Oral History Interview - Neil Martinson
Object
Audio file
Production date
04/2017
Object number
2018.86
Physical Description
Audio recording of an oral history interview with photographer Neil Martinson. Neil first started taking photographs whilst still in school in Hackney.
Associated Organisation
Centerprise (Produced for)
Associated Person
Martinson, Neil (Subject of)
On display?
No
Inscription
Q. So you were born in Hackney? [00:00:04]
Neil Martinson (NM). Yes I was, and I lived there for most of my life. [00:00:05]
Q. Can you talk about everything? Can you tell us about your early Hackney memories, your school, your family, your football team? [00:00:20]
NM. Ha! Okay. So we lived in Stoke Newington in the flats that overlooked Clissold Road and Clissold Park. The flats are still there. Actually, my earliest memory is - I think I must have been four or something - my earliest memory is being very frightened being out in the flats on my own, because everything seemed to be so big and overwhelming. And that kind of memory has always stayed with me.
Stoke Newington was a very working class area, in fact the whole of Hackney was, and my parents were one of only four Jewish families that lived in the estate. They weren't particularly religious, but they were certainly culturally Jewish, and they went to a club in East End of London called Oxford & St Georges [Jewish Youth Club] which was in Whitechapel, which was incredibly important throughout their lives. Interestingly, I think it's an area of social history that has been a bit neglected, the role of those clubs. And I went to the club as well. I travelled from Stoke Newington to Whitechapel on the 67 bus, which took quite a long time.
I went to William Patten School, which again is still there. I think I was the only Jewish child in primary school and infants’ [school]. For the assembly, because it was a Christian assembly, I used to have to sit out of it. Not that I knew what any of it meant, either the Christian side or the Jewish side. It all seems a bit bizarre looking back on it, but there was a sense of … I think there was actually a sense of Jewish people were slightly different. When I used to play with my friends in the estate, one of the things they often used to say was, “oh, you’re not like them.” And what they meant was the frommers [Hasidic Jews] who lived around Cazenove Road, because obviously I didn't have the long curls, and I used to play with them.
A lot of my childhood was spent in Clissold Park, where in those days they had park keepers, and if you were bad or did something wrong they would just belt you. They were all very large Irish guys, very rowdy, I realise looking back on it they were probably all drunks. A lot of the area was being redeveloped as slum clearance, so where Stoke Newington school is, there used to be a whole row of houses that were being redeveloped and were empty. So we spent a lot of time playing in old houses and finding treasure.
Q. Did you support Arsenal from the go? [00:03:47]
NM. Yeah, because you could actually hear people cheering from where we lived. My dad used to take me to the Arsenal games, which was quite a big deal really. We used to walk there – it’s not very far - and we used to sit high up in the stands, and it was only years later that I realised he’d been taking me to see the reserve games. Nonetheless it was pretty exciting.
Q. How did you come to take up photography? As I understand you took up photography at a school age? [00:04:20]
NM. Yeah, I took it up when I was about 16-17. Really it came I think from two things.
There was a camera shop in Stoke Newington High Street, long gone. Of course being a boy there was something incredibly fascinating about the equipment. And so I used to walk past the shop and look at the cameras and look at the equipment and kind of think ‘wow, they look great’.
The other factor was the library in Stoke Newington … So you had a reference library and the lending library, and they had books of photography. They were pretty awful actually, I did have some and I threw them away. They were kind of annuals of photography; colour, very badly printed.
Hackney when I was growing up was a pretty grey place. There wasn't much to do, and it was pretty boring especially as a teenager. I think what the books did was they opened up a world that I didn’t know about, I mean a lot of it was travel photography, or exotic parts of the world. I just carried on looking at different books of photos. A friend of mine had a Saturday job at Westminster Libraries and they had a really good collection of photography books. To my shame I still have some of those books, particularly a book by Henri Cartier-Bresson. So I started to discover things on my own, I didn't know any photographers, I didn’t know that world at all. It was completely alien to me.
When Centerprise started we got involved with that through one of our teachers at Hackney Downs - they were fairly radical teachers. I think they were the kind of post-1968 generation. They introduced to all kinds of ideas, I'm sure now they’d be locked up in prison for it. We used to go see jazz with them in Liverpool Street, which clearly would be a no-no now. There was quite a lot going on in schools. There was the Schools Action Union, which was like a trade union for school students, and we went on strike, walked out of school. It was pretty chaotic, but it was quite fun. There was a whole lot of alternative music.
Through the teachers we got to know Centerprise and we wanted to produce a magazine, which we did, it was called Hackney Miscarriage, there were two terrific issues of it, I've got a couple of copies. Next to Centerprise was an organisation called Free Form who had a dark room. And I managed to save up to buy a Zenit E, which I bought from the camera shop in Stoke Newington, a Russian clunky camera. I started taking pictures in a very kind of ad hoc, hit and miss kind of way, and was able to go to Free Form to develop the film.
Q. Where was the dark room? [00:08:21]
NM. It was in Dalston Lane.
Q. Alright, that’s before Free Form and Chats [Palace]? That’s when Martin Goodridge…? [00:08:25]
NM. That’s it, Martin Goodridge was going. It was really kind of it, that’s what I was doing. Well, there wasn’t any internet, so all I could do was going to the library and look at books. I didn’t know any photographers. I slowly started to take pictures, but I also got involved in producing materials, because I guess I was quite radical for a 16 year old, and found it all very exciting, and became quite politicised as well at the same time.
Q. So it wasn’t particularly an artistic purchase? Most of it was bearing witness, documentary type of motivation? Or would you say was a mixture of the two? [00:09:10]
NM. It wasn’t artistic, not in a conscious sense, although I look at some of my first images and think ‘bloody hell, I wish I could take pictures like that now’, cause I think they had a kind of naïve, innocent approach. I think a lot of it, a lot of the motivation was to … a sense that there’s a whole history of working class people that had never been talked about or recorded, that was important. I really got into history when I was in school - not in an academic sense because I managed to fail at everything - but I read a lot and it was really obvious how much history was missing, what the gaps were. And I thought it was really important to record that in different ways, and to use photography or posters or graphics in a way that makes for change, makes for social, progressive social change.
Q. What were the cultural spaces for young people like in the 1960s and 1970s? [00:10:49]
NM. Ha! Depends on how you define cultural space. I did briefly go to Boy Scouts, which was pretty tacky and horrible. There weren’t any, there were some cinemas but when I was growing up most of those were in the process of closing down. I went to Saturday morning cinema when I was young, but I think probably by my teens – because I think there was something like six or seven cinemas from Stamford Hill to Dalston – by my teens pretty much all of them had closed down. So, there was nothing in Hackney, I mean really, nothing!
Q. Any particular clubs or pubs or music venues that you used to go to? [00:11:37]
NM. Yes, there were some pubs, probably when I was about 15-16. There was a pub in Dalston called the Duke of Wellington which used to have Irish music, it was a big Irish pub - because Dalston had a big Irish community then - and the Irish pub was pretty well known for supporting the Republican movement, so they would have collections there and they would have folk music, Irish folk music. The other pubs tended to have jukeboxes, I don’t recall any pubs in Hackney having live music apart from the Duke of Wellington.
Q. Can you describe the political culture in Hackney and East London in general in the period when you were becoming an adult? [00:12:23]
NM. So when I was becoming an adult, the politics I sort of engaged in was very much about trying to address some issues that were fairly basic. So there were lots of activities around things like nursery provision. A lot of it was about trying to change what Hackney Council was doing because Hackney Council was very old Labour, we had councillors that had been there for years and years. And also I think the people I moved with, we never saw that as being the politics we were interested in either. So the Councils were in a sense seen as the enemy – it was a very simplistic kind of politics.
