Auteur François Truffaut

Auteur François Truffaut was born 1932 in Paris and died 1984 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. His mother and stepfather sent Truffaut when he was a young boy to live with various nannies as wll as an important loving grandmother, who nurtured his love of the arts. As a teenager, he was an enthusiastic moviegoer, often found in the front row of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française, which was co-founded by Georges Franju and Jean Mitry. Langlois (1914-1977) was a French film archivist and cinephile. During the Second World War, Langlois and his colleagues helped save many films that were at risk of being destroyed during the Nazi occupation of France

As a pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema, where his film screenings in Paris in the 1950s are often credited with providing the ideals that led to the development of the politique des auteurs (auteur theory) on the generation of young cinephiles and critics who would later become the La Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave). Among the directors included were Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Alain Resnais. The future filmmakers were called les enfants de la cinémathèque (children of the cinémathèque), as they could often be found in the front row of packed screenings.

When Truffaut first took a chair at the cinémathèque he spoke that when the screen lit up, it was the first time he could see films that had been banned, films that he had never been allowed to see, films that he didn’t know had existed, and films that ultimately changed his life – the effect was immense, overwhelming, transformative. Even more so, for Langlois would screen the films, back-to-back, without any breaks between them: westerns by John Ford, comedies by Chaplin, and Josef von Sternberg films with Marlene Dietrich; gangster films by Howard Hawks, musicals by Vincent Minnelli and crime dramas by Robert Bresson and Fritz Lang; and, most importantly, films by Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, who would become his idols. It was akin to seeing them all at once.

For Godard and Truffaut: In Defense of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française scroll below to post script.

After starting his own film club in 1948, Truffaut met film critic, André Bazin, who had a great effect on his professional and personal life, ultimately becoming his spiritual father. Bazin was the head of another film society and became a personal friend and helped him out of various financial and criminal situations during his formative years. At 18, Truffaut joined the French Army in 1950, but spent the next two years trying to escape, and was arrested for attempting to desert the army and incarcerated in military prison. Bazin used his political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a job at his new film magazine, Cahiers du cinéma (Notebook of Cinema), which allowed Truffaut a platform to echo Bazin’s critical film philosophy, the politique des auteurs, a theory which changed the landscape of film criticism and cinema forever.

For more Auteur, scroll below to post script and see the politique des auteurs.

Composer and conductor Maurice Jauber.

Maurice Jaubert (born 1900 in Nice) was a prolific French composer who scored some of the most important French films of the early sound era. Jaubert grew up in a musical household, and began playing the piano aged five. Jaubert left for Paris and studied law and literature at the Sorbonne, but became seduced by classical music. His music was written in a style of clarity, frankness and freedom, in which he did not seek novelty for the sake of it, where his spontaneity is not weighed down by pedantic formulas.

Maurice Jaubert was the second son of François Jaubert, a lawyer who would become the president of the Nice Bar Association. He followed in his father’s footsteps and upon graduation from the Sorbonne, became the youngest lawyer in his hometown.

After Jaubert was awarded the baccalaureat (a college bachelor’s degree), from the Lycée Masséna in Nice in 1916, he enrolled at the Nice Conservatory of Music, where he studied harmony, counterpoint and piano. He was awarded the first piano prize in 1916.

Although Maurice Jaubert understood and appreciated film composing and scoring, he also had other creative musical outlets. As music director of Pathé-Nathan studio, he conducted musical orchestrations of several other composers, including Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud.

Left to right: Maurice Jaubert, French writer Jean Giono, and Brazilian-French film director, Alberto Cavalcanti, courtesy of Underscore,fr/portraits.L

Jaubert was a French army officer in engineering during World War I, and was demobilized in 1922. The next year he completed his musical education in Paris with Albert Groz, while undertaking a variety of music related jobs such as proof correction and checking Pleyela rolls.

The compositions by Jaubert’s in the early 1920s included songs, piano pieces, chamber music and divertissements. He wrote his first stage music in 1925 for a play by Calderón, Le Magicien prodigieux, using the Pleyela, a revolutionary player piano at the time. He was then hired by Pleyel to record rolls on the Pleyela.

