Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  After London, Mansfield returned home – in our wilderness of mirrors – to appear in The George Raft Story. In which, ironically, there was no part for George. He was impersonated by Ray Danton, whose slick moves, obediently inky hair and sharp Italianate suits, were an inspiration to the Krays and other emerging local talent who took film magazines along, as prompts, to Woods the tailor in Kingsland Road.

  Cinematic memories are not to be trusted. Even the shop in Broadway Market can’t supply me with Mansfield’s performance in Too Hot to Handle. All I have to work with is a smudged front‐page photograph from the Hackney Gazette (25 September 1959). JAYNE AMONG THE BIRDS. ‘Glamorous American film star Jayne Mansfield visited the East London Budgerigar and Foreign Birds Society’s show at All Saints Hall, Haggerston. She presented the prizes and had a rapturous reception from crowds of local fans.’

  Among these fans, so I learnt thirty years later, walking to the boarded‐up and rubbish‐strewn precinct known as the ‘Triangle’, was a Greek Cypriot youth from the neighbouring flats. This seventeen‐year‐old had left the Queensbridge Road School, which had an enviable reputation, back then, for producing premier league armed robbers, malleable heavyweights and midfield hardmen such as Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris. Tony Lambrianou had thrown in his job with a bedding company in Hackney Road. ‘From that period on,’ he told me, ‘I started getting into villainy. Properly.’ As if villainy were an address. Like Hare Marsh. Or Evering Road. There were expeditions to the Midlands, cars could always be acquired, beds borrowed, bedmates shared; a bit of this and that in Nuneaton, followed by a first experience of prison: Winson Green, Birmingham.

  The leonine Lambrianou, sallow of skin, slim tie, three‐peak handkerchief peeping from breast pocket, is on his way to a meet. A drink at the Black Bull and over to Hoxton, the Green Man. He has previous at All Saints Hall. Denied access to a function, for being improperly dressed, the juvenile Tony and his brother Chris answered this perceived lack of respect by burning the stage. No danger of that now, the boy’s sharp as a razor. Shoes bright as a coffin‐carrier.

  Mansfield speaks of trying to secure herself an experienced older man, a protector to replace the father who died at the wheel, heart attack, with the child Jayne beside him. ‘I loved to sit on Daddy’s lap,’ she said, knowing what she said. ‘And have him hold me, hug me, caress me and kiss me. My mother would often scold us. She said it wasn’t ladylike to be sitting on a man’s lap. She’d say that I got his trousers wrinkled.’ The Carlo Ponti/Sophia Loren relationship was one to which Jayne made constant admiring reference. The secure but open marriage. In reality, she cohabited with short‐fuse hustlers, card‐sharks, bar boys. A Hungarian muscle‐man plucked from Mae West’s chorus line. A smooth dancer, around Lambrianou’s age, she encountered in a Venezuelan nightclub. Then there was Anton LaVey, the San Francisco Satanist, former circus hand, lion‐keeper: the Devil’s consul on the West Coast. The one who put a curse on Sam Brody’s cars.

  It was natural, bottom‐wriggling across red leather, clambering out of the black limo on Haggerston Road, between church and church hall, that Jayne expected male attention: the sexless embrace of security, professional attendants to hold back the crowds, clear sightlines for photographers. Invisible arms to catch her coat. Nothing of the sort was available, the East London birdmen were more interested in their caged beauties. A knot of lipless old boys in flat caps. Two or three women hovering, half‐curious, encumbered by kids. And the septic Lambrianou: who looked the part, a rub‐off Ray Danton with sculpted cheekbones and heavy brows waiting on a Mansfield audition. An XL chauffeur’s cap with polished peak. Eye on the main chance, the action.

  English weather required a stylish white raincoat (perhaps stitched and finished in Hackney) carried loosely around the shoulders. Mansfield took Marilyn Monroe’s 1957 descent at Heathrow as her model: the showgirl’s wiggle, a moue of surprised delight at the banked cameras. This newsreel arrival was the best of it (before the sniping silences of a disgruntled husband, the queeny asperity of her stiff‐backed director). Mansfield worked hard to duplicate the effect.