But what you did have - certainly by the time I got involved in Centerprise - was a lot of active groups campaigning on all kinds of issues, a lot around housing, there were a lot of families in bed & breakfast accommodation, a lot of council housing was really poor and really, really awful. There was certainly corruption within the council in terms of the housing and construction services.
Obviously you had the feminist movement. You had a movement around working class history as well, there was a history workshop which was incredibly influential for me, which was started out at Ruskin College, Oxford and that was partly the inspiration for the People's Autobiography of Hackney, which I was really involved with as well.
So what you had, I think was … I reckon sometimes if you look at the groups that met at Centerprise, which was an enormous number of groups, some of them pretty wacky it has to be said, and some of them almost Monty Python in terms of the varieties of say Marxist-Leninist groups that used to meet there. But you also had some very grassroots groups, it’s hard to say isn’t it?! Grassroots groups working, because you had estates which were just falling down with damp, I mean really awful conditions.
Q. What was the motivation for Centerprise to be set up, and was it always in Kingsland High Street? [00:15:07]
NM. It was originally in Dalston Lane, which is when I first got involved with it when I was still in school, and it was set up primarily by a guy called Glenn Thompson. We thought he was a great guy, he was a Black American guy, had great big afro hair, charismatic, visionary, and in many ways his ideas were fairly simple, it was that to retrieve any kind of social justice you need literacy, you need the tools to actually take yourself forward both individually and collectively.
A lot of that was the drive behind the idea of having a bookshop, I mean there were no bookshops in Hackney. Well there was one kind of bookshop in Stoke Newington but there was actually nothing in it. So we didn’t have access to books that we could buy, or steal usually. So the drive … the drive was also connected to, a lot of it was also inspired by Ivan Illich and Paulo Friere, particularly Paulo Freire in terms of literacy - because if you look at what happened to Centerprise, some of it was about the expression of ideas for working class people, but some of the work was also basic literacy, helping people to read and write, the basic tools you need to kind of get by in life but also to advance whatever it is you believe in.
I think what happened was there was a whole group of us from school to whom it was amazingly exciting, because suddenly - I told you Hackney was grey, but suddenly had this colours and you had ideas and you had this amazing books that you've never seen before, so it was really exciting. I used to work in the coffee bar when it was in Dalston Lane on Thursday nights, when I was still at school which was useful, a bit of income for me.
Centerprise gave us some money to produce an alternative schools magazine, and that was condemned by our headteacher at Hackney Downs as being a maoist cell, so that was a pretty good result really. Also there was a whole load of alternative publishing going on at the time, because after we published Hackney Miscarriage, I went on a TV programme called Late Night Lineup which was on BBC2 with two friends, and we were asked our views on the alternative newspapers and magazines that were around at the times, so you had … the early days of Private Eye, Oz, IT, all kinds of material being produced.
And it wasn’t easy to do that. We kind of take it for granted now how easy it is to communicate, but you know a lot of the stuff we were doing - I haven’t got any examples here - but we used to use duplicators, standard duplicators with stencils which either you dyed or if you were really sophisticated there would be a very simple scanner and you might do more than one colour. And posters, mostly the early ones were done with letraset, so you kind of wrap up onto the poster or some of them were silk-screened.
A lot of the early movements particularly around community politics were about access to the means of production and distribution, i.e. how can you make a poster to engage and communicate with people? So you had things like the Lenthall Road Workshop, which is where this poster was done, which I did, and that was silk-screened. There was no other way to do it, if you wanted to publicise something there wasn't an easy way to do it, you had to make it really, unless you had enough money to pay for a printer, mostly we didn't have any money.
Q. Can you give us a detailed description of the process of making a poster, the process of silk-screen posters? [00:19:41]
NM. Yes, I’m not sure I can remember all of it, but effectively what you had to do was to make a stencil because the way silk-screen works is you push the ink through a stencil. So in this case, this particular poster, three colours, so fairly sophisticated, and all of this was cut by hand, this was letraset, this was cut by hand, that was cut by hand and mostly, it still looks quite good, I think, but it would take a long time, it could take you a day just to make the stencil, and then if you had as in this case three colours, you had to print each colour, put it on a rack, if you're doing a 100 of them say then you have to do 300 altogether and try to make sure they're all in the right position as well, so it would probably take two or three days to make it.
Q. Do you know much about the origins of Lenthall Road Workshop? [00:21:08]
NM. I can’t remember the name of the guy who was there, I remember what he looked like. He seemed to be quite old. He had ginger hair and a ginger beard, quite a very warm face, and he always cycled everywhere on a ratchet wheel bike. But that’s all I remember.
Q. Can you remember any other cultural groups that emerged during the early to mid-1970s in Hackney other than Centerprise, Lenthall Road, for example Chats Palace, any of these places? [00:21:35]
NM. Yes, you had the festival down at Chats Palace, over at the Marshes, Hackney Marshes Fun Festival I believe it was called.
Q. Sorry, can I just stop you for a second, because I had to stop the thing. Can I just ask you to start answering Pete’s question about Chats Palace again? [00:22:09]
NM. Sure. So there was Chats Palace, there was the Hackney Marshes Fun Festival, there wasn’t … I can’t remember there being much else, not in terms of actual buildings or physical presence, but there well might have been …
Q. And how did you become involved in the Hackney Flashers and your connection with Jo Spence? [00:22:36]
NM. I had some friends who were on the Hackney Trades Council, Women Subcommittee. The Trades Council was coming up to its 75th anniversary, and they wanted to do something as part of that, it was specifically about women, and I was the only photographer they knew, there weren’t many photographers that used to hang out in Hackney. And they came, we met to discuss what they’d like to do and talked about putting up an exhibition. I knew I needed to get some more people to come and help on this, because I was 20 at the time, I didn't know a lot, obviously I thought I knew more than I did but I really didn't know a lot. Jo had just been to talk to people at Centerprise about what she might do at Centerprise to help in any way, so I ended up meeting with her because I didn't know many photographers at all, I didn't know any.
Then between us we worked out what kind of exhibition we might do and it was very much a record of women at work because it was for the Trades Council, but it was about the inequalities that existed particularly around pay, because women got paid a lot less. We gathered together a group, mostly women but not exclusively, of photographers and set about recording the life of women at work in Hackney.
It was pretty simple, we went to factories and we took pictures. Looking at the pictures now you’d have to say it’d be very difficult to get those pictures now because you wouldn't get access, they wouldn’t let you in, and we just took as much as we could. It was presented very, very simply, it was very straight, it was pictures and some text with how much they were earning compared to men. The exhibition went on at Hackney Town Hall. I left the group shortly after that.
What's interesting looking at the pictures now is the number of women doing quite heavy manual work, and also they don't look very young. Women worked until they were quite old, in quite difficult jobs then, and it was manual work.
Q. The thing, documenting Working Lives obviously carried on, you can see it on your website, you’ve got a section called ‘Working Lives’, but could you tell us a little bit about the book that you produced with Centerprise? [00:25:25]
NM. I was involved with the people that worked in Hackney since they started, which I think about 1972. I worked on pretty much on all the books, mostly designing them, and again it was self-taught. We wanted to talk about people at work and working lives, we did one called Working Lives Vol.1, which my dad is in - he was a cabinet maker - and it makes sense to do one that brought it up to 1976-77 as it was then. I think because I was so involved in photography, we said, “Why don’t we take the pictures as well, because it’s contemporary”. I got together a group of five photographers to do it. We got a little bit of money from Centerprise. Centerprise had some funding from the Arts Council, and I think it took us three years to do the book.
