J. Crane, House Decorator; Stoke Newington

The first time I saw this ghost sign in 2008, it was partly covered by a graffiti (and a pretty bad one at that).

Five years later the graffiti was gone and the ghost sign for James Crane could be seen in full.

It certainly dates from the last decade (or couple of decades) of the 19th century. James Crane is mentioned in a couple of publications from that period indeed. In October 1894 readers of the London Gazette learnt that James Crane, builder and contractor, of 121, Church Street, Stoke Newington, was bankrupt. Two years later, a notice of intended dividends was published in the London Gazette and reprinted in several professional journals, including Timber and Plywood.

J. Crane. House Decorator
Plimber, Gas & Hot Watter Fitter
Contractor for General Repairs

Location: Church Street

Daren, Stoke Newington

I returned recently to Stoke Newington in north London, an area with an impressive concentration of ghost signs. A few changes had occurred since my last visit four or five years ago. Sadly, as Sam Robert had commented, the glass of wine had been painted black by Hackney Council. Yet there were some more positive surprises, including the reappearance of the ghost sign below for Daren brown bread.

Only the part that was once hidden by a hoarding has survived but that's enough to identify the brand advertised here, especially since there are several similar ones around London. Examples published on this blog so far include these from Camberwell and Vauxhall.

The origins of Daren go back to 1875, when Leonard Keyes established a milling business at Brent windmill in Dartford. A few years later his brother Sidney K. Keyes joined the firm, which moved to Colyer's Mill on an artificial channel of the Darent. As their business expanded the two brothers looked for a site with greater production capacity and in 1891 they purchased Daren Mills on Dartford Creek.
The sucess of Daren, like that of Hovis, was linked to the growing demand for unaldurated flour and healthier bread in the late 19th century. Research carried out throughout the second half of the 19th century had revealed that millers and bakers often adulterated their wheat flour with rye, barley, Indian corn or bean-flour. Even worse, as a majority of consumers preferred white bread, a large proportion of them did not hesitate to add alum (around 50% in the mid-1850s) or copper sulphate, a highly toxic chemical, to make their bread look whiter. Those findings were reproduced, sometimes in a simplified form, by leading newspapers and had a huge impact on society. In this climate, consumers turned increasingly towards brands that claimed they could guarantee the quality, and safety, of their products.
Additionally by the end of the 19th century doubts began emerging about the nutritional value of white bread against brown bread. The campaign for more nutritious bread intensified during and after the Boer War as some linked the poor physical condition of British recruits (40% were declared unfit for military service) to the consumption of white bread; although this was more due to poverty and the associated consequences of bad housing and insufficient food than just a lack of vitamins in bread.
As Daren flour was used to bake brown bread (but not wholemeal), the company benefited from both factors. Demand grew steadily during the first decades of the 20th century, leading to the expansion of Keyes Daren Mills (see aerial views from 1924 and 1929).
In spite of the popularity of Daren loaves, the situation of the company deteriorated after the First World War. Competition with Hovis, Turog and other brands was extremely harsh. Furthermore, as production techniques improved and more modern mills were built around the country, milling capacity exceeded demand for flour in the 1920s. To counter competition from northern millers (essentially Joseph Rank Ltd from Hull and W. Vernon & Sons from Merseyside, both of which were expanding rapidly through mergers and acquisitions) seven independent millers from the London area formed in 1921 the Associated London Flour Millers. Each company retained its own identity though. Unfortunately information about Daren is rather patchy and I have not found a document stating clearly it was one of the founders of the Associated London Flour Millers but several suggest it. In 1929 Keyes Daren Mills Ltd became Daren Ltd, probably following the retirement of its founders. By joining forces the seven milling companies could lower their costs and make subtantial savings. As a result the Associated London Flour Millers returned healthy profits for several years. Yet following a first loss in 1929, its financial situation became precarious in the early 1930s and in 1933 the concern was absorbed by Ranks Ltd. Ranks kept the Daren brand and Daren loaves continued to be baked around the country. However Daren bread disappeared in the late 1960s or early 1970s. In 1962 Ranks had acquired Hovis-McDougall Co and after a few years it decided to keep only its bestselling brand, Hovis.

There is no online mention of a bakery at this address. The first part of the baker's name is missing but it may well have been "Raleigh", preceded by an initial (without it, the name would not have been centered).

... Raleigh's
...
Daren
Best Brown Bread

Location: Stoke Newington Church Street / Picture taken in May 2013

R. Ellis, Stoke Newington

An online search for ironmongers trading on both Northwold Road and Brooke Street (the name of the road before 1912) didn't return any relevant result. Thus, for now, we'll have to assume the only memory left by R. Ellis is this ghost sign.