Left to right: Maurice Ravel, French Romantic composer and best man at Jaubert’s wedding; Georges Neveux, devenu secrétaire de La Comédie; and Jaubert as the new smiling husband, courtesy of Underscore,fr/portraits.

Jaubert as a young composer, was attracted by technical innovations that could serve his artistic aspirations. While working on the play, Le Magicien prodigieux, he met a young soprano, Marthe Bréga, who would later sing most of his vocal compositions. They married in 1926, with composer, Maurice Ravel as his best man.

In 1929, while pursuing his work for the concert hall and the stage, Maurice Jaubert began writing and conducting for the cinema. He collaborated with prominent directors such as Alberto Cavalcanti (Le Petit Chaperon Rouge), Jean Vigo (Zero for Conduct and L’Atalante), René Clair (Quatorze Juillet), Julien Duvivier (Carnet de bal and La Fin du Jour), and Marcel Carné’s Drôle de drame, Hôtel du Nord and Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows).

Maurice Jaubert and François Truffaut

Thirty years after Maurice Jaubert’s death, director François Truffaut, purchased the publishing rights to four of his orchestral compositions.

It is believed that Truffaut first discovered Jaubert’s compositional music scores on the radio, but it’s never been determined which score he first heard. Perhaps it was Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, where Jaubert in an early scene asked his musicians play the score backwards, similar to what George Martin would do in The Beatles’ recordings 35-years-later. Or, possibly from the film, Carnet de bal, where Jaubert enhanced director Julien Duvivier’s illusionary imagery with his own brillant use of lyrical imagery in his compositional music soundtrack.

Nevertheless, an emotional bond was set, when Truffaut used four of Jaubert’s orchestral compositions to four of his own films: Le Chambre Verte, L’Histoire d’Adèle, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes and L’Argent de poche.

Le Chambre Verte (The Green Room, 1978) was a deeply personal project for Truffaut, where he spent several years working on the film’s script, played the main character, Davenne, and felt a special connection to the theme of honoring and remembering the dead. In the film, he finds a forgotten, derelict altar, and rebuilds it and rechristens it as his own Altar of the Dead. The film is adapted from Henry James’ 1895 short story, Altar of the Dead and also two other works by James: The Beast in the Jungle and The Way It Came. Inside the chapel Davenne places portraits of people from his own life, which included composer Maurice Jaubert, writer Henry James and actor Oskar Werner, taken from footage of Jules and Jim, when Werner was an Austrian-German soldier during the Great War.

Cécilia, played by Nathalie Baye, then better known as the script girl in Truffaut’s1973 film, La Nuit américaine (Day for Night), plays the role of a young woman who helps him build his alter. Complications arise when Cécilia requests that one of the candles represent her former deceased lover, but is rebuffed by Davenne, due to a betrayal by the deceased man in the past.

Le Chambre Verte was one of Truffaut’s most critically praised films, and considered by some as his most personal, but also one of his least successful financially. From that point on, Truffaut’s films were never quite the same, making more popular mainstream films like the crowd pleasing Le Dernier Métro, a 1980 historical drama film, which won ten César Awards for best film, best actor (Depardieu), best actress (Deneuve), best cinematography, best director, best editing, best music, best production design, best sound and best writing. The box office and accolades were immense, but for many serious critics it spelled the kiss of death of Truffaut’s personal films. Truffaut followed with La Femme d’à côté, a film about adultry, and the detective film, Vivement dimanche!, where he did display his personal vision in his love of genre films. In a sense; one for Renoir and one for Hitchcock.

The 1975 film, L’Histoire d’Adèle (The Story of Adèle H.) is a historical drama directed by François Truffaut, and starring Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Robinson and Sylvia Marriott, based on Adèle Hugo’s diaries. The narrative is about Adèle Hugo, the daughter of writer Victor Hugo, once considered the most famous man in France. Victor Hugo was so famous that Adèle would only use the first initial of her surname to hide her identity. Adèle Hugo’s unrequited love for a military officer leads to her downfall. Throughout the film she is on a quest to find the military officer, but, as the film ends, she has become battered and weary to the point of destitution, that when she finally finds the officer, she passes by him without realizing who he is.