It was a pretty ambitious undertaking, it was a very big book about 120 photos. All of the accounts are oral accounts so they all had to be transcribed, they all had to be checked and it’s quite extraordinary we managed to do it, looking back on it. It was a huge risk for the organisation because it cost a lot of money to produce.
We did have a heart-stopping moment because one of the accounts was of a mortuary attendant in Hackney Hospital, and the arrangement was we could take the photos as long as there was no dead body identifiable, and the way we used to prepare the photos for printing was to mark the crop on the tracing paper for the camera operator. The books came back, 5000 of them - because that was the only way we’d keep the unit price less than a pound - flip through it and on one of the pages on the mortuary was a face looking straight out, at which point I went into a cold sweat thinking have I cocked this up? Did I do the crop wrong? I checked, fortunately I got the crop right, the printer got it wrong so what they had to do was to reprint that page and insert it by hand, all 5000 copies.
The book sold out, we sold 5000, I think it was reprinted twice, so it probably sold 15,000 copies in the end, mostly in Hackney because … I mean, I worked for the publishing project - I had lots of different jobs - one of them was distribution which involved getting in a minivan, drive around Hackney to newsagents and the bookshops that were starting to sprout, not that many taking the books in or taking them to schools.
Q. On your website you talk about some of the inspiration, the photographic inspirations for that book. Can you tell us a little bit about that? [00:28:59]
NM. Yes, John Berger in a word really, and a book called A Fortunate Man which had a huge impact on certainly what I was doing, and the way I saw the world because at the time it was the only book I had seen then that had that combination of words and photos, because either you had a book of photos or you had a book of words. It might sound odd now, but at the time it was kind of revolutionary to have a documentary photographer working alongside that kind of text. That was very much the inspiration for it and kind of thinking it through, I think it worked pretty well.
Q. Would you like to mention any other photographers that were an influence to you? [00:30:00]
NM. Influenced me? Well, there’s a lot. Jean Moir took the pictures for A Fortunate Man, and I said that my first introduction to photography was Cartier-Bresson and I thought the images were just extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. Then it was like a whole load of photographers, Bruce Davidson in America. East 100th Street. Again, extraordinary piece of work. A lot of Walker Evans, so in a sense a very traditional documentary photographers, and I remain quite unrepentant about that. I still think it's important.
Q. It’s interesting that your series of the tower blocks, portraits of the Nightingale Estate - I presume it’s the Nightingale Estate - which I really liked. I wonder if you could talk about that. I’ve noticed they were taken almost exactly at the same time as Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows a series of pictures very quite similar inside a street in Manchester. It’s just really odd that a Manchurian never saw those pictures because they would be made around at the same time, but I wonder if you had come across them subsequently. [00:30:53]
NM. I came across them subsequently, at the time I never knew about them.
Q. There’s quite a striking similarity in terms of the interior décor of the flats - that’s quite natural in the working class environment - but it’s the nature of the wallpapers is really dominant in the pictures. How did that come about? [00:31:32]
NM. So one of the pictures is of my mum and dad, because that’s where we lived, so we moved into the Nightingale Estate when it first took tenants, after just being built. So the idea I had - which I didn’t manage to complete and I think it’s partly because I was really too young to work out how to do these things - I wanted to take pictures of every single family in the tower block. I think I managed about eight, before it became very difficult and I just couldn’t do it. And it could have been great, had I done it. The images are still quite interesting because they’re part of the period as well, and of course in all of them everyone has a telly on, that’s just the way it was. That would have been 1972 I think, something like that.
Q. Many of your pictures document local Hackney protests which we touched on a bit earlier. The number of documentations of hospital closures seems really striking to me, I wonder if you could tell us a bit about what was going on in the local health service. [00:32:46]
NM. There was a local campaign called Hackney Health Emergency, and Hackney Trades Council who were both very active in supporting health campaigns, and I would take pictures for them - I’m pretty sure I didn't get paid for them, I didn’t get paid for almost anything. Some of the campaigns were very significant and involved hundreds of people. A lot of them involved the trade union specifically because obviously it was about job losses. So one hospital which closed down was the Queen Elizabeth Children's Hospital, which was in Bethnal Green, and that was an incredibly important hospital for the East End because it wasn't just the Bethnal Green hospital, it was the children's hospital for East London, and had a very special place in people’s lives because if your child was not well or had an accident or whatever, you would try to take them to the hospital, because that's what they do, work with children. I don’t think those kind of hospitals exist anymore. So that was a very emotive, passionate campaign. I took pictures there when they were in the process of closing it.
There were a few places where I ended up doing that. I took pictures in Lesney’s, the matchbox factory, the Christmas before it closed. Again that was hugely important in Hackney because it employed hundreds if not thousands of women, and they had a fleet of buses that would go round Hackney picking women up and taking them home. What was unusual was they organised the shift systems around childcare, so women could drop the kids off to school, work in Lesney’s and get back in time to get the kids again. One of the pictures you might have seen was one of the Lesney’s buses come through Hackney at night.
I think the thing about some of the pictures that I took, it wasn’t systematic, it was pretty random, some of it. A lot of the pictures were when things were made in Hackney, stuff, they might have been little metal cars or a metal box factory, they used to make stuff out of steel, and obviously a huge tailoring industry which is now mostly gone to the Far East or Turkey, which it’s interesting because lots of the pictures I’ve got are of Turkish people, Asian people who came here to make the clothes, but the clothes are now made in the country they came from, and those factories are gone.
Q. This takes us on to the question of race relations, anti-racism movement in Hackney in the 1970s and beyond. One of your poster series is about anti-Nazi league meetings, I guess it would be in late 1970s. It’s the trade school in Dalston Lane which even I remember, it was called Hackney Labour Club I think. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about racism in Hackney and the movement against racism. [00:36:04]
NM. Yes. It’s probably about 40 years since the National Front became a kind of force around East London and North London. It’s exactly 40 years since the so called Battle of Wood Green, which I went to, when the National Front were trying to march. What they would do … and clearly in the 1940s fascists were very strong around East London, and I think some of that continued. I was very involved in the Stoke Newington anti-Nazi league and lot of other stuff as well. What you’d have with them … the National Front they were often out leafleting, particularly down Brick Lane which became a real flashpoint for what was going on, so I used to go down there every Sunday with a whole group of people to try to make sure we took the pitch before the National Front did. It was kind of quite ritualistic.
A National Front organiser in Hoxton, who I’ve got a picture of, his name will come to me, he lived on the estates in Hoxton … Hoxton was quite a big stronghold for the National Front, because Hoxton was quite infamous for the gangs, it used to be the Hoxton Mob as they were called when I was growing up. What you had I think was a whole series of things coming together in the fight against the National Front, and the anti-Nazi league was fantastic because although the Socialist Workers Party was pretty prominent in it, it was a pretty broad coalition of people who were very determined not to let the National Front get a foothold.
At the same time there were a lot of pretty appalling racist murders, I think this one was around the time that a guy called Altab Ali was killed in Whitechapel, and that was a racist murder. In Lewisham there was a fire who killed people. In Walthamstow I took pictures at the funeral of the Khan family who was killed in an arson attack, a mother and three children were murdered. There was a riot there.
So you had street riots and I took pictures of quite a few of those, including the Brixton riots, at which point … after that I slightly stopped because I got attacked by the police and beaten up quite badly in the Brixton riots, and so after that I decided it was a bit too much.
Q. Is this another silk-screen it is on? [00:39:42]
NM. Yes, silk-screen. I think that was Lenthall Road actually, I’m pretty sure it’s Lenthall Road.