R. Ellis,
Ironmonger,
Stove Range
& Bath Boiler
Works.
Gas Fitter
& Plumber.
General
House Repairs
Estd 60 Years
Location: Northwold Road / Picture taken in April 2008

T. Harry, Stoke Newington

I don't have much to tell about T. Harry's business. Were these depositories used mainly by individuals or by the many industries that opened along Manor Road from the end of the 19th century? Over the years these included, among others, a drain pipe manufacturer, jam manufacturers (including D. Politi's company, which in the 1920s began making apparently good Turkish Delights), a large number of clothing manufacturers (including the London Shirt and Collar Dressing Co), several garages, a printer, and makers of cycles and umbrellas.
Although this ghost sign is very simple, it displays a rather unusual abbreviation: "C^es."

T. Harry & C^es
Depositories
Location: Manor Road / Picture taken on: 01/04/2008

For a glass of good wine, Stoke Newington and Holloway

Ever since I first saw it, I've been wondering about this glass of wine. What is it doing just next to a school? And why was the glass left intact when the rest of the wall was rather clumsily painted black? Could this have been the work of a street artist?


Location: Stoke Newington Church Street / Picture taken on: 01/04/2008

Then three years later and a couple of kilometres further west I spotted the same glass of wine (it used to be hidden behind a modern billboard) and this time there was something written underneath. However a search on the internet with the slogan "For a glass of good wine" didn't lead to any identification. I guess this ghost sign was promoting a local wine merchant and the logo would have been enough for people to recognize it. Maybe someone could cast some light on this little mystery.

For a Glass of Good Wine
Location: Holloway Road / Picture taken on: 06/04/2011

Post Office, Stoke Newington

Before they introduced bright red signs...

Post Office
Stoke Newington
Allen Rd
N. 16
Note the uppercase 'T' in 'Stoke'. A mistake by the sign writer?

Location: Allen Road / Picture taken on: 14/08/2008

Cakebread Robey & Co Ltd, Stoke Newington

Cakebread Robey & Co Ltd, of Stoke Newington, a firm that used to supply materials to the building trade, was founded in 1882 by George H. Cakebread and Arthur E. Robey. In recent times the firm, which is now trading under the name Neville Lumb (part of French multinational St Gobain since 2001), has been known essentially for its sanitary, plumbing and heating equipment. However as the sign below reminds us, for several decades, Cakebread Robey & Co was also relatively well-known for its glass products. Many of their etched, engraved or embossed glass and mirrors as well as their stained glass windows can still be found around the country in pubs, hotels and churches.

In London, some of Cakebread Robey & Co's best glass can still be admired at The Queens, 26 Tottenham Lane, and The Salisbury on Green Lanes at the junction with St Ann's Road. As for their stained glass windows, the largest concentrations can be seen at St. Andrew's, Whitehall Park, in Holloway, or at St. Andrew's, Chase Side, in Southgate.
A look at the index pages of the Building of England series by Nikolaus Pevsner and online reveals Cakebread Robey & Co glass and windows can also be found in other counties, including Buckinghamshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Greater Manchester, and Suffolk.

The company had this wall painted twice. The range of products changed slightly in the process. The most recent layer reads:

Cakebread Robey & Co. Ltd. Builders Merchants & Ironmongers

Stained Glass Windows, Leaded Lights, Glass, Lead, Oils, Colours, Varnishes.

Stoves, Baths, Lavatories, Saintary Fittings, Locks & Fastenings

Also at Wood Green, Ilford, Tottenham, Harrow & Dalston

The products previously avertised, on the same part of the wall as above, were:

Lead Glass, Oil Colours & Varnishes

Stove Ranges, Baths, Closets & Lavatories

Location: Tyssen Road / Picture taken on: 01/04/2008

John Hawkins & Sons, Stoke Newington

If I mention the name of John Hawkins, most people will have images of pirates chasing the Spanish gold fleet across the Caribbean to fill their coffers and those of the kingdom, and of the defeat of the Invincible Armada. Few may think of Preston. Yet today's sign is about the other John Hawkins, cotton master in that quintessential industrial town of Lancashire, upon which Coketown in Charles Dicken's Hard Times is based.

