lennon-born/, accessed March 2017 11. S . W. Cinema, A People’s History of the EMD/Granada Cinema, 2012 12. B BC News, ‘Snapshots of a century: I was there,’ 16 June 2003, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2989058.stm, accessed March 2017 13. I nterview with Tony Tutton, the Beaucrees, 17 March 2017 14. I nterview with Alan Miles, 23 March 2017 15. B runo Ceriotti, ‘The Riot Squad’, http://brunoceriotti.weebly.com/theriot-squad.html, accessed March 2017 16. Interview with Butch Davis, 30 March 2017 17. I nterview with Butch Davis, 25 March 2017 18. B onhams, ‘Unreleased Riot Squad rehearsal tapes, featuring David Bowie,’ November 2004, http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/11386/ lot/304/, accessed March 2017 19. Geoff Brown, The Life of James Brown, Omnibus Press, 2007.

62

20. P . Jones, ‘Brown’s a Super-Spectacle: James Brown: Walthamstow Granada, London,’ Record Mirror, 9 March 1966 21. Paul Anderson, Mods: The New Religion, Omnibus Press, 2014 22. Jamie Mandelkau, Buttons: The Making of a President, Sphere, 1971 23. Interview with Alan Miles, 23 March 2017 24. Waltham Forest Guardian, 1969 25. Interview with John Smith, 7 April 2017 26. Ibid.

27. M ark A. Johnston, ‘Marmalade Skies: Martin Briley interviewed,’ June 2003, http://www.marmalade-skies.co.uk/sfa20.htm, accessed April 2017 28. B ill Bayliss, ‘Walthamstow Memories: Sam Simpson and Jim Mitchell,’ February 2015, http://www.walthamstowmemories.net/pdfs/Bill%20 Bayliss%20-%20Sam%20Apple%20Pie.pdf, accessed April 2017

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1 In Your Dreams from series ‘The Last of the Teddy Girls’ by Ken Russell, 1955

64

5

Setting the Scene: Walthamstow 1957–1967

by Karen Averby

The decade 1957–67 was an interesting time for Walthamstow. The period was one of transformation in all areas of life, witnessing changes within industry, housing, architecture, transport, entertainment and social life.

Most significantly, at the start of the period Walthamstow was a municipal borough on the northern perimeter of London, within the county of Essex, with responsibility for its own administrative affairs. Within ten years it had become absorbed into Greater London as part of the newly created London Borough of Waltham Forest, formed in 1965, which also incorporated the former municipal boroughs of Leyton and Chingford. As such the Borough Council shared responsibility with the Greater London Council in matters of housing, city planning, roads and leisure services.

In 1957 Walthamstow’s architectural character had remained relatively unchanged since the time of its rapid transformation in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a rural Essex locale to a relatively densely developed urban town. Rows and rows of terraced houses with some villas formed identical streets, with little regard to rational layout in most of the town, especially in the south; commercial and industrial premises filled in irregular spaces between housing. Most development in the north occurred after the First World War, with a little more attention paid to spatial planning.

Shopping areas had become established over a long period of time along the main routes in older parts of Walthamstow, such as Hoe Street, High Street and Wood Street. Smaller concentrations of shops were located at Church Hill, Forest Road, St James Street, Markhouse Road, Queen’s Road, Orford Road, Beulah Road, Palmerston Road, Higham Hill Road, Chingford Road and a group near Highams Park Station.

There was very little public space within Walthamstow, but extensive open spaces to the west and east marked the town as a distinct geographical area, 65

ŠVestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

2, 3 The newly completed Central Parade, 1960s

distinguishing it from similar urbanised areas. To the west the Lea Valley, with its marshes and reservoirs, formed a physical barrier between London and Walthamstow, and to the east Epping Forest formed a parkway that could be accessed without passing through built-up areas.

The physical legacy of the Second World War enabled a transformation in the appearance of Walthamstow’s built environment. Widespread and relatively uniform bomb damage was still very visible by 1957, with undeveloped and often uncleared bomb sites. There were thousands of houses still in a state of disrepair;1 and temporary prefabs, erected on bomb sites and at Highams Park Lake to house the displaced, were still in use. The bombing of some of the poorest houses and slums allowed the rebuilding and planning of new modern housing estates, and urban redevelopment projects, which coincided with the encroaching outward sprawl of London. The civic centre at Forest Road, formed of the Technical College (1938), Town Hall (1941) and Assembly Hall (1943), was relatively new in 1957 and symbolised what could be achieved with spacious and gracious planning.