Q. And once the production had been completed how would they be distributed? [00:39:51]
NM. Flyposting! Get around at night.
Q. Would you like to talk to us about your experiences with it? [00:39:59]
NM. Yes, I love flyposting, I still do. I still do it. So we would have a bucket, wallpaper paste, posters! Usually … Sometimes we had a car, sometimes we didn’t and we’d creep around at night when probably it would have actually been better during the day, but anyway we did it a night, finding the most prominent place possible to slap the posters up, as many as possible. It was great, I loved it. It was such fun.
Q. Was there an alternative to silk-screen printing? [00:40:35]
NM. Yes, offset.
Q. What was the economics of it? [00:40:40]
NM. That depends on how much money you had access to. My first job was in a printer, as a camera operator. Sometimes there was an aesthetic - I wasn't conscious at the time - because obviously you could use much brighter colours on silk-screen, and you got a very different feel. I think probably by the late 1970s most things would be offset like this one was, for sure. And it was much easier to use photos as well.
Q. Was there an industrial aspect to silk-screen printing, or was it always more community and artistic-based? [00:41:29]
NM. The ones I was involved with were always community-based, we never got involved in the artistic side. You did have in the 1970s a growth of print shops that were offset litho, that were authentic community-based ones. There was one called Spider Web which was based in Islington. There was about three or four, some of which became pretty successful businesses, until the whole industry then changed.
Q. So how do you think the political culture of the area, of the borough has changed? What did you describe in your recent trip to London Fields? [00:42:16]
NM. I don't see … I don’t know … From what I see I can't see that local people have got huge benefits from what's gone on in Hackney in terms of … Clearly there’s more money there, absolutely more money in Hackney. But if I go to the coffee bars or whatever in Hackney, I don’t see local people working there at all, in the restaurants. Now, I think it's good that the money has moved into Hackney if it benefits local people, not if it’s forcing people to move out and there’s no employment opportunities.
Politically, what is it people are campaigning for? To keep their bar open till later or actually have more teachers in schools? I don't know. I did go through there last week and I didn’t like it to be honest, really. I don’t live there anymore, I moved out a few years back, but I’ve probably lived there longer than almost anyone I went to school with.
Obviously things change, and one of the things I think about East London in particular is … and one of the things I think is fantastic about it, is that it’s changed over the years a lot through the energy of newcomers, primarily immigrants, and a lot of things that happened have been in spite of planners not because of them. Some of it is great as well, if you take the area around Shoreditch where 20 years ago all those buildings were empty, there was nothing there, it was dead. It used to be full of cabinet makers. Twenty years ago it would have been unimaginable if you were to say to someone people are going to come here and they’re going to make money out of thin air, I mean literally thin air. And that's fantastic because it’s brought the area back to life, there are things going on.
But I think it’s like with all things nowadays, it’s an issue about social equality, social justice and how do you address that really. And I think the 1970s and 1980s … I mean, my sense, my memory, it could be wrong, was that there was a very strong sense of collective community will to change things for the better for as many people as possible, and I’m not sure that's there. [Ends 00:45:57]
Q. So would you be able to tell us actually step by step how you made this particular poster for example? [00:48:59]
NM. So this was a silk-screened poster, and the process is actually very laborious because to make it you have to create stencils through which the ink goes. Usually … in this case you have to cut it by hand, and obviously if you're looking at the kind of details that surrounds … So this was cut by hand, and some of it was photographic stencils, so this would have been a photographic stencil - for some of it would’ve been used letraset - and because it's in three colours and it takes a while for the ink to dry, and if you did say 150 you had to do the poster three times, but also wait for it to dry, so it probably took two or three days to do at least. The advantage of doing it though was that you had control over it in a sense, and the ink smelt really good.
Q. Was this a project that you took on by yourself, or you did it as a group? [00:50:07]
NM. This one I did by myself because … it must have been around the time of the coup in Chile or just afterwards I guess …
Q. Those ones I guess … when you talked about the photographic … The different process …[00:50:29]
NM. Yes. So the thing about silk screen is it’s very laborious, it’s very slow. I think later on probably in the late 1970s we had a bit more money on campaigns so we could actually afford to get things printed offset litho, which was much simpler, so something like this where you would still use letraset, but you would be able to lay it out, take it to print so effectively they took a photo of it and take it to printer. You could print a lot very, very quickly, so it was obviously a lot more efficient. But then there were other things, like certainly in the early days when we used standard duplicators, which were incredibly time consuming and looked pretty awful as well.
Q. [Describing photo] Can you describe to us what’s going on in this one? [00:53:29]
NM. Yes, this, I’m fairly sure, is the Hackney Health Emergency and these guys would be whatever the health authority was at the time. A public meeting around the cuts they were due to make in the health service and probably, I think it was St Leonard’s Hospital. It’s a meeting at the Town Hall and as you can see there was a lot of people protesting about what was going on then. I mean, the hospital did close as an Accident & Emergency, sometime after that. But the protests in Hackney those days were fairly lively, quite often involved occupying the Town Hall.
Q. The guys in the foreground really look under pressure. [00:54:23]
NM. Yes, they were very uncomfortable. I mean, they didn’t expect it. They were so used to just doing things, and [these] things happening was a bit of a surprise. It was a very effective campaign, very well organised as well.
Q. Can we just go through a couple, there’s a couple of people I just wanted to talk about, if you just stop there. So I believe that guy’s called Ian Rowe[?] I don’t know if you know him? [00:54:51]
NM. No.
Q. Okay, so in that case we might not be able to do this one. I meant that guy who was hanging around Chats Palace for ages in the 1990s, and this gentleman on the right there, him as well, he turns up in three or four pictures. Okay, I thought maybe we could talk about them, but if you don’t remember them it might not work out. He was a councillor actually, he became a Hackney councillor, I don’t know if he was at that point. This guy who turns up in three or four of the pictures clearly is a serial campaigner, but he was on the board at Chats Palace in the 1990s. Just two guys I recognise. There he is, there he is. That’s him again. [00:55:00]
NM. Oh yeah.
Q. Brian Walker definitely knows that guy’s name. [00:55:53]
Q. ? showed a picture to my girlfriend – she’s in the Hackney Labour Party - she said, “There’s a guy in the Labour party who tells me he always goes around with a red flag, that must be him.” [00:57:58]
NM. Oh yeah, that’s interesting. Yes that’s him.
So this I’m fairly sure was a rate capping demonstration where again the Council chamber was occupied, demanding that the Council not set a rate, which of course was illegal, so it did set a rate. It was a pretty raucous occasion, although in a way quite ritualised, because everybody knew what was going to happen, they would take over the council chamber and the council would still pass the budget. I think compared to the cuts nowadays it was nothing.
Q. Maybe the last piece like that was outside the Town Hall to do with the Poll tax. [00:59:05]
NM. Yes. That was probably it.
Q. I was there for that. [00:59:15]
NM. Were you? I was working at Haringey Council at the riot, which it was fun…not!
Q. Anything else in particular you would like to talk about? They’re quite theatrical some of them, aren’t they? [00:59:29]
NM. Yeah. St. Leonard’s Hospital was occupied before they closed it, and they carried on working as normal. I took some pictures inside. I don’t know how long it lasted for, the occupation. But it got pretty nasty. They took some of them to court individually, including a friend of mine. Yes, there you go, occupied. It was organised by NUPE. They tried to victimise this guy, whose name I can’t remember.
Q. OK. So as a photographer of a political event, how did you think of that photograph woman at the weekend at the EDL [English Defence League] demo? Saffiyah Khan. Have you seen it? [01:00:36]
NM. Oh yes, great image.
