Spitalfields Life

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There is one woman, above all others, whom the world’s greatest ballerinas rely upon when it comes to fitting their shoes perfectly, Michelle Attfield of Freed of London. With generous spirit, self-effacing nature and fierce professionalism, Michelle is the queen of the pointe shoe and a legend in ballet circles.

In her half century at Freed, she has fitted ten-year-olds at the Royal Ballet School and accompanied them throughout the course of their careers, subtly modulating the design of their pointe shoes to accommodate both their physical change and the needs of their repertoire. “Sometimes I discover I know more than I think I do, when I look around for an expert and then realise that I have been around longer than anyone.” she admitted to me with a laugh of self-deprecation. In the volatile world of show business, Michelle is one of those rare figures whom dancers can always count upon for unwavering loyalty, appreciation and practical advice.

An ex-dancer and former customer of Freed, who was trained to fit shoes by Mrs Freed herself, Michelle embodies the spirit of the company that she has served all these years and which she delights to speak of. Yet she is the model of discretion, drawing a tactful curtain over the details of her intimate relationships with the great divas, and preferring to enthuse about show-business customers such as her beloved Patrick Swayze who visited Michelle at the shop after hours for extra fittings. “Supine with admiration,” is her verdict upon Mr Swayze.

“I’ve worked for Freed of London for forty-nine years, I’ve given my life to this company. I trained as a dancer but I wasn’t quite good enough to be a ballerina, so I qualified as a teacher and, since Freed’s shop in St Martin’s Lane were always advertising for staff in The Stage, I went along.

I was a Royal Academy of Dance student from the age of ten, so I had known Mrs Freed all that time. It was April and I had a teaching position starting in September, and when I told Mrs Freed she said ‘Why don’t you  stay with us and stop all this nonsense?’ I said, ‘But I’ve got a job with the Royal Ballet.’ So I went to work at Freed permanently and never looked back. I tried to leave once when my daughter was born but, luckily for me, some of my customers refused to deal with anyone else. So they rang me and said, ‘You’ve got to come back.’

She was a monster. Mr Freed made shoes but Mrs Freed made the business. She was the dynamo. He was a shoemaker and a good one, she was a milliner. He did the making and she did the sewing. He invented the concept of making the shoe to fit the foot, prior to that they were very stylised, they propped you up but they didn’t let you dance. This development coincided with choreographers like Frederick Ashton and John Cranko wanting a little more and dancers who were willing to give a little more, and our shoes helped them to do it.

Mrs Freed visited the factory every day at seven-thirty and then she went and ran the shop all day – and she did that every day. I discovered the reason they always advertised in The Stage was because no-one could work for Mrs Freed. People exited from the shop very quickly, girls used to start in the morning and leave in the afternoon. I’d come back from lunch and ask ‘Where has she gone?’

Mr & Mrs Freed loved dancers but they didn’t want to go to the ballet. ‘No dear, you take the tickets and go to the ballet,’ they’d say to me, ‘we’ve had enough of that all day.’ You had to work uber-hard but I had been a dancer and dancers are used to hard work – class in the morning, rehearsal in the afternoon and performance in the evening. People either left at once or stayed forever, and it was the most wonderful place to work if you loved ballet – I fitted Margot Fonteyn!

I learnt to dance with one of the founder members of the Royal Academy of Dance and I learnt to fit shoes with Mrs Freed – the perfect foundation for this job. I try to be the bridge between the aspiration of the shoe and the reality of what can be achieved. Because Freed shoes are handmade, we can deliver exactly what an individual dancer needs and that’s why we have our reputation. A pointe shoe is a tool of the trade for a dancer, the shoe has to perform whatever she has to perform and, while a student may require longevity, a professional needs a show purposed for performance. The Freed pointe shoe is a chameleon because it will do anything for anyone.

I’ve fitted so many dancers that wherever I go in the world someone will come up and say, ‘Hello Michelle, I didn’t know you were going to be here.’ I’ve been all over to fit shoes, Japan, Australia, America, Milan, Verona, Paris – it goes on and on. But my greatest pleasure is what I regard as my ‘home companies,’ Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, Scottish Ballet and Northern Ballet. I sit cross-legged on the floor and dancers come and stand in front of me, and I put shoes on them and decide which maker’s shoes would be best for them to wear. They chose the size but I choose the maker. It has to be a relationship of trust. I look at the whole dancer not just the feet. I say, ‘I know what you want and I’ll do it.’ You want the shoe to fit the dancer so well that you see the dancer not the shoe, you don’t want to see the shoe. And it’s a great feeling when you’ve got them where they want to be.