As in all four of Truffaut and Jaubert films, the images, sound and music are profound. But much notice was given to 20-year-old Isabelle Adjani, who justifiably received critical acclaim for her performance as Adele H., which led to her status as a legend on the French screen today.

Truffaut’s 1977 film, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women) is billed as a romantic comedy about a man who loves women. The film stars Bertrand Morane, played by Charles Denner, a Truffaut regular who had appeared in his earlier films, 1968’s La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) and 1972’s Une belle fille comme moi (Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me). The movie begins with one the most joyful funerals in film history, where in attendance are all the women with whom Morane loved in his life. The ensemble of female actors is too irresistible not to list, which features, Brigitte Fossey, the former child star of Clément’s1952 landmark film, Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games), Leslie Caron, with no introduction required; Nelly Borgeaud as one of Bertrand’s emotionally unstable lovers; Geneviève as Hélène, a lingerie saleswoman; and Valérie Fabienne, one of Bertrand’s former lovers, who he regrets making her think that he wanted a serious relationship with her.

As noted above, Bertrand Morane loved women, as Truffaut did as well; so, let’s close with the opening of one of the cinema’s most euphoric funeral sequences in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes.

The cast also included, Roselyne Puyo as Nicole, in a bit part as an usherette, who in real life is deaf. Truffaut also served as a passionate voice for those who suffered from disabilities; reminding audiences that they too exist, and to also show those who suffer with disabilities, a pathway to live a relativity normal life and join or re-join “normal society.” This act of courage is best illustrated by T-Boy’s Brom Wikstrom. So take a trek to Machu Picchu in a mobile wheelchair with Brom and his bride, Anne’: Looking Back: Lima, Machu Picchu, Peru – Brom Wikstrom, Traveling Boy

In 1976’s L’Argent de poche, Truffaut mixes the story of his actors with childhood experiences and the challenges of a number of children. Scenes include life at school; a toddler and a cat, playing on an open windowsill but falling down unhurt; a young girl, played by Truffaut’s daughter, causing confusion with a bullhorn; Bruno showing his friends how speak to girls; a double date at a movie theater; a child telling a dirty joke; first love and a first kiss. The main character is the motherless Patrick, who lives alone with his father who uses a wheelchair for mobility and an automatic page turner to read books. His mysterious friend, Julien, lives in poverty, has long unwashed hair and cannot stay awake at school due to long nights without sleep, wandering the empty, dark city streets. Patrick notices Julien constantly refuses to change his clothes for gym class, and his curious why does not.

In the end, Julien and his classmates realize why he doesn’t remove his clothes for gym classes; to hide his bruises that cover his body, making it obvious that he was beaten by his parents. Once the criminal news of Julien’s parent’s cruel abuse becomes public, he is rescued from his family, who are arrested as angry mobs of citizens pound their fists on the police wagon, aware that abusing a child is the greatest crime ever commited by a parent.

L’Argent de poche ends with an important message by one of the schoolteachers, Jean-François Stévenin, in a stunning performance by Jean-François Richet, about child abuse, injustice, children’s rights, hope, love and resilience: Of all mankind’s injustices, injustice to children is the most despicable! Life isn’t always fair, but we can fight for justice… If kids had the right to vote, they would have better schools. Life isn’t easy. You must learn to be tough. I don’t mean ‘gangster-tough’. What I mean is having endurance and resilience… Time flies. Before long, you will have children of your own. If you love them, they will love you. If they don’t feel you love them, they will transfer their love and tenderness to other people. Or to things. That’s life! Each of us needs to be loved.”

François Truffaut’s first feature: Les quatre cents coups

Jean-Pierre Leoud plays a loose version of Truffaut in 1959’s “Les quatre cents coups” (“The 400 Blows”), a film highly influenced by Jean Vigo’s “Zero for Conduct” which paralleled tragic instances in Truffaut’s own childhood. Before the film was made, Truffaut dedicated it to his spiritual father, Andre Bazin, who succumbed to death prior to the film’s release. Photograph courtesy of In a Lonely Place Film, Growing-up is Still Difficult.