Q. I think it’s given everybody a bit of a boost. [01:00:51]
NM. Yes. She’s kind of … It helps that she’s very beautiful but also just so calm and in control. That's the thing I think, that quiet power. Fantastic, brilliant.
Neil Martinson (NM). Yes I was, and I lived there for most of my life. [00:00:05]
Q. Can you talk about everything? Can you tell us about your early Hackney memories, your school, your family, your football team? [00:00:20]
NM. Ha! Okay. So we lived in Stoke Newington in the flats that overlooked Clissold Road and Clissold Park. The flats are still there. Actually, my earliest memory is - I think I must have been four or something - my earliest memory is being very frightened being out in the flats on my own, because everything seemed to be so big and overwhelming. And that kind of memory has always stayed with me.
Stoke Newington was a very working class area, in fact the whole of Hackney was, and my parents were one of only four Jewish families that lived in the estate. They weren't particularly religious, but they were certainly culturally Jewish, and they went to a club in East End of London called Oxford & St Georges [Jewish Youth Club] which was in Whitechapel, which was incredibly important throughout their lives. Interestingly, I think it's an area of social history that has been a bit neglected, the role of those clubs. And I went to the club as well. I travelled from Stoke Newington to Whitechapel on the 67 bus, which took quite a long time.
I went to William Patten School, which again is still there. I think I was the only Jewish child in primary school and infants’ [school]. For the assembly, because it was a Christian assembly, I used to have to sit out of it. Not that I knew what any of it meant, either the Christian side or the Jewish side. It all seems a bit bizarre looking back on it, but there was a sense of … I think there was actually a sense of Jewish people were slightly different. When I used to play with my friends in the estate, one of the things they often used to say was, “oh, you’re not like them.” And what they meant was the frommers [Hasidic Jews] who lived around Cazenove Road, because obviously I didn't have the long curls, and I used to play with them.
A lot of my childhood was spent in Clissold Park, where in those days they had park keepers, and if you were bad or did something wrong they would just belt you. They were all very large Irish guys, very rowdy, I realise looking back on it they were probably all drunks. A lot of the area was being redeveloped as slum clearance, so where Stoke Newington school is, there used to be a whole row of houses that were being redeveloped and were empty. So we spent a lot of time playing in old houses and finding treasure.
Q. Did you support Arsenal from the go? [00:03:47]
NM. Yeah, because you could actually hear people cheering from where we lived. My dad used to take me to the Arsenal games, which was quite a big deal really. We used to walk there – it’s not very far - and we used to sit high up in the stands, and it was only years later that I realised he’d been taking me to see the reserve games. Nonetheless it was pretty exciting.
Q. How did you come to take up photography? As I understand you took up photography at a school age? [00:04:20]
NM. Yeah, I took it up when I was about 16-17. Really it came I think from two things.
There was a camera shop in Stoke Newington High Street, long gone. Of course being a boy there was something incredibly fascinating about the equipment. And so I used to walk past the shop and look at the cameras and look at the equipment and kind of think ‘wow, they look great’.
The other factor was the library in Stoke Newington … So you had a reference library and the lending library, and they had books of photography. They were pretty awful actually, I did have some and I threw them away. They were kind of annuals of photography; colour, very badly printed.
Hackney when I was growing up was a pretty grey place. There wasn't much to do, and it was pretty boring especially as a teenager. I think what the books did was they opened up a world that I didn’t know about, I mean a lot of it was travel photography, or exotic parts of the world. I just carried on looking at different books of photos. A friend of mine had a Saturday job at Westminster Libraries and they had a really good collection of photography books. To my shame I still have some of those books, particularly a book by Henri Cartier-Bresson. So I started to discover things on my own, I didn't know any photographers, I didn’t know that world at all. It was completely alien to me.
When Centerprise started we got involved with that through one of our teachers at Hackney Downs - they were fairly radical teachers. I think they were the kind of post-1968 generation. They introduced to all kinds of ideas, I'm sure now they’d be locked up in prison for it. We used to go see jazz with them in Liverpool Street, which clearly would be a no-no now. There was quite a lot going on in schools. There was the Schools Action Union, which was like a trade union for school students, and we went on strike, walked out of school. It was pretty chaotic, but it was quite fun. There was a whole lot of alternative music.
Through the teachers we got to know Centerprise and we wanted to produce a magazine, which we did, it was called Hackney Miscarriage, there were two terrific issues of it, I've got a couple of copies. Next to Centerprise was an organisation called Free Form who had a dark room. And I managed to save up to buy a Zenit E, which I bought from the camera shop in Stoke Newington, a Russian clunky camera. I started taking pictures in a very kind of ad hoc, hit and miss kind of way, and was able to go to Free Form to develop the film.
Q. Where was the dark room? [00:08:21]
NM. It was in Dalston Lane.
Q. Alright, that’s before Free Form and Chats [Palace]? That’s when Martin Goodridge…? [00:08:25]
NM. That’s it, Martin Goodridge was going. It was really kind of it, that’s what I was doing. Well, there wasn’t any internet, so all I could do was going to the library and look at books. I didn’t know any photographers. I slowly started to take pictures, but I also got involved in producing materials, because I guess I was quite radical for a 16 year old, and found it all very exciting, and became quite politicised as well at the same time.
Q. So it wasn’t particularly an artistic purchase? Most of it was bearing witness, documentary type of motivation? Or would you say was a mixture of the two? [00:09:10]
NM. It wasn’t artistic, not in a conscious sense, although I look at some of my first images and think ‘bloody hell, I wish I could take pictures like that now’, cause I think they had a kind of naïve, innocent approach. I think a lot of it, a lot of the motivation was to … a sense that there’s a whole history of working class people that had never been talked about or recorded, that was important. I really got into history when I was in school - not in an academic sense because I managed to fail at everything - but I read a lot and it was really obvious how much history was missing, what the gaps were. And I thought it was really important to record that in different ways, and to use photography or posters or graphics in a way that makes for change, makes for social, progressive social change.
Q. What were the cultural spaces for young people like in the 1960s and 1970s? [00:10:49]
NM. Ha! Depends on how you define cultural space. I did briefly go to Boy Scouts, which was pretty tacky and horrible. There weren’t any, there were some cinemas but when I was growing up most of those were in the process of closing down. I went to Saturday morning cinema when I was young, but I think probably by my teens – because I think there was something like six or seven cinemas from Stamford Hill to Dalston – by my teens pretty much all of them had closed down. So, there was nothing in Hackney, I mean really, nothing!
Q. Any particular clubs or pubs or music venues that you used to go to? [00:11:37]
NM. Yes, there were some pubs, probably when I was about 15-16. There was a pub in Dalston called the Duke of Wellington which used to have Irish music, it was a big Irish pub - because Dalston had a big Irish community then - and the Irish pub was pretty well known for supporting the Republican movement, so they would have collections there and they would have folk music, Irish folk music. The other pubs tended to have jukeboxes, I don’t recall any pubs in Hackney having live music apart from the Duke of Wellington.
Q. Can you describe the political culture in Hackney and East London in general in the period when you were becoming an adult? [00:12:23]
NM. So when I was becoming an adult, the politics I sort of engaged in was very much about trying to address some issues that were fairly basic. So there were lots of activities around things like nursery provision. A lot of it was about trying to change what Hackney Council was doing because Hackney Council was very old Labour, we had councillors that had been there for years and years. And also I think the people I moved with, we never saw that as being the politics we were interested in either. So the Councils were in a sense seen as the enemy – it was a very simplistic kind of politics.