I think how lucky you are if you are involved with dance. Mine is a job that will never end because there will always be ballet. I used to take my daughter Sophie to  the factory and she’d be crawling around on the floor getting dirty while I was picking up shoes. When she was eight, she stood in the wings when Nureyev was dancing, and she turned to me and asked ‘May I have a sandwich?’ She worked in the shop as a Saturday girl and Saturday in our shop is a baptism of fire. Then she went off to work in finance but after she got married, she asked to come back and now accompanies me when I do fittings. I’ve got to start handing over to her because I want to be like the Cheshire Cat, I want to disappear without people noticing me go.”

Michelle with Shevelle Dynott – “One of my darling boys…”

Michelle with Darcy Bussell.

Michelle with Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur, joint directors of the Estonian National Ballet.

Michelle and fellow shoe fitters at the Freed shop in St Martin’s Lane in the eighties.

Frederick & Dora Freed in their shop.

Michelle in her dancing days.

Portrait of Michelle Attfield copyright © Patricia Niven

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Audrey on trip to Epping Forest, aged twelve in 1957

Audrey Kneller sent me this evocative memoir of her years in Elder St.

Elder St was not a pretty place in spite of its name. No buds burst forth each spring to awaken our spirits and no birds sang merrily to remind us of the wonders of nature. Instead soot lay unmolested in every crevice of the ancient brickwork, while the clanking and hissing of steam trains shunting reminded us of the presence of the large London terminus. Poverty was a mantle we refused to wear, but it lurked menacingly on every street corner.

Early in 1953, my Auntie Sophie happened to bump into Millie Berman, an old school friend of my mother’s. This chance meeting was to bring great changes. Millie lived with her daughter on the upper floors of a rented house in Elder St and was looking for someone to take over the tenancy as she was intending to move. Clearly this was an opportunity not be missed.

Shortly after the Coronation in June 1953, we left the comfort of our temporary home in Edgware and moved into the four-storey terraced house at 20 Elder St, Norton Folgate, E1. Our first impressions were far from favourable. The tallness of the houses and total absence of trees or even a blade of grass was very forbidding. However we gradually settled and discovered the bizarre fascinations of an urban existence.

At the back, towards Bishopsgate, there was a large bomb site where I joined some boys playing cowboys and indians, and had a lovely time amid the dirt and rubble. My mother, being a genteel person, was quite horrified when I returned home looking the worse for wear. Thereafter I played more civilised games with my sister and the other refined children of the neighbourhood inside the safe confines of the street. The bomb site, however, came into its own on Guy Fawkes Night when the sky was lit up with the flames of a huge bonfire and accompanying fireworks, watched by us from a third floor bedroom window.

Our part of Elder St was an ideal playground, not only because it sheltered us from traffic but also because of the numbers of children living in the surrounding houses and tenements, so we were seldom short of playmates. In those days, the threat of the motor car was almost non-existent, leaving us to play unrestricted and unhampered, a freedom children cannot enjoy today.

In fact, I cannot remember ever, in the early days of our life in Elder St, seeing a car impinge on our games of higher and higher, piggy in the middle and others too numerous to mention. We played in the road outside our door and no-one ever prevented us from chalking out our squares on the pavement for hopscotch. The black-painted iron bars above the basement in front of the some of the houses could easily be squeezed behind, if a side bar was missing, in order to retrieve a lost ball. These hump-shaped grills were nicknamed “airies,” and a cry would often go up, “It’s gone down the airy!” It was up to the smallest and bravest of us to crawl down into the tiny space below, and once down there you had an awful feeling of being trapped in a cage until you emerged triumphant with the lost ball.

I remember long summer evenings spent playing in the street and the man who came along on his three-wheeler, peddling ices. “Yum Yum” was the brand name and yum yum his ice lollies were, delicious and creamy. A good selling point was that every so often one of the lolly sticks would have the name “YUM YUM” printed on it and whoever had such a stick could have another lolly free on presenting it to the ice cream man. Once this fact became known, some of us sat in the gutter scratching the words “YUM YUM” on our spare sticks. But the ice cream man was not fooled and, some time later, when he came round again after an unexpectedly long interval, the name of the product had been changed to “WHIM”. The lollies were the same but somehow the gilt had gone from the gingerbread.

I recall with affection the Josephs family. Simon Josephs was my age and lived with his parents, two maiden aunts and an elderly grandmother around the corner in Fleur-de-Lis St. Their house was much smaller than ours and poorly built but they were a happy family. They even had a television set, which we did not have, and we lost no opportunity when invited to view. We also spent happy hours playing with Simon and his games, especially my favourite one of Monopoly.

