LoveEast.53

| The Gentle Author
Spitalfields Nippers
Pigeon fancying has always been a
popular tradition in the East End.
Horace Warner collected boots for children
who had none and some of his photograph
record the delivery of the new boots.
This little girl is leaning on a parsley basket.
Parsley came by train from East Anglia and
children were paid to bunch it up.
In the last years of the nineteenth century, Horace
Warner took a series of portraits of some of the
poorest people in London - creating relaxed,
intimate images that gave dignity to his subjects and
producing great photography that is without parallel
in his era.
22 LOVEEAST
SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS
Horace Warner
This boy is wearing Horace Warner’s hat
for the photograph
Born into a Quaker family that had its roots in
Spitalfields in the seventeenth century, Horace was
a Sunday school teacher at the Bedford Institute
which still stands in Quaker Street. The wealth of the
family business, Jeffrey & Co - the wallpaper printers
who printed William Morris’ wallpaper - enabled the
Warners to be generous benefactors to the Bedford
Institute which offered practical support to the
residents of Quaker St and the surrounding courts and
alleys.
Horace’s photographs revolutionise our view of
Londoners at the end of the nineteenth century,
by bringing them startlingly close and permitting
us to look them in the eye. Unseen outside the
Warner family for more than century, most of these
breathtaking photographs have been published for
the first time by Spitalfields Life, including biographies
of many of the children.