A Reconstruction Committee was set up and several phases of modern 66

housing and redevelopment schemes were completed in the 1950s and 1960s. New business centres were built on undeveloped bomb damaged sites in key locations. Bomb-damaged shops at the junction of Hoe Street and Church Hill were cleared in 1958 for the construction of the Central Parade development, completed in 1964, which comprised flats, shops, a lecture hall, and a clock-tower decorated with local coats of arms. (2,3) Across the road a tall office block was built on Church Hill, and in 1959 the bombed site of the former Education Offices at the High Street/Hoe Street junction was cleared for a new shopping arcade with maisonettes above, completed in 1960.

Modern housing estates including low-rise two-, three-, and four-storey flats completed between 1959 and 1964 included those at Priory Court, Prospect Hill, Chingford Road, The Drive, and Park Court in Grosvenor Park Road.

(4) In the 1960s high-rise blocks of council flats began to dominate the 67

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Municipal Buildings

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1. Walthamstow School of Art Forest Road 2. Walthamstow Town Hall Forest Road 3. Walthamstow Assembly Hall Forest Road 4. William Morris Gallery Forest Road 5. St. Mary’s Church Church Lane 6. Vestry House Museum Church Lane 7. Central Parade Hoe Street 8. The Quant Building Church Street 9. Walthamstow Building Society Hoe Street 10. Telephone Exchange Hoe Street

11. The Granada Hoe Street 12. Leyton Super Baths High Road Leyton 13. The William IV Pub High Road Leyton 14. The Bell Pub Forest Road 15. The Lord Palmerston Palmerston & Forest Road

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It has not been possible to chart all post-war developments. This map does, however, give an indication of the changing landscape.

Not all developments were given names, for example, some buildings were simply known as 569–577 Forest Road. In these instances, the buildings have been left unnumbered.

19. Grosvenor Park Court Grosvenor Park Road 20. St. Stephen’s Close St. Stephen’s Close 21. Queen’s Court Hoe Street 22. St. Andrew’s Court Higham Hill Road 23. Lloyd Park House Forest Road 24. Essex Close Estate Forest Road 25. Callonfield Blackhorse Road 26. Tenby Court Tenby Road 27. Palace Parade High Street 28. Market Parade Leyton Green Road 29.

Northwood Tower Marlowe Road

Residential Buildings 16. St. John’s Church Halll Brookscroft Road 17. The Drive The Drive 18. Priory Court Priory Court

68

©Vestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

4 Modern low-rise housing at Priory Court, 1950s

landscape, including one built on the site of a row of shops at Wood Street.

By 1967, however, tower blocks were beginning to be seen as threats to the physical and social character of an area. A Borough Council policy of 1968 sought to control high-rise development to protect the appearance of the built environment, especially in the area south of the Town Hall, centred on Walthamstow Village, and the main approaches to Epping Forest along the northern and north-eastern boundaries of the borough. This coincided with the implementation of the Civic Amenities Act 1967 which recognised that ‘areas of special architectural character or historic interest’ should be preserved as conservation areas. Walthamstow’s first conservation area, St Mary’s Church (Walthamstow Village) was designated that same year.

Changes in transportation also contributed to Walthamstow’s physical transformation. Streets designed for low-level horse traffic were becoming congested by the increased use of private cars, so street widening and remodelling was undertaken at key areas, including Forest Road near Wood Street in 1961, later the road junctions at Whipps Cross and the Crooked Billet. The North Circular Road had become inadequate for the huge volume of lorry and car traffic, so it also was eventually widened and a new cut made 69

ŠAlan Kidd

5 Walthamstow Bus Garage by Alan Kidd, 1961, painting, 39 x 40 cm

through the forest to the waterworks and beyond into Woodford to link with the M11.