Next door to the Josephs lived an elderly spinster and her bachelor brother who was disabled, having been afflicted with shell shock in the First World War, and I remember sitting with them one Yom Kippur evening waiting for the fast to end. One by one, the tiny houses and the dark overcrowded tenements in Fleur-de-Lis St became empty and boarded up awaiting demolition. The Josephs, we heard later, were re-housed in a new flat on the Ocean Estate in Mile End.

Number 26 Elder St was a tall narrow house accommodating two families, one Jewish and the one Gentile. My sister Yvonne and I would sometimes sit on the steps of the house playing gobs or five stones with the daughters of the respective families. Avril Levy from the Jewish family had a famous auntie, Adele Leigh a renowned opera singer, who would often call round, leaving her sporty two-seater Sunbeam Rapier outside the house.

In Blossom St lived a family that to me epitomised poverty both materially and spiritually. The children were neglected and ran around with bare feet and bare bottoms. I was very shocked because they were so different from us yet lived almost on our doorstep. One day, Christine, a little girl who lived at 16 Elder St, decided that we should venture into the house in Blossom St. We peered inside what seemed to be a dark hole with no semblance of what I considered to be the trappings of a home. Dirt and decay lay all around and I caught a glimpse of a man lying asleep on an old armchair which, instead of cushions, was covered with sacks filled with horse hair. Overcome by feelings of horror, disbelief and the foul stench that pervaded the building, we stepped backwards into the street, and quickly walked back to the welcome ‘civilisation’ of Elder St, never to set foot again in Blossom St.

As to the past history of our house, we were led to believe that it was built in the early eighteen-hundreds. I cannot support the validity of this but the house certainly contained some unusual features.

Looking through the windows at the back, high walls surrounded the yard which was no more than ten feet in depth, just enough space for a coal storage area and a washing line to be strung across. Our convenient position near Liverpool St Station could also be a disadvantage, if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction our clean laundry would be showered with a fine layer of soot.

Ours was the only house in Elder St – and for all we knew anywhere else in Norton Folgate – to have a bathroom. The fittings were brass and, instead of having a normal plughole, there was a tall brass post affair which had to be lifted up to let the water run away. Hot water came from an ancient geyser on the wall above the bath but woe betides anyone who fell foul of the delicate lighting-up procedure. I did once and was greeted with a loud bang. The secret was to run the water first and then ignite the gas. Henceforth, unless my mother or sister were there to do the honours, I felt it safer to spend my bath times in an old zinc tub in front of the fireplace in the living room.

Nevertheless, it was handy to have a bathroom, especially as a connecting door led into the back bedroom thereby giving us a bathroom en suite! The toilet was situated next to the bathroom on the first floor landing. To have an inside toilet was again untypical of the area, most toilets being situated outside in the backyard, as I found at our cousin’s house in Buxton St.

A house of this size required regular maintenance and my mother employed a spare-time handyman to keep the interior in a good state of repair. He came and went for six years, painting, papering, plumbing and fixing, and no sooner had he finished on the top floor than it was time to start again at the bottom, rather like the Forth Bridge.

An interesting feature of the house was a long speaking tube with a whistle at one end, extending from the top floor right down to the basement. Presumably a device once used by servants, this was a source of amusement. Another source of great amusement to us, as well as to other children in our street, was the wall panelling. We succeeded in convincing them that one on the first floor landing slid back to reveal a secret passageway, such as the ones used by Cavaliers to escape the Roundheads during the Civil War.

One day, my sister told some children playing in the street that there was something strange in our basement and they immediately came to investigate. Meanwhile, I had dressed up a tailor’s dummy in an old red frock and hid behind it. As the children descended the basement stairs, I slowly moved the dummy forward, calling out in an eerie voice. The inquisitive children scattered in haste, believing me to be a headless ghost!

Not long after we moved into Elder St, we discovered the presence of unwelcome lodgers lurking behind the skirting boards. After mousetraps failed to catch them, we acquired the services of a cat. One day, one of our cousins from Buxton St called round with a tabby who had the perfect markings of a tiger, so the name stuck. Tiger was a wonderfully docile pet but he lived up this name in keeping the rodent community at bay.

One day I found him sitting on the landing and tried to pick him to carry him downstairs but he would not budge. I could not understand it until my mother pointed out that he was standing guard over a small hole in the skirting board. We left him there all that day and eventually he returned to us of his own accord, presumably having accomplished his mission.

As to the other houses in Elder St, I am sure that none of us children had any idea of their historic value. As far as I could see, we were surrounded by decaying walls and we had to make the best of the situation until circumstances improved.