The narrative of Les quatre cents coup is taken from the point-of-view of Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel, a reacurring character who appeared in four features and one short film, often referred to as the Antoine Doinel Cycle. The film re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, and petty crime, with Antoine Doinel played by actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, a veteran of six and a half of Truffaut’s films. Les quatre cents coup marked Truffaut’s passage from a leading film critic to trailblazing auteur of the La Nouvelle Vague. In the 2022 Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll, Les quatre cents coups was ranked 50th as one of the greatest films ever made.

Truffaut and Fatherhood

In both of Truffaut’s public and private life, the concept of fatherhood was an endearing theme; a biological father who abandoned him in his early childhood; Andrea Bazin, his spiritual father; Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, fathers who mentored his own love and art in cinema; and Jean-Pierre Léaud, who referred to Truffaut as his cinematic father.  Later, after Léaud appeared in Antonie and Collete, he played in a number of Jean-Luc Godard films, and was quoted as saying: If Truffaut is my father, then Godard is my uncle. As Truffaut became older he became obsessed with finding the name of his own biologicall father to the point of hiring private detectives. Eventually the name of his real father was found, a successful French dentist of Jewish ancestry.

François Truffaut: film critic, now director, received the award for Best Director at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival.

In 1958, François Truffaut was regarded as the enfant terrible of film critics, due to the politique des auteurs, and was banned from the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, he submitted his directorial debut to the festival, Les quatre cents coups and received the award for Best Director and a Palme d’Or nomination. From that year onward, Truffaut’s life dramatically changed forever. 

Truffaut as Actor

English language film director Alfred Hitchcock made cameo appearances in 40 of his 53 surviving major films. Truffaut was also fond of appearing in his own films, but often as a lead character. He also appeared in films made by other directors, such as the playing the role of Claude Lacombe, a French scientist with a bad command of English, in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Later, Truffaut spoke of his own first encounter on the film’s set: When I first arrived on the set of the Spielberg film, I quickly put my book by Stanislawski back into my suitcase.

Jaubert as Composer

As music director of Pathé-Nathan studio, Jaubert conducted the film scores of several other composers, including Arthur Honegger and Darious Milhaud. In the 1930s he gained a reputation as a conductor in France and abroad, most notably for the final season of Marguerite Bériza’s opera company and the season of opéras-bouffes for the 1937 exposition. At the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, in 1937, he conducted the premiere of Philippine, an opérette, by Marcel Delannoy with libretto by Henri Lyon and Jean Limozin.

Maurice Jaubert (1900-1940)

Jaubert enlisted in a French army engineering company during World War II which he would command as a reserve captain. When his company mobilized in September 1939, he was fatally wounded after having successfully blown up a bridge. He died at age 45 a few hours later at the Baccarat Hospital on June 1940. His letters to his wife reflected a spirit of sacrifice tinged with deep humanism. Jaubert did not live to hear his last two compositions, written at his base camp. Jaubert’s gravesite rests in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

Maurice Jaubert left a legacy of written articles about lectures, his musical tastes and political opinions, which included a passionate support of German-born American composer Kurt Weill, who created a revolutionary kind of opera of sharp social satire in collaboration with the writer Bertolt Brecht.

François Truffaut, (1932-1984)

Truffaut suffered from a brain tumor and underwent an operation at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on September 12. He died just over a year later in the hospital on October 21, 1984 at the age of 56-years-old. At his bedside were Madeleine Morgenstern, film producer and ex-wife; their two children, Laura and Eva; and actress Fanny Ardant, with wholm he lived with from 1981 to 1984 and had a daughter, Joséphine Truffaut (born September 1983). Ardant apeared in Truffaut’s final two films, La Femme d’à côté and Vivement dimanche! As he had requested, his body was cremated and his ashes were buried also in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. Truffaut was an atheisit, but chose to have a Mass celebrated for him at the church of Saint-Roche, believed to be in the honor of the Roman Catholic Church.