  Courtier‐like, Lambrianou accepted the shrugged and shed coat. And remained where he stood as the thin‐ribbed mob followed Jayne inside the church hall. From which point, the only evidence is the photograph in the Gazette. An argument in scale and quality of hair: Mansfield is imposed on a monochrome scene, tracked by a dusty shaft of golden light. The hard silver buttons of the old bill, the sharp peaks of their helmets, worn indoors, threaten the bronzed length of her naked back. Other men, creosoted in Brylcreem, take heat from the luxuriant tumble of managed locks. Jayne coos at the cages. And they coo right back. Avian twitter making good the hungry silence of the church‐hall crowd: their cheap smoke‐breath, the rifling farts of sour excitement.

  The Mansfield raincoat, bundled tight, is already on the bar of the Black Bull. A salient part in an anecdote Lambrianou is working up – which will serve him well in the lean years when he comes out of prison after the McVitie trial. Dispirited, in a miasma of pre‐cancer melancholy, banished across the river, Tony recounts once again the legend of that afternoon: how he tried to flog the coat to the landlady in the Bull. A red‐wigged Medusa whose chin, if she ever became dislodged from her stool, would barely have reached the plateau of the bar. The stolen garment, as the vendor saw at once, would have wrapped her like a lemur in a pearly shroud. Glazed eyes flashed fire, the opportunist thief fled.

  Lambrianou considered the canal, almost deciding to let the bundle, now wrapped in newspaper, float away, harmless as an unwanted foetus. Then failing again in the Green Man, even for the price of a drink, he flogged the fragrant memorabilia, the only DNA‐enhanced evidence of Mansfield’s Hackney visit, to a stall on the market. Where it languished and weathered, to the point where the mac was indistinguishable from the rags and tatters of Hoxton’s recently deceased: the stripped corpses of the poor who were still obliged, postmortem, to earn a crust for others.

  Some trace of Jayne Mansfield’s ill‐luck held to the Triangle. The fish shop failed. The butcher. The bread shop. Both greengrocers turned it in: one of them, a very fit Judo enthusiast, died of a heart attack. The post office, scene of so many rucks and rows, numerous episodes of attempted robbery and fraud, was decommissioned. Speculations, optimistically funded by the council, crashed. Wine bars and specialist ethnic cuisines that never made it to a second month. The Black Bull was squatted by German professionals, then pulled down. Memorialized by a set of coloured bins, bottle banks from which many bottles were withdrawn. CCTV cameras were installed. The betting shop enlarged its premises and thrived. The Asian newsagent, obliged to serve care‐in‐the‐community waifs, babble‐ranters, single‐slipper tobacco‐addicts soliciting half a cigarette, pitched his trade towards scratchcards and Lottery scams to tax the most helpless members of society, funding evermore grandiose brownfield follies.

  Cars parked mid‐road, drums beating, electric windows down. Speeding chauffeurs honked, elbow to horn, mobile phones in both fists. Staved‐in headlights, sparking exhausts, wonky fenders: off the‐book motor‐trade business, doctored MOT certificates from railway‐arch garages. The war‐zone geometry of this profane eye‐of‐grass within a blunt Triangle was the aftermath of Anton LaVey’s anathema on cars. Mansfield’s manager, Sam Brody, touring the San Francisco coven, dissed a skull, snuffed a black candle. LaVey told him he’d be dead within a year. Which must have come as a relief from this state of perpetual hospitalization, the breaking of bones every time he got behind the wheel. There were ugly spirits abroad: LaVey, a sometime colleague of underground film‐maker Kenneth Anger (who visited London, frequently, in these years), lived for a short time with Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was to the Detroit automobile industry what Dick Cheney was to Iraq: ruination. The smoothest engines died at her touch. She parked where she could, on pavements, against wounded trees, in hot‐pillow motels whose locations she could never remember. Susan Atkins, one of the Charles Ma
nson dune‐buggy slaughter battalion, had an early gig, climbing out of a coffin in LaVey’s ‘Topless Witches’ Review’.

  ‘Movie money,’ Jayne said, ‘you can’t keep.’

  Much of her fortune had vanished before the flying windscreen decapitated her on the road to New Orleans, that bougainvillea‐scented voodoo city waiting for floods. Her second husband, Mickey Hargitay, identified the body, in two parts. Tasteless commentators speculated on whether they’d be able to sew the head back on in time for the funeral.