But what you did have - certainly by the time I got involved in Centerprise - was a lot of active groups campaigning on all kinds of issues, a lot around housing, there were a lot of families in bed & breakfast accommodation, a lot of council housing was really poor and really, really awful. There was certainly corruption within the council in terms of the housing and construction services.
Obviously you had the feminist movement. You had a movement around working class history as well, there was a history workshop which was incredibly influential for me, which was started out at Ruskin College, Oxford and that was partly the inspiration for the People's Autobiography of Hackney, which I was really involved with as well.
So what you had, I think was … I reckon sometimes if you look at the groups that met at Centerprise, which was an enormous number of groups, some of them pretty wacky it has to be said, and some of them almost Monty Python in terms of the varieties of say Marxist-Leninist groups that used to meet there. But you also had some very grassroots groups, it’s hard to say isn’t it?! Grassroots groups working, because you had estates which were just falling down with damp, I mean really awful conditions.
Q. What was the motivation for Centerprise to be set up, and was it always in Kingsland High Street? [00:15:07]
NM. It was originally in Dalston Lane, which is when I first got involved with it when I was still in school, and it was set up primarily by a guy called Glenn Thompson. We thought he was a great guy, he was a Black American guy, had great big afro hair, charismatic, visionary, and in many ways his ideas were fairly simple, it was that to retrieve any kind of social justice you need literacy, you need the tools to actually take yourself forward both individually and collectively.
A lot of that was the drive behind the idea of having a bookshop, I mean there were no bookshops in Hackney. Well there was one kind of bookshop in Stoke Newington but there was actually nothing in it. So we didn’t have access to books that we could buy, or steal usually. So the drive … the drive was also connected to, a lot of it was also inspired by Ivan Illich and Paulo Friere, particularly Paulo Freire in terms of literacy - because if you look at what happened to Centerprise, some of it was about the expression of ideas for working class people, but some of the work was also basic literacy, helping people to read and write, the basic tools you need to kind of get by in life but also to advance whatever it is you believe in.
I think what happened was there was a whole group of us from school to whom it was amazingly exciting, because suddenly - I told you Hackney was grey, but suddenly had this colours and you had ideas and you had this amazing books that you've never seen before, so it was really exciting. I used to work in the coffee bar when it was in Dalston Lane on Thursday nights, when I was still at school which was useful, a bit of income for me.
Centerprise gave us some money to produce an alternative schools magazine, and that was condemned by our headteacher at Hackney Downs as being a maoist cell, so that was a pretty good result really. Also there was a whole load of alternative publishing going on at the time, because after we published Hackney Miscarriage, I went on a TV programme called Late Night Lineup which was on BBC2 with two friends, and we were asked our views on the alternative newspapers and magazines that were around at the times, so you had … the early days of Private Eye, Oz, IT, all kinds of material being produced.
And it wasn’t easy to do that. We kind of take it for granted now how easy it is to communicate, but you know a lot of the stuff we were doing - I haven’t got any examples here - but we used to use duplicators, standard duplicators with stencils which either you dyed or if you were really sophisticated there would be a very simple scanner and you might do more than one colour. And posters, mostly the early ones were done with letraset, so you kind of wrap up onto the poster or some of them were silk-screened.
A lot of the early movements particularly around community politics were about access to the means of production and distribution, i.e. how can you make a poster to engage and communicate with people? So you had things like the Lenthall Road Workshop, which is where this poster was done, which I did, and that was silk-screened. There was no other way to do it, if you wanted to publicise something there wasn't an easy way to do it, you had to make it really, unless you had enough money to pay for a printer, mostly we didn't have any money.
Q. Can you give us a detailed description of the process of making a poster, the process of silk-screen posters? [00:19:41]
NM. Yes, I’m not sure I can remember all of it, but effectively what you had to do was to make a stencil because the way silk-screen works is you push the ink through a stencil. So in this case, this particular poster, three colours, so fairly sophisticated, and all of this was cut by hand, this was letraset, this was cut by hand, that was cut by hand and mostly, it still looks quite good, I think, but it would take a long time, it could take you a day just to make the stencil, and then if you had as in this case three colours, you had to print each colour, put it on a rack, if you're doing a 100 of them say then you have to do 300 altogether and try to make sure they're all in the right position as well, so it would probably take two or three days to make it.
Q. Do you know much about the origins of Lenthall Road Workshop? [00:21:08]
NM. I can’t remember the name of the guy who was there, I remember what he looked like. He seemed to be quite old. He had ginger hair and a ginger beard, quite a very warm face, and he always cycled everywhere on a ratchet wheel bike. But that’s all I remember.
Q. Can you remember any other cultural groups that emerged during the early to mid-1970s in Hackney other than Centerprise, Lenthall Road, for example Chats Palace, any of these places? [00:21:35]
NM. Yes, you had the festival down at Chats Palace, over at the Marshes, Hackney Marshes Fun Festival I believe it was called.
Q. Sorry, can I just stop you for a second, because I had to stop the thing. Can I just ask you to start answering Pete’s question about Chats Palace again? [00:22:09]
NM. Sure. So there was Chats Palace, there was the Hackney Marshes Fun Festival, there wasn’t … I can’t remember there being much else, not in terms of actual buildings or physical presence, but there well might have been …
Q. And how did you become involved in the Hackney Flashers and your connection with Jo Spence? [00:22:36]
NM. I had some friends who were on the Hackney Trades Council, Women Subcommittee. The Trades Council was coming up to its 75th anniversary, and they wanted to do something as part of that, it was specifically about women, and I was the only photographer they knew, there weren’t many photographers that used to hang out in Hackney. And they came, we met to discuss what they’d like to do and talked about putting up an exhibition. I knew I needed to get some more people to come and help on this, because I was 20 at the time, I didn't know a lot, obviously I thought I knew more than I did but I really didn't know a lot. Jo had just been to talk to people at Centerprise about what she might do at Centerprise to help in any way, so I ended up meeting with her because I didn't know many photographers at all, I didn't know any.
Then between us we worked out what kind of exhibition we might do and it was very much a record of women at work because it was for the Trades Council, but it was about the inequalities that existed particularly around pay, because women got paid a lot less. We gathered together a group, mostly women but not exclusively, of photographers and set about recording the life of women at work in Hackney.
It was pretty simple, we went to factories and we took pictures. Looking at the pictures now you’d have to say it’d be very difficult to get those pictures now because you wouldn't get access, they wouldn’t let you in, and we just took as much as we could. It was presented very, very simply, it was very straight, it was pictures and some text with how much they were earning compared to men. The exhibition went on at Hackney Town Hall. I left the group shortly after that.
What's interesting looking at the pictures now is the number of women doing quite heavy manual work, and also they don't look very young. Women worked until they were quite old, in quite difficult jobs then, and it was manual work.
Q. The thing, documenting Working Lives obviously carried on, you can see it on your website, you’ve got a section called ‘Working Lives’, but could you tell us a little bit about the book that you produced with Centerprise? [00:25:25]
NM. I was involved with the people that worked in Hackney since they started, which I think about 1972. I worked on pretty much on all the books, mostly designing them, and again it was self-taught. We wanted to talk about people at work and working lives, we did one called Working Lives Vol.1, which my dad is in - he was a cabinet maker - and it makes sense to do one that brought it up to 1976-77 as it was then. I think because I was so involved in photography, we said, “Why don’t we take the pictures as well, because it’s contemporary”. I got together a group of five photographers to do it. We got a little bit of money from Centerprise. Centerprise had some funding from the Arts Council, and I think it took us three years to do the book.
It was a pretty ambitious undertaking, it was a very big book about 120 photos. All of the accounts are oral accounts so they all had to be transcribed, they all had to be checked and it’s quite extraordinary we managed to do it, looking back on it. It was a huge risk for the organisation because it cost a lot of money to produce.