At the time of Truffaut’s death, he was considered by many critics and moviegoers as the most popular French film director of his era. Film audiences flocked to his films, whose main themes were passion, women, childhood and awareness of the disabled, which struck a chord with both critics and moviegoers alike.

To hear more about François Truffaut and Maurice Jaubert, consider purchasing the album, Bandes Sonores Originales Des Films, which includes the scores, L’Argent de poche, L’Histoire d’Adèle, L ‘Homme qui aimait les femmes and Le Chambre Verte, available on vinyl and CD.

And don’t miss film critic Walt Mundkowsky’s film review of François Truffaut’s “Stolen Kisses” – A Look Back – Traveling Boy

Also, if you wish to revisit The Film Soundtracks in Our Lives, Part I, see Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western, Once Upon a Time in the West. You can buy, but not on our site, Morricone’s Complete Spaghetti Western Compilation, also available on vinyl or in three-discs or a five-box set on CD.

POST SCRIPT:

Godard and Truffaut: In Defense of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française

In 1968, French culture minister Andre Malraux tried to fire Henri Langlois by stopping funding of la Cinémathèque française, allegedly due to Langlois’ arrogance and iron-fisted rule. Local and international uproar ensued, and even the prestigious Cannes Film Festival was halted in protest that year. Malraux eventually backtracked. Below is an announcement made in 1968 by Jean-Luc Godard and They were once soliders-in-arms in the art of cinema, but as their careers’ progressed, Godard’s films became increasingly political, specifically Marxist, and dismissed Truffaut as a bourgeoisie film director. Truffaut replied, I make personal films, and I can’t remember the last time I took a bus.

READ More: the politique des auteurs – The policy or politics of auteurs: In his 1954 journal, Une certaine tendance du cinéma français (A certain trend in French cinema) Truffaut wrote as a critic for the French film publication, Cahiers du Cinéma (Cinéma Notebook) and introduced the concept that directors should be considered the real creators of the films they create. When translated literally, the French word auteur means author in English. The term is applied to a film director with complete creative control over their work, often defined as a director who has a recognizable personal style, signature and vision which is evident in each film they make. When applied to the other arts, a painting by van Gogh or a symphony by Mahler is instantly recognizable to audiences. When film critic and director, Jean-Luc Godard wrote that Hitchcock was as profround an artist as Dostoevsky, traditional film critics thought he had gone mad. They failed to recognize that Hitchcock was just as profound in his own medium of film as Dostoevsky was in his medium of literature.

Truffaut referred French directors, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and Jacque Tatil as auteurs. He contrasted auteurs with directors of commercial studio films, whom he called, merely “metteur en scène” or stagers of a script created by someone else.

In the US, The Auteur Theory was coined and expanded by New York film critic, Andrew Sarris, the Father of American Auteurism. After Truffaut first introduced this new theory, which was based on film critic, Andre Bazin’s earlier work, it eventually spread to the US in 1963 through the writings of Sarris and film critic/director, Peter Bogdanovich.

But, many US film critics thought the concept was preposterous to the point that a film director should even be called an artist. This applied, in particular, to the highly influential San Franciso based film critic, Pauline Kael, who attacked both the theory and Sarris. The battles between them were legendary, and still discussed today, even though Kael finally embraced the theory and championed her own favorite directions, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Bernardo Bertolucci and even Truffaut. In the end, Sarris said that Kael was not anti-auteur, but anti-genre, and recognized the director as an artist, but still not necessarily the sole artists in a collaborate medium which included cinematographers, edits, art directors, etc. Sarris counter with, who is in charge of all the collaborators who helps the director create their personal vision of a film?

Truffaut on Cinephiles: But the cinephile is… a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

Art is not scientific; why should criticism be? The main complaint against some critics, and a certain type of criticism, is that too seldom do they speak about cinema as such.

Every critic should take to heart Jean Renoir’s remark: All great art is abstract. He should learn to be aware of form, and to understand that certain artists, for example Dreyer or Von Sternberg, never sought to make a picture that resembled reality.

