To create and produce our small runs of fine quality clothing, we go out of our way to find and use up obsolete and end-of-line cloths sourced from British mills. This removes the need to fabricate new materials and ensures we avoid contributing to the global over-production of goods. He was born in John Street, Poplar (today’s Grundy and Rigden streets), on 1 November 1863, in respectable poverty. His father was an engine fitter who died (after three years with tuberculosis) when Morrison was eight; his mother, with three children to support, then opened a small haberdashery shop in John Street. At fifteen, Morrison started as a clerk in the London School Board’s architects’ department, and subsequently worked as a clerk at the Beaumont Trust, which administered the People’s Palace, and then became a sub-editor on The Palace Journal, in 1889, where he impressed Walter Besant. He began to write short stories for the Journal and upon leaving his full-time post in 1890, contributed poems about bicycling (his craze of the time) and short stories on a number of themes to various publications, most significantly to the Strand magazine (the journal that nurtured so many writers, not least Arthur Conan Doyle) and to WE Henley’s National Observer (Henley was also at that time encouraging the young Rudyard Kipling). Tales of Mean Streets was a big success for Morrison, and he was able to move from lodgings in the Strand to rural Chingford, and by 1896 was living in some comfort in Loughton. It was here he invited some of the men of the Old Nichol so that he could observe their accent and demeanour: ‘Sometimes I had the people themselves down here to my house in Loughton. One of my chief characters, a fellow as hard as nails… came several times and told me gruesome stories and how the thieves made a sanctuary of Orange Court.’ This was the chap who had dropped the fire grate on a copper’s head. Wake Up Punk: Railing against the commodification machine". The Irish Times. 6 May 2022 . Retrieved 4 May 2023.

Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into an area just off Bethnal Green Road known as the “worst street in London”…

References and Further Reading

Musician Henry Rollins wrote in response to the incident, "Corré and Westwood might think they have taught everyone a lesson in what punk’s all about, but all they did was show off their massive egos and how much they’ve lost the plot. Maybe it was something else, too. Perhaps it was an emotional response to the fact that McLaren cut Corré out of his will. It doesn’t matter now. It’s yesterday’s garbage. Ooh, how punk." [18] The Jago has a warped morality. The Ropers are despised for being clean, sober and industrious. Viciousness and dishonesty is respected and the only real sin is that of informing. An inverted hierarchy of criminality and brutality means that a child of the Jago aspires ultimately to joining the ranks of the High Mob, the most successful criminals. Anyone familiar with Joe Corré’s label AChildof the Jago will know it’s an acquired taste. Its Shoreditch store has been peddling its dandyish, Edwardian-influenced gear since opening doors in 2008 – not your typical east London fare by any stretch. But that’s just the way Joe likes it. He proudly describes the label, that’s just opened a new location on Charing Cross Road, as an ‘anti-brand’. I spent twenty-five years living and working in Los Angeles. Not once did I visit East LA, Compton, or Inglewood. I drove over them, many times a year, on the Century freeway to and from LAX airport. The nearest I got to ‘being there’ was listening to Tupac Shakur and Ice Cube on Power 105. Sometimes on that very freeway. Sally Green may have been inspired by the Nichol’s Mary Ryan, whom Father Jay described as ‘a virago… a person greatly feared and dreaded in the locality’. But Ryan may also have been a model for Morrison’s character Mother Gapp, owner of the Jago’s most foetid pub, The Feathers – itself based on the real Prince of Wales pub, at 52 Old Nichol Street. ‘A famous slum: the last of Boundary Street’

We learn McLaren thought himself to be a Fagin-like figure, someone 'who wanted to cause maximum chaos,' adds fellow punk Eddie Tudor Pole. 'He was like a kid who wanted to take a tin of beans from the bottom of a supermarket display.'"— Camden New Journal [26] Wake Up Punk is Nigel Askew 's [19] documentary with interviews of Vivienne Westwood and her two sons Ben Westwood and Joe Corré, [20] about burning some [21] of his own (Joe Corré's) collection of punk memorabilia, [22] [23] and having Nigel Askew record the event. [21] AChildof the Jago, Joe says, ‘is a very London brand. All of my cultural impressions come from my upbringing – everything I’ve grown up with.’ Which includes his mother. (He’s self-assured enough not to be cagey when asked about her). ‘Not necessarily in the styling of the shop, but in terms of the clothing, I’ve definitely been influenced by her. She’s done everything, invented everything, from the tube dress, to – every look you can think of, she’s done it ages ago. It’s impossible not to be influenced by that.’ The novel’s 37 chapters are short, snappy scenes (some are barely 500 words long) that drive the plot along at high speed. Meaning never emerges from the story or the characters – the book’s theme is always hammered home, like a Jago fist on a baby’s face.

About Bobby Seal

Photo of Morrison in March 1895 edition of The Bookman (New York City) Later life [ edit ] Arthur Morrison blue plaque, High Road, Loughton On McLaren's death in a Swiss medical centre from a rare form of cancer in April 2010, Corré said: "It was hard for me because he never wanted to do the emotional stuff that comes with being a parent. He ran away from it and I found that hard to take. We had a difficult relationship, but it was all right in the end. I went to Switzerland and we said what we had to say and we made our peace. I'm really glad I did that. It was such a release for both of us". [9] A Child of the Jago explores the influence of a sense of place upon the human psyche. For Morrison the very geography of the streets of the Jago produces a certain mentality: just like the winding passageways of the slum its inhabitants are furtive, guarded, and secretive; they operate by their own rules and not those of the society outside their own narrow confines. Home to the people of the Jago comprises ‘foul rat runs, these alleys, not to be traversed by a stranger’. Daughter of a boilermaker, a relatively prestigious occupation, and thus fallen on hard times and very much ill at ease in the Jago, where she is resented. She barely steps outside her room, indulging in self-pity and ignoring the needs of her children. Her occasional forays are disastrous, she is assaulted in the street by Sally Green, and while she relaxes in Mother Gapps with the victorious Josh her neglected baby dies. It is the despised Pigeony Poll who provides what little motherly affection the children receive.