  The fact that the All Saints Church bristled with angels made me suspect the worst, they were carrying excess insurance. The building was around the same age as our house. Its walls were dressed with a crumble of grey boulders, like antique walnut shells stuck in icing sugar. But Anna decided, and joined the congregation a few times to show willing, that our first child, Farne, should be christened. It was that era: Farne was five years old. I wrote to Lindisfarne, where the ceremony would have carried some significance, and was told the thing was impossible. Parishioners only. We had visited Holy Island and the Farne Islands when Anna was so heavily pregnant that it took two men, one pulling, one pushing, to haul her up the ladder from the boat, and to roll her out on the dock. The spirit of place was powerful. Sitting in the ruins of the abbey, I responded, seeing life in moving shadows, monkish presences in blood‐brown habits; continuity, permission to name. Daughters of the early 1970s fetched up with Native American weather tags – Rainbow, Sky – or title to one of the sacred islands of our Celtic fringe. But none of this allowed them to be watermarked across their puckered brows on the ground of their elective tribe.

  5 March 1978: the event. Brian Catling, present, as godfather. And Judith Bicknell as godmother. When it comes to it, we try to respect the rules of ritual, the community of this church, its tiny congregation. One or two of the old folk have come along, the vicar is in flow. There was close attention to what was happening, no holding aloof, when Catling heard a soft click against the stone. A man called Harry had slumped, coughing out his teeth, which bounced once on the aisle, before Brian swooped with a large red handkerchief. With Renchi’s help, he got Harry out to the porch while the vicar carried on with the dipping and marking. News was brought through, in whispers, that this elderly and faithful parishioner had died. The ceremony now became a double‐event, memorial tribute and welcome; one valued member of the flock departing and a new soul joining the Christian fellowship.

  Not long after this, so it was rumoured, the vicar’s wife, mother of numerous children, left the adjoining vicarage to enlist in a Stoke Newington lesbian commune. Our son and our younger daughter were not christened.

  Tony Lambrianou, tears in his eyes, remembered how his mother enrolled him, along with his brothers, in the congregation of All Saints Church, as soon as the family moved to Haggerston. Sunday school too. Never missed. Wouldn’t dare. Brought up strict. Christian values. Those were the days. No drugs, no litter. You could leave the front door unlatched. Not a spot on his white shirt.

  ‘We used to take round the collecting trays,’ Tony said. ‘And hold on to them. Believe me, when anything went missing from that church, it was down to me or one of my brothers.’

  Stonebridge Estate

  The estates south of the Triangle are sealed‐off prison islands, benevolently intended, incubating malcontent and mischief – as well as lives of ordinary human getting and being, survivalism, the slow accretion of site‐specific memory. This place is their place and the alarm felt by outsiders is not part of the native register. The term ‘estate’, despite a thorough rinsing in council‐speak, consultation notices that appear as harbingers of expulsion (followed by rapid demolition), can’t shake free of the mocking echo of the great houses – formal gardens, intimidating gates, lodges, stables, managed orchards – that once occupied the northern fringes of the city. Pastoral Hackney, bucolic Bethnal Green.

  Balmes House, a little to the west of here, along the canal, on the border between Hoxton and De Beauvoir Town, was a prime example. Once the home of Sir George Whitmore, Lord Mayor of London and fervent Royalist, it declined to a Hogarthian madhouse in the charge of a man called Warburton (a brutal keeper who married the owner’s daughter). Warburton prospered: as his charges, chained and gibbering, lay on straw in their own excrement. Sir George greeted Charles I, returned from a fool’s errand in Scotland, at Balmes House; before a triumphant entry, via Hoxton, into London. Warburton put his money into property. Amateur historians speculate that the term ‘barmy’ (or balmy) derives from Balmes House – from the period after the asylum was torn down, the gardens built over. A time when former inmates wandered parks and green spaces, taking the air, rubbing tender ankles, finding it impossible to relocate themselves outside the structure that once contained them.