The post The Film Soundtracks in Our Lives, Part II: Composer Maurice Jaubert and Auteur François Truffaut appeared first on Traveling Archive.

After my arrival at Heathrow Airport, I was whisked away in one of London’s famous Black Cabs. I was relaxed and feeling carefree, well aware that a London Black Cab driver knew every part of the city like the back of their hand. Unlike U.S. taxi or Uber drivers where the gig is often a part-time one, being a London Black Cab driver is nothing less than a proud full-time endeavor. Four-years of training and person-to-person non online tests is required to be one. By simply naming an address, establishment or even a landmark you will be transported to your place of interest without any form of hesitation. Many of the drivers have achieved such a level of success that they’ve purchased their own expensive Black Cabs, which featured unique modern amenities that seemed almost futuristic to me. The drivers can be chatty, too; interested in who you are and where you’re from, and most importantly serving as an ambassador of London.

London, England. Sept 2023.

It had been five-long years since my last trip to London, and I was interested in seeing how the city has changed. Disengaging the Black Cab by the West End’s St. Martins in the Field, I could see Trafalgar Square – still the de-facto location for swarming crowds to celebrate national events and ceremonies. In its center remained the towering 18 ft. statue of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson who had knocked out both the French and Spanish war vessels in the Battle of Trafalgar during the Napoleonic Wars. With apologies to Winston Churchill, Nelson remains Great Britain’s national hero with a population still feeding off his glories.

Charles Dickens Museum

It should come to no surprise that Charles Dickens is considered one of the greatest writers in the English language. The London author and social critic was highly regarded as a literary genius during his own lifetime, unlike other artists who had lived in obscurity, only to find an audience long after their passing. Our contemporary vernacular is endowed with words believe to be coined by Dickens, butter-fingers, the creeps, a-buzz, and for many it would not be Christmas without a stage adaptation of his novella, A Christmas Carol.

Dickens’ former three-story Georgian home is where he lived with his wife, Catherine and their eldest three children for two-years. His home is now a museum, which includes bedrooms, study, kitchen dining room, all in period decor. In the two years that Dickens lived in the house, he completed The Pickwick Papers (1836), wrote Oliver Twist  (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39). Though Dickens’ novels are not considered autobiographical, there are many autobiographical elements in them. Mary, his wife’s 17-year-old sister, had also lived with them, and died in his arms after succumbing to an illness. She inspired many characters in his books, and her death is fictionalized in Little Nell (1837). Dickens was also deeply affected by his experiences working as a young man on the banks of the Thames to support his family, who were in debtors’ prison. This led to his goal of helping London’s poor as a true social and economic crusader, which included trying to counter the contaminated air, particularly in the East End where industrial smoke mixed with London’s infamous fog contributed to countless deaths. Sources indicated that the polluted air also stunted the growth of young children in East End, leaving them weak and malnourished.

National Portrait Gallery

At the National Portrait Gallery, you’ll get the best look of many pre-photographic famous people – though, like today’s photo shopping, you will see them looking far more attractive than they probably really were.

William Shakespeare (1563-1616) painted by John Taylor. This painting of the iconic playwright, actor and poet was the first portraiture acquired by the National Portrait Gallery upon its founding in 1856. It is considered the only known portrait of him painted while he was alive. After Shakespeare’s death, his reputation grew, and artists created portraits and narrative paintings of him, generally based on this earlier image or from their own imagination.

Celestine Edwards (about 1857-1894) painted by William Harry Horlington. Edwards was a Methodist preacher, medical student and Britain’s first black newspaper editor. At age 12, he stowed away on a ship departing Dominica, eventually settling in Britain. In the 1890s he founded the Christian newspaper, Lux, and the anti-racist magazine Fraternity, inspiring younger Black Britons with the widespread movement of solidarity among people of African heritage. His campaigns spearheaded civil rights throughout the world.