Hawkins began as a handloom manufacturer in the 1820s. Having accumulated enough capital, he had become by 1844 the owner a large mill and a member of the Masters' Association. Like many other cotton masters John Hawkins became involved in politics (he was a Liberal of radical inclinations) and was elected town councillor for the St Peter's ward. However when he sought a second term in November 1853 he suffered a heavy defeat, polling only 62 votes. The reason was simple. Preston was in the middle of what would ultimately be its longest and most costly industrial conflict, with 80% of the town's productive capacity coming to a halt, and Hawkins was a particularly uncompromising employer.
During the 1840s Britain had been hit by recession and employers across the country had imposed a series of wage cuts in an attempt to stay ahead of their competitors. By the end of the decade such cuts represented a loss of between 10 and 20 percents for the workers. In Preston competition came mainly from the nearby textile centres of Blackburn or Stockport or, further afield, from those in Yorkshire. Industrial relations were extremely poor and when the cotton workers demonstrated in August 1842 in front of the town’s corn exchange against their deteriorating living and working conditions, the authorities called in the armed troop. Four workers died when they opened fire. Such an attitude led Chartist Alexander Challenger to declare in 1842 that "the cotton lords of Preston are the greatest tyrants in the country. It is well known that they grind their workmen down more than any other persons, getting their work done cheaper, and therefore they can undersell their neighbours." In spite of such dramatic events, the cuts had generally been accepted by the workers, but on the understanding that wages would go back up as soon as the situation would improve. By the end of 1852 prosperity had returned to Britain and throughout the country workers striked to demand a 10 percent increase, which was often granted. Yet in Preston, where new mills were being built and old ones expanded, only a few mill owners offered increases to weavers and spinners. Thirty-six employers showed no intention of following suit. One of the latter was John Hawkins, who even had the nerve of offering a pay rise to his weavers by cutting the wage of the tacklers! Tension rose and on September 15 the Masters' Association announced the mills would be locked from October 15. Not all mills were involved in the lock out, but John Hawkins's was. In February the cotton masters reopened their mills, hoping the workforce would return on their terms after several weeks without any income (altough collections were organized throughout the town and country). However the workers were not ready to give in and went on strike, a move the mill owners countered by bringing people from Manchester, Yorkshire and even the south and Ireland. Many were convinced to turn back by the unions but time was against the workers. The union funds were running dry and a series of internal conflicts in China led in late 1853-early 1854 to a 50% reduction in the demand for English cotton. The industry was once more in financial trouble. Finally on May Day the workers voted to return to work. Even though this was Preston’s most important conflict, it was not the last one: workers went again on strike in 1869, following further wage reductions, 1878, and 1912.
As for the mill owners, in spite of several short term depressions, they continued to expand and when John Hawkins died in 1873, the Preston Chronicle described his operations as "gigantic". John was succeeded by his eldest son Joseph.

Of course, all this doesn’t tell us why there is in London, hundreds of miles away from Preston, a painted ad for John Hawkins & Sons... The answer is provided by Mary B. Rose in Firms, Networks, and Business Values: the British and American Cotton Industries Since 1750. After a short boom in the aftermath of the First World War, the cotton industry started facing increasing difficulties from the early 1920s onwards, partly because of the collapse of the Indian market. To minimize losses, productive capacity was reduced and price agreements were negotiated. Yet some firms looked at other ways of increasing their share of the market by moving into direct selling for the home market. Among them were the five spinning and weaving firms of the Preston and Blackburn area, including John Hawkins & Sons, controlled by the Birtwistle family (the Birtwistles were long-established mill owners in Blackburn and were sitting on the board of directors of several other companies). In 1921 under the name John Hawkins (my guess is they chose that name because of the namesake navigator) they opened their first retail outlet and launched a mail order business. From Lancashire they expanded across the rest of the country and by 1937 had a total of 38 outlets including at least one in northeast London.

John Hawkins & Sons Ltd
Cotton Spinners
& Manufacturers
Preston, Lancashire
Actually there is another sign on this wall. It reads:

Phones CLIS 1122/3 and CLI 2000

Steeles

Contractors Limited Plate & Sheet Glass Merchants & Manufacturers

The CLIS dialling code is a bit strange. I thought those area codes had only three letters, thus more like the CLI one below... Does anyone know which area they are for. Clerkenwell and Islington?

Location: Stoke Newington High Street / Picture taken on: 01/04/2008

Alf. The Purse King, Stoke Newington

Stoke Newington Church Street is home to an incredible concentration of ghost signs, one of which has already been presented on this blog. If several of these painted signs advertized well-known products, there's one that displays a more intriguing name: Alf. The Purse King (click on the picture for an enlarged version).

The left-hand side reads

Alf. The Purse King. Reg
A. Rubinstein		- & Sons

The right-hand side reads

Phone Dal 3255		Leather Goods Manufacturers
Purses, Pouches, Hand Bags, Wallets, &c.
Also At 8 Kimberley Terrace, Gt. Yarmouth

In the phone number, Dal stood for Dalston.