By 1960 all trolleybuses had been replaced by regular buses, and the removal of associated overhead wires and poles along their former routes was pleasing to many. (6) Modernisation of Walthamstow’s train lines came in 1960, when steam trains were replaced by full electrification on the Chingford line and diesel trains on the Barking line. The Chingford branch line actually declined in use as fewer commuters travelled into the City, but on 1 September 1968 the opening of the Victoria line between Seven Sisters and Walthamstow instantly drew large passenger numbers. (8) The modern design of the new Blackhorse Road Station was not universally popular and attracted negative comment in the local press.

A prosperous period for local industry before the Second World War had been ended for many companies by war bomb damage, while others had switched to manufacturing that supported the war effort. Following a period of post-war recovery, by 1957 Walthamstow industries once again flourished, and ranged from small workshops with one or two employees, to large industrial undertakings employing several hundred people. Factories were located throughout Walthamstow, most on the western edge of the built-up area especially at Blackhorse Lane, although a few were sited to the east. In the mid-1950s Walthamstow’s main industry was in general, electrical and constructional engineering, closely followed by clothing and 70

ŠVestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

6 The last trolleybus drives into Walthamstow, 1960

footwear manufacture. Wholesale and retail distribution trades and other manufacturing, including furniture, plastics and metal goods, were also well represented. (7) Renewed prosperity was short-lived for some companies, however.

Although further expansion was enjoyed by some engineering and manufacturing firms, by 1961 the clothing trade in particular was suffering, although Walthamstow retained a significant niche trade in necktie production. Several larger factories ceased production or moved away, among them Wells-Brimtoy Distributors Ltd, who relocated to Anglesey from Stirling Road in about 1965, and Ford Motor Co., which in 1967 left its premises in Blackhorse Lane after twenty years. A number of smaller firms also closed or relocated, including ice-cream maker Shales & Co. Ltd of Shernall Street, who closed in 1959, and Short & Mason Ltd, suppliers of scientific instruments, who left Wood Street in 1968 after a decade.

Nevertheless, although around half of Walthamstow’s working population travelled daily to work outside the borough, local light industries remained a significant employer of the local workforce; by the later 1960s the main concentrations of industry were at Hale End, Fulbourne Road, Walthamstow 71

ŠLondon Borough of Waltham Forest Archives and Local Studies Library

7 People employed in the main industries in Walthamstow, mid-1950s

Avenue and Billet Road, and Blackhorse Lane. Two council-owned industrial estates included that at Brunner Road, developed in 1964–65 as part of council plans to resite firms displaced by redevelopment. Successes included Philips Records Ltd, who bought a factory in Walthamstow Avenue in 1958 and became one of the most modern pressing plants in Europe; plastics manufacturer Halex Ltd, who opened a new factory at Hale End in 1960 and became the dominant producer of plastics goods; and Britains Ltd, model soldier makers, who moved from their purpose-built factory at Sutherland Road in 1968 to a new four-acre site in Blackhorse Lane.

Despite a growing number of women in the workforce, in this period there was still an obvious divide between jobs destined for men and for women.

The situations vacant sections in the weekly local newspapers contained substantial numbers of female-only roles, especially for light assembly and clerical work, and catering positions. Male-only positions included sales roles, warehouse work and tool manufacturing.

Education in 1957 largely reaffirmed these gender-based roles. Most schools in Walthamstow focused on traditional schooling, with classes such as woodworking and metalwork for the boys and domestic skills for the girls.

Although technical schools had been established in the area for some years, providing instructional and practical education which could be transferred to the workplace for both sexes, there was still an evident divide in the classes taught. The McEntee Technical School at Billet Road in Walthamstow was 72

ŠVestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

8 The opening of the Victoria line in Walthamstow, 1968

built in 1956 and was something of a flagship for post-war regeneration, providing new modern premises for the existing technical school.

Young people in Walthamstow faced futures not dissimilar to those of their parents, whose employment opportunities had been fairly static. Relatively few school leavers went on to receive a higher education and people often remained in the same trade or profession for life, usually the same as that of their parents. A major and welcome change for young men at this time was the phasing out of National Service from 1957, which saw an end to mandatory conscription to the armed services for eighteen months between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. By the end of the period huge changes in secondary and further education were underway, and in 1968 junior and senior comprehensives for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds and ages fourteen to eighteen were designed to offer a broader education.