The Bronte sisters: Anne, Emily and Charlotte (about 1834) painted by their teenage brother, Branwell. The only surviving group portrait of one of Britain’s greatest literary families, discovered in 1914, folded on top of a cupboard in an Irish farmhouse. The Gallery made the decision not to restore it, retaining its paint loss and fold marks due to its remarkable history. The Bronte Sisters’ best-known novels include Anne’s Agnes Grey, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, all published in 1847 under the masculine pseudonyms, ‘Action Bell,’ ‘Ellis Bell’ and ‘Currer Bell.’ In a sense, their works were intended to address their own experiences in Victorian society at a time when it was not easy to be a woman.

Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) painted by Sir William Orpen. The portrait shows an emotionally wounded Churchill after he had resigned as the First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, due to orchestrating a disastrous naval campaign in the Dardanelles Straits. By linking Turkey to Europe, he created a second front, which resulted in the deaths of 46,000 thousand soldiers, many of whom consisted of the newly formed ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corp), who had made suicide charges against battle tested Ottoman Turks in Gallipoli. Orpen described Churchill as ‘a man of misery who had lost pretty well everything,’ while Churchill concluded that it was ‘not a picture of a man, but of a man’s soul.’

The Garden Museum

I was surprised to find a such a thing as a museum devoted to gardening. But, after all, this is London; one of the museum capitals of the world, with special thanks, of course, to Greece and Egypt. Nestled on the grounds of the deconsecrated church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, I could see picture-perfect views from its gardens of the British Parliament and Big Ben on the opposite banks of the Thames. My time inside was rewarding, where the museum offered easy access to the working records of leading British garden designers of the 20th and 21st century. I also discovered the narratives of great gardeners through a collection of artifacts and tools from gardening throughout history. In addition, my tour included botanical art, photography, and paintings exploring how and why we garden.

The East End

The East End lies east of the Roman and medieval walls of the Old City of London, north of the River Thames. When U.S. writer Jack London ordered a taxi in 1902 to the deprived Whitechapel district in the East End, the area was so obscure for London’s main populace that he was forced to give the driver instructions on how to find it. In his book, The People of the Abyss, he went undercover, purchasing ragged clothing to wear so that he could live among the destitute in an attempt to understand their daily routine of starvation, homelessness, disease, theft, prostitution and discrimination with no hope for a better tomorrow. The lines of people at charitable foundations were so long and time consuming that many of the weak would fall asleep while standing. Some never made it inside. It was not unusual for a single person to share a cramped one-room apartment with 18 others, making sleeping while standing a requirement. The dire conditions which Jack London experienced were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor. In 1902, the life expectancy in the East End was 35-years-old; in London proper, 60-years-of-age.

I was a bit cloudy about the East End, thinking this was simply an area where the Cockneys of London lived. But what does ‘Cockney’ really mean? Research told me that Cockney is an English dialect that has a unique pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and slang. By 1600, the definition of Cockney meant anyone who could hear the Bow Bells at St. Mary-le-Bow, which are now drowned out by modern city noise. The accent is said to be a remnant of early English London speech, influenced by the traditional Essex dialect. But it also had much to do with the area attracting the rural poor, who had their own unique dialects from other parts of England, which spread whiile working in various trades such as weaving, fishing, shipbuilding, and dock work. Even today, England remains a class-conscious nation, where hearing the dialect of a stranger can tell you all you needed to know about them. With waves upon waves of migrants pouring into the East End from outlying areas, the local citizens found themselves competing for a few casual day labor jobs among numbers that reached the hundreds. This was good for the owners, where competition allowed them to dramatically cut daily wages to obscene lows, making the pennies-for-dollars part-time-jobs hardly worth the effort. Upon exploring the East End’s dark cobblestone streets in the mid 19th century, Karl Marx spoke of knifings, bodies in rags and nine-year-old prostitutes pulling him into doorways as nightly rituals, which confirmed his own idealized economic philosophy.

The East End continued to transition with a new breed of migrants: silk weaving French Huguenot refugees, followed by the Irish of the same mode, which led to fierce competition between the two, cumulating with Spitalfield riots of 1765 and 1769. And then, between 1880 and 1914, the East End’s small Jewish community was transformed by the arrival of 150,000 East European and Russian Jewish refugees, who had faced persecution their entire lives. Together, they all helped to create new jobs and workforce. But, the later closure of docks, cutbacks in railways and loss of industry contributed to a long-term decline, removing many of the traditional sources of semi-skilled jobs, which continued during the Second World War’s Nazi Blitz, which had devastated much of the East End, when bombed for 58 consecutive nights.