We did have a heart-stopping moment because one of the accounts was of a mortuary attendant in Hackney Hospital, and the arrangement was we could take the photos as long as there was no dead body identifiable, and the way we used to prepare the photos for printing was to mark the crop on the tracing paper for the camera operator. The books came back, 5000 of them - because that was the only way we’d keep the unit price less than a pound - flip through it and on one of the pages on the mortuary was a face looking straight out, at which point I went into a cold sweat thinking have I cocked this up? Did I do the crop wrong? I checked, fortunately I got the crop right, the printer got it wrong so what they had to do was to reprint that page and insert it by hand, all 5000 copies.
The book sold out, we sold 5000, I think it was reprinted twice, so it probably sold 15,000 copies in the end, mostly in Hackney because … I mean, I worked for the publishing project - I had lots of different jobs - one of them was distribution which involved getting in a minivan, drive around Hackney to newsagents and the bookshops that were starting to sprout, not that many taking the books in or taking them to schools.
Q. On your website you talk about some of the inspiration, the photographic inspirations for that book. Can you tell us a little bit about that? [00:28:59]
NM. Yes, John Berger in a word really, and a book called A Fortunate Man which had a huge impact on certainly what I was doing, and the way I saw the world because at the time it was the only book I had seen then that had that combination of words and photos, because either you had a book of photos or you had a book of words. It might sound odd now, but at the time it was kind of revolutionary to have a documentary photographer working alongside that kind of text. That was very much the inspiration for it and kind of thinking it through, I think it worked pretty well.
Q. Would you like to mention any other photographers that were an influence to you? [00:30:00]
NM. Influenced me? Well, there’s a lot. Jean Moir took the pictures for A Fortunate Man, and I said that my first introduction to photography was Cartier-Bresson and I thought the images were just extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. Then it was like a whole load of photographers, Bruce Davidson in America. East 100th Street. Again, extraordinary piece of work. A lot of Walker Evans, so in a sense a very traditional documentary photographers, and I remain quite unrepentant about that. I still think it's important.
Q. It’s interesting that your series of the tower blocks, portraits of the Nightingale Estate - I presume it’s the Nightingale Estate - which I really liked. I wonder if you could talk about that. I’ve noticed they were taken almost exactly at the same time as Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows a series of pictures very quite similar inside a street in Manchester. It’s just really odd that a Manchurian never saw those pictures because they would be made around at the same time, but I wonder if you had come across them subsequently. [00:30:53]
NM. I came across them subsequently, at the time I never knew about them.
Q. There’s quite a striking similarity in terms of the interior décor of the flats - that’s quite natural in the working class environment - but it’s the nature of the wallpapers is really dominant in the pictures. How did that come about? [00:31:32]
NM. So one of the pictures is of my mum and dad, because that’s where we lived, so we moved into the Nightingale Estate when it first took tenants, after just being built. So the idea I had - which I didn’t manage to complete and I think it’s partly because I was really too young to work out how to do these things - I wanted to take pictures of every single family in the tower block. I think I managed about eight, before it became very difficult and I just couldn’t do it. And it could have been great, had I done it. The images are still quite interesting because they’re part of the period as well, and of course in all of them everyone has a telly on, that’s just the way it was. That would have been 1972 I think, something like that.
Q. Many of your pictures document local Hackney protests which we touched on a bit earlier. The number of documentations of hospital closures seems really striking to me, I wonder if you could tell us a bit about what was going on in the local health service. [00:32:46]
NM. There was a local campaign called Hackney Health Emergency, and Hackney Trades Council who were both very active in supporting health campaigns, and I would take pictures for them - I’m pretty sure I didn't get paid for them, I didn’t get paid for almost anything. Some of the campaigns were very significant and involved hundreds of people. A lot of them involved the trade union specifically because obviously it was about job losses. So one hospital which closed down was the Queen Elizabeth Children's Hospital, which was in Bethnal Green, and that was an incredibly important hospital for the East End because it wasn't just the Bethnal Green hospital, it was the children's hospital for East London, and had a very special place in people’s lives because if your child was not well or had an accident or whatever, you would try to take them to the hospital, because that's what they do, work with children. I don’t think those kind of hospitals exist anymore. So that was a very emotive, passionate campaign. I took pictures there when they were in the process of closing it.
There were a few places where I ended up doing that. I took pictures in Lesney’s, the matchbox factory, the Christmas before it closed. Again that was hugely important in Hackney because it employed hundreds if not thousands of women, and they had a fleet of buses that would go round Hackney picking women up and taking them home. What was unusual was they organised the shift systems around childcare, so women could drop the kids off to school, work in Lesney’s and get back in time to get the kids again. One of the pictures you might have seen was one of the Lesney’s buses come through Hackney at night.
I think the thing about some of the pictures that I took, it wasn’t systematic, it was pretty random, some of it. A lot of the pictures were when things were made in Hackney, stuff, they might have been little metal cars or a metal box factory, they used to make stuff out of steel, and obviously a huge tailoring industry which is now mostly gone to the Far East or Turkey, which it’s interesting because lots of the pictures I’ve got are of Turkish people, Asian people who came here to make the clothes, but the clothes are now made in the country they came from, and those factories are gone.
Q. This takes us on to the question of race relations, anti-racism movement in Hackney in the 1970s and beyond. One of your poster series is about anti-Nazi league meetings, I guess it would be in late 1970s. It’s the trade school in Dalston Lane which even I remember, it was called Hackney Labour Club I think. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about racism in Hackney and the movement against racism. [00:36:04]
NM. Yes. It’s probably about 40 years since the National Front became a kind of force around East London and North London. It’s exactly 40 years since the so called Battle of Wood Green, which I went to, when the National Front were trying to march. What they would do … and clearly in the 1940s fascists were very strong around East London, and I think some of that continued. I was very involved in the Stoke Newington anti-Nazi league and lot of other stuff as well. What you’d have with them … the National Front they were often out leafleting, particularly down Brick Lane which became a real flashpoint for what was going on, so I used to go down there every Sunday with a whole group of people to try to make sure we took the pitch before the National Front did. It was kind of quite ritualistic.
A National Front organiser in Hoxton, who I’ve got a picture of, his name will come to me, he lived on the estates in Hoxton … Hoxton was quite a big stronghold for the National Front, because Hoxton was quite infamous for the gangs, it used to be the Hoxton Mob as they were called when I was growing up. What you had I think was a whole series of things coming together in the fight against the National Front, and the anti-Nazi league was fantastic because although the Socialist Workers Party was pretty prominent in it, it was a pretty broad coalition of people who were very determined not to let the National Front get a foothold.
At the same time there were a lot of pretty appalling racist murders, I think this one was around the time that a guy called Altab Ali was killed in Whitechapel, and that was a racist murder. In Lewisham there was a fire who killed people. In Walthamstow I took pictures at the funeral of the Khan family who was killed in an arson attack, a mother and three children were murdered. There was a riot there.
So you had street riots and I took pictures of quite a few of those, including the Brixton riots, at which point … after that I slightly stopped because I got attacked by the police and beaten up quite badly in the Brixton riots, and so after that I decided it was a bit too much.
Q. Is this another silk-screen it is on? [00:39:42]
NM. Yes, silk-screen. I think that was Lenthall Road actually, I’m pretty sure it’s Lenthall Road.
Q. And once the production had been completed how would they be distributed? [00:39:51]
NM. Flyposting! Get around at night.