The new Borough Council encouraged and enabled educational betterment. Importantly, education was not restricted to younger people, and people of all ages were welcomed to study at the Waltham Forest Technical College and School of Art and the Waltham Forest Senior Evening Institute. There were also several community associations and voluntary organisations offering educational opportunities, including the Walthamstow Adult Education Centre. Council-administered grants were available for students with places at university or technical colleges and teacher training colleges, including mature students. A Waltham Forest Youth Service offered educational facilities at eleven youth centres. Evening classes were offered in a range of subjects and at weekends activities included horse-riding, 73

©Alan Kidd

9 Walthamstow High Street by Alan Kidd, 24 x 46 cm

74

©Alan Kidd

10 Walthamstow Skyline by Alan Kidd, 1961-1965, colour etching, 24 x 35 cm

sailing, camping and other sports and recreations. A progressive council initiative was the implementation of Youth Employment offices at High Street, Walthamstow, and in Chingford and Leyton. The offices liaised with and visited local firms to discuss training opportunities for young people and encouraged them to register vacancies with the Youth Employment offices.

The formation of the new borough had a positive impact in other areas of life, among them health and child welfare. By the end of the period there were maternity services, baby clinics, health-visiting services and five daynurseries. Women’s health issues were addressed and in 1967 improved smear-test facilities were officially inaugurated in the borough. However, these were available only at Granleigh Road in Leytonstone and Hatch Lane, Chingford, and were restricted to women aged over twenty or those suspected of needing treatment. Female-only Family Planning Association sessions were held at Marmion Avenue Health Services Clinic and the Hurst Road Health Centre, although specific contraceptive advice was available by appointment at a monthly clinic at Hatch Lane on ‘medical grounds’ only.

Notable changes in Walthamstow’s demographic were a cause for concern throughout the period, especially a continuing decline in population. It had peaked in 1931 at 132,972 but was falling by 1938. By 1951 it stood at 121,135; it had plummeted to 108,845 by 1961 and was still falling by 1968, 75

ŠVestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

11 Whipps Cross Lido, June 1960

reaching 101,914 by 1971.2 A severe housing shortage, together with an unaffordable high level of rates and mortgages, had resulted in a significant number of young people leaving Walthamstow for new and expanded towns and estates outside of the area. Most were young married couples in their late twenties or early thirties with young children. An increased demand for housing had followed a fall in average household sizes as young married couples and single people increasingly desired homes of their own rather than sharing with their parents. The right of each household to a separate dwelling was recognised and changes in housing policy were adapted accordingly.3 Post-war council developments had not fully met demand, and the implementation of the Town and Country Planning Act of 1962 heralded the end of unauthorised urban expansion by private builders; in Walthamstow the council permitted only a very small proportion of private redevelopment. Measures to address the housing shortage included a scheme for people to downsize by selling their houses to the council in exchange for a brand-new flat.

76

ŠVestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

12 Walthamstow Carnival procession, c. 1959

By 1961 the older age-groups in Walthamstow had increased proportionally, especially a growth in the over-forty-fives sector, which was well above the national average.4 Other significant changes included increasing multiculturalism, especially with the movement of people to Walthamstow from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan.

Cultural life within Walthamstow also underwent significant changes. The local history museum at Vestry House, which had opened in the 1930s, was complemented by the opening of the William Morris Gallery in 1950. The Central Library at High Street and Branch Libraries at Higham Hill, Hale End and Wood Street were heavily used. There was a book delivery service as well as a rich musical collection of LPs of classical and folk music, poetry and drama. However, declining attendance at the once hugely popular cinemas and theatres of Walthamstow led to the closure of several buildings, and either change of use or demolition. The dominant twin-towered Palace Theatre on High Street had closed in 1954 and was demolished in 1960.

There were six cinemas in 1951, but by 1965 only the Granada on Hoe Street and the Regal, Highams Park remained.

Cinema owners recognised that other methods of entertainment were needed if they were to stay profitable. This entailed either converting to a different use altogether, or to a multi-use venue. The beginning of the 1960s heralded the beginning of a ‘bingo bug’, and several venues were converted, 77

ŠVestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest

13 Local football team Walthamstow Avenue won the Amateur Cup Final at Wembley in 1961 against West Auckland 2-1

including the Dominion Theatre on Buxton Road and the Hoe Street Cinema at Bakers Arms, both of which were refurbished almost overnight and reopened as instantly successful and profitable bingo halls. Cinemas were also popular concert venues and the Granada was one of the larger venues hosting bands, among them Johnny Cash, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

Talent and beauty contests were also popular, the latter to the extent that it was deemed newsworthy to report the winning of beauty contests by local girls while on holiday.