Although we may have been devoid of pastoral pleasures in Spitalfields, life was far from dull. We were living on the fringes of a great nucleus of Jewish enterprise and culture – consisting of delicatessens, bakeries, butcher shops and kosher restaurants, intermingled with other Jewish-owned businesses in the garment, jewellery and shoe trades, bookshops, a Yiddish theatre and numerous synagogues – stretching from Brick Lane southward to Houndsditch and eastward as far as Bow. This was our heritage, we had returned to the roots set down by our grandparents and thousands of other immigrants fifty years earlier.

Audrey’s tenth birthday tea in 1955

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Peter Rayner

It is rare that you meet anyone with such an array of practical skills and accomplishments as Peter Rayner. I visited Peter at his home in Stratford where he told me his story.

“On my father’s side, I am an East End boy and, on my mother’s side, I am Leicestershire. They met when dad was in the army and mum was in the land army in Kent but although I was born and bred in Hertfordshire I consider myself an East Ender.

I always wanted to be a train driver but I left school and went into catering. My parents told me there would be more money in it. I had always been interested in making bread and cakes. I got all my qualifications and I worked for a small family bakers in Enfield but, when the old boy died, I was unemployed.

Through my bellringing, I heard there was a job going at Whitechapel Bell Foundry so I tried my hand there. I had learnt to ring bells at St Mary’s Cheshunt at the age of twenty.

I joined the foundry in October 1973 when I was twenty-four. My job was tuning bells, shaving metal off the inside. They normally cast bells sharp and by increasing the internal diameter you bring the note down in pitch to what you want. They taught me, the only place you can learn to make bells is in a bell foundry. The first job I worked on with Wallace Spragget and John Slater was the bells for All Saints, Worcester. Wally had worked Gillett & Johnston’s bell foundry which was in Croydon and, when it shut down, he transferred to Whitechapel. He had spent his life tuning bells and he took me under his wing and taught me.

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry was an old world place, still in the Victorian era, but I enjoyed working there because there was so much history. When I was there they demolished the old chain shop which was a bit ramshackle and built the new extension on the back.

Apart from the odd spell when it was quiet, were always fairly busy. When people asked me how many people worked at the bell foundry, I used to joke, ‘Only about half of us!’ It was thirty-five people but about fifteen were only concentrating on the handbells, while the rest of us were doing the big bells, making the moulds, casting the bells, tuning the bells and building the frames.

The moulds are a mixture of London clay, horse hair, goats hair and various types of sand so when it is mixed up it is a form of black pudding, though I would not recommend eating it.

I liked working there because I have always enjoyed working with my hands. I was working on old bells coming in for retuning, because they did not know how to tune bells in the old days. Some would be five, six or seven hundred years old. It will be two, three or five hundred years before the bells I worked on need any further attention. Bells do not often wear out. They get dirty and covered in crap from pigeons. Generally bells come in because the frame and fittings are completely worn out.

I worked on the bells for Durham, Gloucester and Canterbury Cathedrals, and also Hexham Abbey, Barking Abbey and Romsey Abbey. In London, Chelsea Old Church, Wimbledon, St Leonards Streatham and St Clement Danes among others. So I can say I have left my mark in bells.

The largest bell I was involved with was the American Bicentennial Bell cast in 1975 for the celebrations in 1976 in Philadelphia. It was about seven feet in diameter and weighed five and a half tons. A big bell. We did replica Liberty Bells, I was involved in casting fifteen of them. The plan was to put one in every state of the union, but how far they got with that I do not know. They were still knocking them out when I left the foundry in 1987.

When I first joined the bell foundry, it was run by Douglas and William Hughes. Alan who became the next bell founder was Bill Hughes’ son. He took over the business when they retired. Douglas Hughes had been an army officer and if you did something wrong you got a tongue lashing, but that was the end of it. Bill Hughes was quieter and he did all the working inspections and paperwork, getting the estimates done. I got on alright with both of them.

After Wally Spragget died, I took over bell tuning but by then I was married with a mortgage and things were getting a bit tight financially, so I had to find a better paid job. I got a job as a guard on the Underground, it was double the wages. After I finished my training, I was based at Golders Green but after nine months I was transferred to the East End depots. I became a train driver on the District Line based in Earls Court and Parsons Green for ten years.

When the Jubilee Line opened I knew there would be a depot in the East End, so I put my application in and transferred to Stratford in 1997. I was a test train driver until the Jubilee Line extended and I was on it for about ten years, so I fulfilled my ambition to be a train driver. I had a really rough day once, one of those days when everything goes wrong on the tube and I got home home late. I slammed my retirement notice in next morning and got a full pension.

That was eleven years ago but I am still heavily involved in bell ringing and I have bought a canal boat and I do model railways. I do most of the cooking at home and, occasionally, I provide bread and cake for bellringers dinners and things like that.“

Peter Rayner tuning a bell at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in the seventies

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