Q. Would you like to talk to us about your experiences with it? [00:39:59]
NM. Yes, I love flyposting, I still do. I still do it. So we would have a bucket, wallpaper paste, posters! Usually … Sometimes we had a car, sometimes we didn’t and we’d creep around at night when probably it would have actually been better during the day, but anyway we did it a night, finding the most prominent place possible to slap the posters up, as many as possible. It was great, I loved it. It was such fun.
Q. Was there an alternative to silk-screen printing? [00:40:35]
NM. Yes, offset.
Q. What was the economics of it? [00:40:40]
NM. That depends on how much money you had access to. My first job was in a printer, as a camera operator. Sometimes there was an aesthetic - I wasn't conscious at the time - because obviously you could use much brighter colours on silk-screen, and you got a very different feel. I think probably by the late 1970s most things would be offset like this one was, for sure. And it was much easier to use photos as well.
Q. Was there an industrial aspect to silk-screen printing, or was it always more community and artistic-based? [00:41:29]
NM. The ones I was involved with were always community-based, we never got involved in the artistic side. You did have in the 1970s a growth of print shops that were offset litho, that were authentic community-based ones. There was one called Spider Web which was based in Islington. There was about three or four, some of which became pretty successful businesses, until the whole industry then changed.
Q. So how do you think the political culture of the area, of the borough has changed? What did you describe in your recent trip to London Fields? [00:42:16]
NM. I don't see … I don’t know … From what I see I can't see that local people have got huge benefits from what's gone on in Hackney in terms of … Clearly there’s more money there, absolutely more money in Hackney. But if I go to the coffee bars or whatever in Hackney, I don’t see local people working there at all, in the restaurants. Now, I think it's good that the money has moved into Hackney if it benefits local people, not if it’s forcing people to move out and there’s no employment opportunities.
Politically, what is it people are campaigning for? To keep their bar open till later or actually have more teachers in schools? I don't know. I did go through there last week and I didn’t like it to be honest, really. I don’t live there anymore, I moved out a few years back, but I’ve probably lived there longer than almost anyone I went to school with.
Obviously things change, and one of the things I think about East London in particular is … and one of the things I think is fantastic about it, is that it’s changed over the years a lot through the energy of newcomers, primarily immigrants, and a lot of things that happened have been in spite of planners not because of them. Some of it is great as well, if you take the area around Shoreditch where 20 years ago all those buildings were empty, there was nothing there, it was dead. It used to be full of cabinet makers. Twenty years ago it would have been unimaginable if you were to say to someone people are going to come here and they’re going to make money out of thin air, I mean literally thin air. And that's fantastic because it’s brought the area back to life, there are things going on.
But I think it’s like with all things nowadays, it’s an issue about social equality, social justice and how do you address that really. And I think the 1970s and 1980s … I mean, my sense, my memory, it could be wrong, was that there was a very strong sense of collective community will to change things for the better for as many people as possible, and I’m not sure that's there. [Ends 00:45:57]
Q. So would you be able to tell us actually step by step how you made this particular poster for example? [00:48:59]
NM. So this was a silk-screened poster, and the process is actually very laborious because to make it you have to create stencils through which the ink goes. Usually … in this case you have to cut it by hand, and obviously if you're looking at the kind of details that surrounds … So this was cut by hand, and some of it was photographic stencils, so this would have been a photographic stencil - for some of it would’ve been used letraset - and because it's in three colours and it takes a while for the ink to dry, and if you did say 150 you had to do the poster three times, but also wait for it to dry, so it probably took two or three days to do at least. The advantage of doing it though was that you had control over it in a sense, and the ink smelt really good.
Q. Was this a project that you took on by yourself, or you did it as a group? [00:50:07]
NM. This one I did by myself because … it must have been around the time of the coup in Chile or just afterwards I guess …
Q. Those ones I guess … when you talked about the photographic … The different process …[00:50:29]
NM. Yes. So the thing about silk screen is it’s very laborious, it’s very slow. I think later on probably in the late 1970s we had a bit more money on campaigns so we could actually afford to get things printed offset litho, which was much simpler, so something like this where you would still use letraset, but you would be able to lay it out, take it to print so effectively they took a photo of it and take it to printer. You could print a lot very, very quickly, so it was obviously a lot more efficient. But then there were other things, like certainly in the early days when we used standard duplicators, which were incredibly time consuming and looked pretty awful as well.
Q. [Describing photo] Can you describe to us what’s going on in this one? [00:53:29]
NM. Yes, this, I’m fairly sure, is the Hackney Health Emergency and these guys would be whatever the health authority was at the time. A public meeting around the cuts they were due to make in the health service and probably, I think it was St Leonard’s Hospital. It’s a meeting at the Town Hall and as you can see there was a lot of people protesting about what was going on then. I mean, the hospital did close as an Accident & Emergency, sometime after that. But the protests in Hackney those days were fairly lively, quite often involved occupying the Town Hall.
Q. The guys in the foreground really look under pressure. [00:54:23]
NM. Yes, they were very uncomfortable. I mean, they didn’t expect it. They were so used to just doing things, and [these] things happening was a bit of a surprise. It was a very effective campaign, very well organised as well.
Q. Can we just go through a couple, there’s a couple of people I just wanted to talk about, if you just stop there. So I believe that guy’s called Ian Rowe[?] I don’t know if you know him? [00:54:51]
NM. No.
Q. Okay, so in that case we might not be able to do this one. I meant that guy who was hanging around Chats Palace for ages in the 1990s, and this gentleman on the right there, him as well, he turns up in three or four pictures. Okay, I thought maybe we could talk about them, but if you don’t remember them it might not work out. He was a councillor actually, he became a Hackney councillor, I don’t know if he was at that point. This guy who turns up in three or four of the pictures clearly is a serial campaigner, but he was on the board at Chats Palace in the 1990s. Just two guys I recognise. There he is, there he is. That’s him again. [00:55:00]
NM. Oh yeah.
Q. Brian Walker definitely knows that guy’s name. [00:55:53]
Q. ? showed a picture to my girlfriend – she’s in the Hackney Labour Party - she said, “There’s a guy in the Labour party who tells me he always goes around with a red flag, that must be him.” [00:57:58]
NM. Oh yeah, that’s interesting. Yes that’s him.
So this I’m fairly sure was a rate capping demonstration where again the Council chamber was occupied, demanding that the Council not set a rate, which of course was illegal, so it did set a rate. It was a pretty raucous occasion, although in a way quite ritualised, because everybody knew what was going to happen, they would take over the council chamber and the council would still pass the budget. I think compared to the cuts nowadays it was nothing.
Q. Maybe the last piece like that was outside the Town Hall to do with the Poll tax. [00:59:05]
NM. Yes. That was probably it.
Q. I was there for that. [00:59:15]
NM. Were you? I was working at Haringey Council at the riot, which it was fun…not!
Q. Anything else in particular you would like to talk about? They’re quite theatrical some of them, aren’t they? [00:59:29]
NM. Yeah. St. Leonard’s Hospital was occupied before they closed it, and they carried on working as normal. I took some pictures inside. I don’t know how long it lasted for, the occupation. But it got pretty nasty. They took some of them to court individually, including a friend of mine. Yes, there you go, occupied. It was organised by NUPE. They tried to victimise this guy, whose name I can’t remember.
Q. OK. So as a photographer of a political event, how did you think of that photograph woman at the weekend at the EDL [English Defence League] demo? Saffiyah Khan. Have you seen it? [01:00:36]
NM. Oh yes, great image.
Q. I think it’s given everybody a bit of a boost. [01:00:51]
NM. Yes. She’s kind of … It helps that she’s very beautiful but also just so calm and in control. That's the thing I think, that quiet power. Fantastic, brilliant.