Long-enjoyed affordable and accessible leisure activities remained popular throughout the period. Swimming baths were well-used, especially those next to the library on High Street and at Cathall Road and High Road in neighbouring Leyton. Whipps Cross Lido was open in the summer months from 7.30 a.m.–9 p.m., and children often paddled and played with model boats in the town hall pond. (11) Learn-to-swim classes established by the council by the mid-1960s 78

were free for the under-tens. Baths were versatile venues and could also be hired for club and gala events; the baths at Leyton High Road were converted for indoor sports including keep-fit classes, badminton and basketball during the winter. They also hosted popular ticketed events such as wrestling and concerts.

Other enduring activities included boating at Highams Park Lake and greyhound racing at Walthamstow and Hackney Stadiums. Entertainments enjoyed by older generations such as dances, ballroom dancing classes and competitions prevailed, as did recitals and concerts, often arranged by the council who also organised the enduringly popular annual carnivals and fetes. (12) Regular charity fundraising events such as jumble sales and bazaars continued to be a staple of community life, especially at Christmas and Easter. Many special interest clubs flourished during this period, from the more traditional such as the Essex Contract Bridge Association, which incorporated a young players section, to the more niche, among them the Walthamstow and Chingford Cage Bird Society.

As the period progressed young people enjoyed a greater prominence than ever before in the social life of Walthamstow, no longer restricted to school or other established organisations and associations. Independent ventures were initiated, and arts groups and clubs were formed, as well as countless local bands. Folk and jazz music were popular, and Waltham Forest’s first folk club, ‘Pedro Folk Club’, was established in 1967, held every Friday at the William IV public house in Leyton. That it was started by two men from Hackney was lamented by the local press.5 The newly formed Borough Council seemingly recognised from the flourishing counter-culture that young people wanted and needed social events, and in 1967 a Waltham Forest Youth Week was part-sponsored by the council with a generous grant of £1,000. It was a large-scale event, with dances, revues, fashion shows, swimming galas and a pop group.6 Sport continued to be as important to Walthamstow residents as it had ever been, especially the supporting of local teams Walthamstow Avenue and Leyton Orient. It was a golden period for local amateur football; Walthamstow Avenue won the Amateur Cup Final at Wembley in 1961 and Leyton Orient were promoted to the First Division in the 1961–62 season.

(13) Local sporting clubs were popular, and school playing fields and council land was used for football, rugby, hockey, netball, athletics, tennis and pitch and putt.

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The proximity of Walthamstow to London was recognised and promoted, and it was not uncommon for people to travel into central London for entertainment, being ‘only seven miles from Piccadilly Circus’ where ‘all the cultural and social activities of the Great Metropolis are readily available’.

Day-trips to the coast and other English towns and cities by rail were also popular, especially as stations at King’s Cross, Liverpool Street and Euston were easily accessible from Walthamstow. As holidays abroad became increasingly affordable to more people, a growing number of travel agencies opened along the main shopping streets, both chains and independents.

Despite becoming part of London, Walthamstow retained its character and individuality. In 1957 it was in many ways still affected by the legacy of the Second World War, but within a decade it had shaken this off to become an area that incorporated both the old and the new facets of life.

1. 3 0,000 out of 32,000 houses in Walthamstow were destroyed or damaged: • 1,288 were totally destroyed • 2,821 seriously damaged • 26,028 partially damaged London Borough of Waltham Forest Official Guide, 1968, p.19 2. W . R. Powell (Ed.), ‘Walthamstow: Introduction and domestic buildings’, in A History of the County of Essex: Volume 6, 1973, p.240 3. R . Needham, Population and Housing: Local Development Plan Preliminary Report No. 1, 1966, p.4 4. R . Needham, Population and Housing: Local Development Plan Preliminary Report No. 1, 1966, p.6 5. Walthamstow & Waltham Forest Guardian & Gazette, 24 November 1967 6. Various events reported in Walthamstow & Waltham Forest Gazette, 1967-1968 80