Unfortunately searching the web doesn't throw much light about the London side of this business. In Great Yarmouth however, Alf the Purse King seems to be still in business, but at a new address in Regent Road. On another website, a page about the town's market written in 2007 mentions that

Up until recently, one of the bag stalls on the market belonged to 'Alf the Purse King', who had seemed to go on forever until his recent death.

Back in London, the only information I could find is about the late 18th century house built of yellow bricks the sign is painted on as no. 89 is grade II listed and as such appears on the Images of England database. The building is also mentioned a couple of times, including to say that by the 1980s it was in a very dilapidated state, in The History of the County of Middlesex (Volume 8) edited by T F T Baker and C R Elrington. This seminal work includes a fascinating account of the development of Stoke Newington Church Street from the late Middle Ages until the early 1980s.

Location: Stoke Newington Church Street / Picture taken on: 10/04/2008

John Brown's Whiskies, Stoke Newington

When I met some friends in a pub after one of my lectures and told them I had just been discussing with my students, among many other issues, the territorial loss of Bolivia following its defeat in the 1932-35 Chaco War, the conversation drifted immediately towards the adventures of Tintin... Indeed there are several references to that terrible war in The Broken Ear. From there we went through the international events which influenced Hergé, from the Mukden Incident in The Blue Lotus to the Cold War in The Calculus Affair, and so on... (after all my three companions that evening were all history teachers at the Lycée français) Then as one of us mentioned Land of the Black Gold, we discussed the different versions that exist of several Tintin books. That finally led us to The Shooting Star, a comic book that was partly redrawn after the war, and ends dramatically, when Captain Haddock collapses. As serving president of the Society for Sober Sailors, he had been invited to give a radio talk on the dangers of alcoholism but collapsed after drinking water instead of... whisky! In several other books we learn that his favourite brand was Loch Lomond, but who knows, maybe the Captain would have appreciated a sip of John Brown's as well? What a twisted way to introduce today's painted sign!!!

Unfortunately a quick look on the web doesn't reveal much about John Brown's whiskies apart from the fact that they ran an advert campaign in the late Victorian era. It is mentioned somewhere that the company's name could be connected with Queen Victoria's servant, something I find hard to believe. After all there is certainly no lack of John Brown in Scotland...

Good Judges
Drink
John
Brown's
Whiskies
Location: Cazenove Road / Picture taken on: 10/04/2008

Criterion, Westminster Gazette, and Gillette, Stoke Newington

While some in government are thinking of banning two for one offers, today I offer you a three for one. Three signs on one wall, a real bargain!


The most visible ad nowadays, which includes a drawing of a match box, is for Criterion
Matches
I haven't been able to find anything about Criterion, other than a few ads published between the 1920s and the 1950s for Criterion Cigars, and a couple of mentions of a Criterion Cigar factory in New Haven, Conn. Nothing though about Criterion Matches. If anyone knows anything about it, I'd be most grateful if you could leave a comment. Thanks!

Another ad easy to spot is the one for the Westminster
Gazette [*]
...
... The News
*: part of the word, painted in a slightly whiter colour, appears between the letters of "Criterion"

The Westminster Gazette was a highbrow Liberal newspaper. Founded by George Newness with staff who had resigned from the Pall Mall Gazette (a formerly Liberal paper, which had turned Conservative), it was first published on January 31, 1893. Its first editor, E. T. Cook left for the Daily News in 1895. His place was taken by J. A. Spender, who retained his position until the Westminster Gazette became a morning publication in 1921. It was under Spender that it became a heavyweight Liberal paper bridging the gaps that existed between the different factions of the Liberal Party. To enliven its green pages, it relied on the caricatures and political cartoons of Francis Carruthers Gould, the witty satires of the late Victorian and Edwardian society of Hector Hugh Munro (aka Saki), as well as on the poems and prose of many emerging and confirmed writers. In spite of a circulation of 20,000 copies and advertisement revenues of £40,000 a year, the Westminster Gazette was making a loss and in 1908 Newness sold it to a Liberal syndicate in a deal pushed by the Liberal whips. This didn't alter the situation though, and the paper continued to be published at a loss. In 1921 Spender was replaced as editor by J. B. Hobman. In 1928 the Westminster Gazette merged with the Daily News.
The location of this sign is not surprising at all. At the time Stoke Newington was a Liberal stronghold and the Westminster Gazette would have been competing with other Liberal newspapers to increase its readership among local residents.

Finally, the third ad painted on this wall was for Gillette
British Made
Razor & Blades
This is one of several examples where signs for Criterion and Gillette have been painted on the same wall. It looks as if the two companies used the same kind of blue for the background.

Location: Stoke Newington Church Street / Picture taken on: 01/04/2008