Bengalis constituted the final mass migration in the 20th century, where they poured into the district to escape the unimaginable brutality, rape and genocide inflicted on them by Pakistani military in their quest for independence in the East End. The East End of Pakistan, that is. The nine-month-long war finally ended in 1971, and the People’s Republic of Bangladesh was officially finally born, but at the staggering cost of an estimated 3,000,000 civilian deaths.

Bengali musician, Ravi Shankar, and former Beatle George Harrison, whom Shankar had earlier taught to play the sitar, orchestrated two benefit concerts in 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, with the intention to fund relief for refugees from East Pakistan. It soon grew to become an all-star musical event, becoming the first-ever massive benefit of its kind. Perhaps Shankar said it best: In one day, the whole world knew the name of Bangladesh.

As I stood by Algate Pump, considered the entrance to Whitechapel, I saw tenement homes mixed with modern buildings, due to fires, bombings and slum clearances. Before me was the Anglican Spitalfields Christ Church, built between 1714 and 1729, courtesy of Queen Elizabeth I, To bring God to the Godless. Steps away was the old and new of historic Spitalfields Market, where huge crowds still browse the different stalls for clothes, food and antiques; the same with Petticoat Lane’s silk weaving markets. Photographer Deb Roskamp and I walked along with life-long London friend, Trish, who added her own personal narrative, explaining that she had once purchased garments at Petticoat Lane Market. The following week we would explore Hadrian’s Wall and the Lake District in England’s North together.

Trish pointed out Toynbee Hall, the birthplace of the international settlement movement, which attracted progressive-minded young men and women to settle among the underprivileged and join programs which would help their lives. And, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, founded in 1901, showcased an array of different art for the people of the East End, with the intention of nourishing their souls.

Later, my own stomach would be nourished at Spitalfields Market, but for now I was happy to enjoy the colorful street art and murals. I noticed one of iconic Argentine futballer, Diego Maradona – the man with The hand of God. The comment stems from Maradona’s response after his controversial ‘handling’ of a goal during the Argentina v England quarter finals match of the 1986 FIFA World Cup, which Argentina went on to win. Later, he said scoring the goal was a symbolic revenge for the United Kingdom’s victory over Argentina in the Falkland’s War four years earlier. What was controversial for me was why is there a mural of him in England, the home of the English team he helped to beat. Was there still a deep seated resentiment of the London populace who had once turned their backs on the people of the East End.

On the far end of district rests the East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre, which offer traditional Sunni Islamic Calls to Prayer, as well as important things to know when arriving from a new or Muslim culture, i.e., educational courses, counseling,  advice services for birth, marriage and death. Just around the corner is Brick Lane, known as London’s curry mile, thanks to the numerous Indian, Pakastani and Bengalis restaurants that line the street.

The air was fresh and clean, no longer polluted by life altering toxic waste and chemicals. Overcrowding is also no longer a widespread problem and tourism is an important component of its infrastructure; in particular with many tours devoted to the 1888 Whitechapel Murders attributed to Jack the Ripper. The East End continues to change to the positive, a positive which helps redefine what was once considered one the most heartless places of destitution in the world.

Special thanks to Londoner and life-long friend, Trish Raffeto, who held our hands and pointed out the significance of special sites that my photographer, Deb Roskamp and I might not have even noticed as we explored the London of today with a glimpse at its past.

Further reading:

• Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) by Friedrich Engels.
• Liza of Lambeth (1897) by W. Somerset Maugham.
• The People of the Abyss (1903) by Jack London.

Stay tuned for Part II, which will include The Globe Theatre, West End plays, Churchill War Rooms, Temple London, Somerset House, London Pub Grub and Tea.

The post What’s New and Old in London, Part I appeared first on Traveling Archive.