  Descendants of Warburton’s charges can be found, gathered around a fixed table, in London Fields, close by the concrete effigies of the Pearly King and Queen. Dogs at their feet, they breakfast on Special Brew, and argue the world to rights in a lively but contained manner. Their alfresco democracy has real charm. They converge at or before first light. When I pass through the Fields in a winter dawn, we nod to each other. The well‐maintained flats on this corner, a council estate from a good period of red brick and solid balconies (now dressed with geraniums), carry a grey plaque: WARBURTON HOUSE. Between Warburton House with its forecourt of expensive motors and Mare Street, you’ll find Warburton Road and Warburton Street. Old histories become our story, a map of walking, memory‐sparks struck from flashing boots.

  Warburton is easy: a chancer, a climber, a man who is quite forgotten but whose name is scattered throughout an indifferent Hackney. Samuel Richardson, father of the English novel, is another case entirely. What has he to do with the borough? Twin estates between Triangle and canal: Haggerston and Stonebridge. Haggerston, the reef of crumbling LCC dreadnoughts, has been named and coded by a Richardson obsessive: the individual blocks have titles like Harlowe, Pamela, Lovelace, Samuel. Now, at the point of demolition, reinvention, orange panels across windows, a local man has made it his business to research the connection. To run Richardson to ground: as a cultural godfather, a reason to justify staying on in this tight enclave, despite the uncivil engineering, the closed roads and footpaths, the dust, the dogs. The raging psychopathology that undermines habits of settled domestic life.

  On 22 June 2005, I received a letter from Erol Kagan of Clarissa Street, E8. This in itself was worthy of note: most of my correspondence was redistributed by hand. The official system had collapsed. Many hours were spent in queues, along Emma Street, clutching my docket for a parcel that would never be seen again. The lowest point came when a two‐hour pavement snake, followed by an interminable search by a bored and frustrated sorter, delivered an envelope for which I was charged a penalty fee: insufficient postage (no stamp). Tearing the thing open as I stomped home through Haggerston Park, resenting the morning’s work lost (the office closes at lunchtime), I discovered a badly printed invitation to a vanity art show, looped digital dredging in the distant wake of W. G. Sebald. The unlanced boil of a nuclear power station overlooking an oatmeal sea.

  A letter, safely delivered, was a rare privilege. I celebrated with a cafetière of organic‐ethical‐Ethiopian coffee.

  I have been living in Haggerston all my life – In fact in the same estate, I am now 31 years old! My parents have left home, I am married with two kids yet still live in the same house! I am very upset that most of my childhood memories are being destroyed, Laburnum School and Haggerston Baths in particular but I just cannot leave my beloved Haggerston.

  I spend most of my spare time researching and documenting the history of Haggerston. I have accumulated a tremendous wealth of information, articles and historic documents on this subject.

  I would be delighted if I could actually meet with you one day to share the information I have gathered and also ask you some questions. There are many parts of my research unanswered including the l
ink between Haggerston and Stonebridge Estate and the novelist Samuel Richardson. I am also keen to meet with older generations that have been living in Haggerston. As currently I appear to be the longest serving member!

  I knew Richardson best – sampled but never inhaled – through Henry Fielding’s spirited parodies of the epistolary novels that served up rapes and ravishments, but made you wait for them, along with a dose of moralizing retribution. Fielding, a Bow Street magistrate, investigator of legal corruption, a man who proposed the abolition of hanging, was a considerable London figure. But Richardson? Investigation challenged my lazy prejudices. By family, education, trade, this man was the real thing: a ‘good apprentice’ who rose through his own efforts, a man of property. You could look on Richardson as a kindred spirit of William Blake: without the poetry, the vision. He took up printing: Aldersgate compositor, corrector of the press, self‐publisher. He married his master’s daughter, learnt to set newspapers, broadsheets, political pamphlets. He got money, status, recognition: a business in the City, a house in the suburbs.

  Which suburbs? Hackney was then a village and Haggerston a bare hamlet, a few muddy lanes, a brook. Richardson helped to create a literary form, the novel, that suited his temperament and inclinations. He was as much a Londoner as Peter Ackroyd. And as circumspect in the revelation of the bare facts of his life (which were no affair of literary snoops and mythologizers). Who knows if Ackroyd ever slept in Hackney? In his Dickens biography, doesn’t Peter run into his great predecessor on Kingsland Road?