William Thomas Whiffin

During my last voluntary stint at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, I took the opportunity of finding out a little more about the photographer behind the Whiffin Photographic collection. There is a small collection of papers (Whiffin 770 (Folder 3) includes a few letters written by Whiffin) from which I gleaned a few biographical details. The man behind these photographs was William Thomas Whiffin (circa 1879-1957), a successful and highly accomplished professional photographer, with studios in the East India Dock Road, King's Cross, Harrow Road and Mare Street in Hackney. Whiffin documented significant events in the East End (he turned his lens on the rise of 'Poplarism' in the early 1920s and the General Strike of 1926) but many of his photographs are of inconsequential scenes which are all the more fascinating because of their ordinariness. In September 1939 Whiffin applied for a permit to document life in Poplar during WW2, and was presumably successful, albeit working under restricted conditions. One particularly poignant handwritten note from a municipal official, dated 14 May 1941, presses Whiffin to attend a makeshift mortuary in Knapps Road to photograph the corpse of an unidentified boy aged 14. My first thought was that the young lad was a victim of the Blitz, but I suppose he could have died in some other way. How ever it was he died, it brought me up short when I read that. I wonder if the authorities ever did identify the child.

Military and civil engineering

Although it is wise never to indulge in any travel writing because a) it is a debased genre, and b) the great I, Ludicrous examine the folly of the holiday bore in their epic 'Oh, Really' (to be found on the peerless LP Idiots Savants), I would suggest that anyone with an interest in the history of civil and military engineering should consider visiting the Argolid region of the Peloponnese in Greece. Within easy reach of the town of Nafplion are prime examples of ancient Mycenean defensive citadels, classical Greek temples and theatres, Roman baths and Frankish, Venetian and Turkish castles; some of these structures are so immense, and positioned such in the landscape that they almost defy belief. The building techniques employed by the Myceneans, and the manner in which they must have co-ordinated the sheer brute strength necessary to transport and manoeuvre such huge blocks of stone, are particularly impressive; quite how they did it is, I gather, still a matter of some debate amongst scholars of antiquity. I have no ideas to contribute on that score (perhaps I should ask my brothers who work in the building trade ...), but I can certainly appreciate building and engineering genuis when I see it.    

Copy-editing for an undergraduate student

The genealogy is on hold at the moment, as I have been asked to copy-edit an undergraduate’s dissertation. This will require some degree of urgency and application to meet the deadline, but it will be completed, on that my client may depend. For the past three years he has been studying civil engineering, a subject about which I know nothing. This is not the problem some might think, as the brief is to run my eye over the grammar, style and clarity of the piece – I certainly won’t be tempted to meddle with the content! 

Identifying 'lost' nineteenth-century London streets

I have made further progress with my current genealogical research project, mainly in connection with pinpointing exactly where the various branches of my client’s family lived in East London in the mid- and late nineteenth century. I have been surprised at how difficult this has been, even with numerous London street directories from the time readily to hand: I wonder if there is a handy and comprehensive modern volume recording the changes to London’s street names, dates of clearance and demolition, and also wartime destruction? Eventually, I managed to find what I was looking for by poring over the 1867–70 OS maps at the London Metropolitan Archives with a magnifying glass; not a frivolous exercise by any means, as one can distinguish the various buildings where my client’s family lived, and copies of the relevant sections of these maps will hopefully make the walking tour I am planning for him that much easier to organise.

Poplar High Street in the 1920s and 1930s

I do voluntary work at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, and try to get in for a couple of hours once a week. Managed to do so today, and catalogued part of a box of the extensive photographic collection of street scenes. The particular box I was working through mainly consisted of very evocative photographs of Poplar High Street from the 1920s and 1930s. Notes and annotations on many of the prints indicate that they were part of the Whiffin Photographic Collection. Information about this collection is at present somewhat scant, although a brief reference found on the net indicates that Whiffin’s Studio was actually based locally, at 237 East India Road, Poplar. Doubtless the staff at THLHLA would have more information about Whiffin’s Studio and the provenance of the collection: I must remember to ask next time.

Interesting connection with Israel Zangwill

Some excitement recently in connection with the genealogical research I am undertaking for my New York client. It has transpired that a great uncle of his, one Nathaniel Cooper, worked with the future author Israel Zangwill at the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane, Spitalfields. The two were educated at the School, and went on to teach there in the 1880s; as almost exact contemporaries – Nathaniel was born in Whitechapel on 29 April 1864, Zangwill on 21 January 1864 – they surely knew each other.

On discovering the connection, I immediately checked the National Register of Archives to see where Zangwill’s papers are located. It was no surprise to find that there is a significant deposit of papers (including some of his brother Louis) among the Jewish collections at Southampton University Library: MSS 294–5, to be exact. Further investigation of the University’s online catalogue revealed that MS 294 includes some material relating to Zangwill’s early life and education at the Jews’ Free School (and MS 153 contains some early minutes and papers of the School itself). Zangwill’s papers might conceivably shed oblique light on Nathaniel’s formative education and early working life as a youthful ‘pupil teacher’ (as he – and Zangwill – is described on the 1881 census) at the JFS, and in an ideal world I would undertake a research trip to Southampton to consult them, but this, alas, is not an ideal world and time will not permit …

It is interesting to speculate if Nathaniel and Zangwill were on friendly terms, and if so, whether they maintained personal contact in later life. Zangwill’s literary celebrity – considerable in his day – remains to some extent, but Nathaniel pursued a more humble path, working as a schoolmaster, at the JFS until at least the late 1890s and then in Ilford. I have yet to establish the school at which he taught in Ilford; perhaps that could be my next project.