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Chapter 1

Hebborn, Eric, Drawn to Trouble: The Forging of an Artist, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 1991 Llewellyn, Nigel (Ed.), The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now, Tate Publishing, London, 2015 Lloyd, Jill and Campbell, Nancy, Bill Jacklin: Graphics, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2015 Lowery, Harry, ‘A People’s University’, The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jan 1947), pp. 37–42 McConkey, Kenneth, The New English, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2006 Mellor, David, The Sixties Art Scene in London, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1993 Seago, Alex, Burning the Box of Beautiful Things: The Development of a Postmodern Sensibility, Clarendon Press, London, 1995

Chapter 2

Birch, Will, Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography, Pan, London, 2010 Grunenberg, Christopher and Sillars, Laurence, Peter Blake: A Retrospective, Tate Publishing, 2007 Livingstone, Marco, Pop Art: A Continuing History, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000 Rudd, Natalie, Peter Blake, Tate Publishing, London, 2003

Chapter 3

Birtwell, Celia and Lutyens, Dominic, Celia Birtwell, Quadrille Publishing Ltd, London, 2011 Hulanicki, Barbara and Pel, Martin, The Biba Years: 1963-1975, V&A Publishing, London, 2014 82

Lester, Richard, Boutique London: A History: King’s Road to Carnaby Street, ACC Publishing, Woodbridge, 2010 Walford, Jonathan, Sixties Fashion from ‘Less is More to Youthquake’, Thames and Hudson, London, 2013 Webb, Iain R., Foale and Tuffin: The Sixties. A Decade in Fashion, ACC Publishing, Woodbridge, 2009

Chapter 4

Anderson, Paul, Mods: The New Religion, Omnibus Press, London, 2014 Balls, Richard, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll: The Life of Ian Dury, Omnibus Press, London, 2000 Brown, Geoff, The Life of James Brown, Omnibus Press, London, 2007 Lewisohn, Mark, The Beatles - All These Years - Extended Special Edition: Volume One: Tune In, Little, Brown Book Group, London, 2013 Mandelkau, Jamie, Buttons: The Making of a President, Sphere, London, 1971 Richardson, Clive, Soul Citizen, Tales & Travels from the Dawn of the Soul Era to the Internet Age, CliveR Books, London, 2015

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Chapter 5

Cherry, B., O’Brien, C., Pevsner, N., London: East, Yale, London 2005 Powell, W.R. (Ed.), A History of the County of Essex: Volume 6, London, 1973, pp. 240–317 Waltham Forest 1940–1975, Walthamstow Antiquarian Society, London, 1975

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the students and pupils who attended Walthamstow School of Art during the fifties and sixties and who have so generously shared their memories with us for this publication.

In particular our thanks go to: Sylvia Ayton, Celia Birtwell, Geoffrey Brunell, Sir Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Olwyn Bowey, Fred Cuming, Terry Day, Euan Duff, Marion Foale, Sofiah Garrard, Peter Greenaway, Ken Howard, Bill Jacklin, Richard Jones, Alan Kidd, Laurie Lewis, Kathy Lewiston, Carole Myers, Peter Polaine, John Smith, Jack Stephenson, Sally Tuffin and James Wedge. Special thanks are also due to: Caroline Roche, Jemima Dury, Janet Horner and Chrissy Blake.

The following people and institutions have been invaluable for researching the essays: Jo Parker and the staff of Waltham Forest Archives and Local Studies Library; Bill Bayliss and all those responsible for the ever-growing local history treasure that is the Walthamstow Memories website; Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, Butch Davis, Howard Watling and John Knowles from The Riot Squad(s); Julia Bloomfield, Alan and Andrea Miles; Paula Riordan, Tony Tutton and Paul Tucker, photographer.

At Hali Publications Ltd, Ben Evans, Malin Lonnberg, Brian David and Michael de la Lama have earned our gratitude for their support, professionalism and enthusiasm, and most of all their patience. Thank you also to the wider Be Magnificent project team, from Create London: Scott Burrell, Hazel Durrant, Hadrian Garrard, Caitlin Garner-Bacon, Rachel Lincoln and Grace Williams; and at the William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum: Kath Cockshaw, James Gray, Gary Heales and Carien Kremer. Finally our thanks go to the Heritage Lottery Fund without whose support the project would not have been possible.

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