Thank you to everyone who came along to the inaugural Battersea Society event at Battersea Bookshop… we know how confusing it can be trying to find your way around the Power Station redevelopment, so well done for persevering!
Jeanne Rathbone author of Inspiring Women of Battersea, had organised the event and kept the audience rapt with her limitless, and awe-isnpiring, knowledge of amazing women in Battersea whose stories have gone unsung.
We read from our poetry collection, London Undercurrents, and curated the poems to fit in with the theme of the night – real women who’ve lived locally. This included poems about Charlotte Despard, Mare Spartali, and the Cooks sisters, who all lived and worked in Battersea, and their north London sisters, Mary Kingsley, Dido Belle, and Janie Terrero.
We had such a great time. Thank you to the book lovers who purchased copies of our book, and Jeanne’s, and to Battersea Bookshop for hosting us in their beautiful, and tempting, bookshop.
Look out for more Battersea Society events at Battersea Bookshop soon.
Thank you to all of you who had planned to come to our event in Battersea on Wednesday 25 October in the offices of Killick & Co. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, we’ve had to postpone the event until next year.
Join us for two free London Undercurrents events in October.
First up – Tuesday 17th October 7pm – 8pm – Battersea BookshopFree event
We’re excited to be reading at this excellent new book shop in the heart of the redeveloped Battersea Power Station. Hosted by The Battersea Society, we’ll be joining Jeanne Rathbone as she reads from her wonderful book Inspiring Women of Battersea. Our set will include poems from London Undercurrents about local Battersea women, and their sisters north of the river. There’ll be a chance to speak to all the authors, buy our books and browse through everything the bookshop has to offer. There are some great shops and art galleries in the Power Station, and you can also enjoy food and drink by the river.
Nearest tube is Battersea Power Station on the northern line. The bookshop is a short walk away, downstairs in the power station building.
Next up, we’ll be at Killick & Co in Battersea on Wednesday 25th October 6.30pm-8pm
As part of their Lessons From Local series of talks and events, we’ll read poems from London Undercurrents curated to represent different stages of women’s lives, both locally in south London and north of the river. It’s free, but please email them to book a space so they get an idea of numbers.
Join us for wine and nibbles! Nearest public transport Clapham Junction train station.
We were delighted to be the first event in this year’s Wandsworth Heritage Festival. Our poetry workshop In and Out of Education was held at Battersea Library on Saturday 20 May 2023, and we had some lovely, studious and inspiring attendees. We’d sourced some materials from the Wandsworth Heritage Service to use as prompts for writing exercises, which included fabulous photographs from Mayfield School – an all-girl’s school in the Putney area. We asked our students to imagine themselves as one of the students in a photo for one exercise, and as one of the teachers for another. Then we bent our heads down and wrote.
One of our students had English as a second language, and stalled at getting started, so we encouraged her to write in her own language, Spanish. Most of the attendees had no creative writing or poetry experience, so it was wonderful to help them make their first attempts at putting pen to paper, and rewarding to hear them all say they wanted to carry on writing.
We had some interesting discussions about access to education, the pros and cons of single sex schools, and the importance of female role models for girls – both as pupils and teachers. The importance of education was clear. Even though we all had memories about dreading certain lessons at school, we all agreed that we’d been lucky to have an education and that for some girls and young women it’s sadly never an option.
There are lots of great education-themed events lined up for the rest of the Wandsworth Heritage Festival – you can read about them and find out how to book here
And look out for more educational and fun London Undercurrents workshops in your timetable soon…
We’re thrilled to be taking part in the Wandsworth Heritage Festival again this May. The theme this year is ‘Educating Wandsworth’ and the programme is packed with interesting walks, tours, talks, exhibitions and other activities, many of them free.
For the Festival, we’ll be delivering a free poetry workshop, Women In and Out of Education, on Saturday 20th May from 11:30 a.m. to 1.00 p.m. at Battersea Library. We’ve been busy delving into Wandsworth Heritage Service’s archives in preparation and thinking about how much women’s and girls’ educational opportunities have changed over the years. Mostly for the better (in the U.K.anyway) but there is still a way to go.
Education, of course, isn’t just about schools and universities. Less formal provision, such as community based activities and workshops, offers people a chance to continue to develop and to try new pursuits. So if you’d like to try your hand at poetry, or want to explore women’s education in a different way, our workshop might be just the ticket.
No previous experience of writing poetry is necessary. To book, please contact heritage@gll.org. And to see what else is on offer during the Festival, check out the programme below:
We were thrilled and humbled when musician Alison Cotton approached us asking if she could include Hilaire’s poem The Cook Sisters Contemplate a Final Trip to Nazi Germany from London Undercurrents, at her musical event Engelchen in Sunderland. You can listen to an extract of the piece We Were Smuggling People’s Lives on this episode of BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, starting at around 1 hour 11 minutes in.
Born in the northeast in the 1900s, Ida and Louise Cook spent their childhood years in Sunderland before moving with their family to London and settling in Battersea in 1919. According to Louise Carpenter, who wrote an essay about the sisters for Granta magazine, the sisters’ upbringing, while Christian, was ‛emotionally austere’, and there was no music at home. Ida and Louise had a very close bond, and following the move to London found work in the Civil Service. One lunchtime, Louise attended a music lecture and was bowled over by what she heard. She and Ida saved up to buy a gramophone, and soon became ardent opera fans.
Ida began writing articles for a fashion magazine, and eventually left the Civil Service to become sub-editor of Mab’s Fashions. She soon branched out into writing short stories, and then tried her hand at a serial. While the serial wasn’t suitable for Mab’s Fashions, its editor put Louise in touch with Charles Boon, who snapped it up. Ida would go on to become one of Mills & Boon’s most successful authors, publishing under the pen name Mary Burchell.
Ida’s income from book sales enabled the sisters to travel to Europe to visit opera houses and follow their favourite opera singers. This in turn led to their extraordinary efforts to help Jewish people flee Nazi Germany. As regulars on the European opera circuit, Ida and Louise had become friends with some of the scene’s luminaries, including the conductor Clemens Krauss and his wife, the soprano Viorica Ursuleac. During one of their trips to Berlin in 1935, Krauss asked if the sisters could help the musicologist Mitia Mayer-Lismann and her 17-year-old daughter Else escape. Mitia and Else were the first of 29 Jewish people the Cook sisters were able to help flee the Nazi regime and find safety in Britain. Under the guise of opera-mad sisters they would fly out to Germany on a Friday evening, and return via train and boat at a different border crossing on Sunday night. They smuggled out valuables such as jewellery and fur coats, into which they had sewn British labels, passing them off as their own. These items were the financial guarantees needed by Jewish refugees in order to be accepted by British immigration. Ida also bought a flat in Dolphin Square for those they’d helped to stay in until they were able to find their own accommodation.
Jade McQueen and Sarah Templeton reading The Cook sisters contemplate a final trip to Nazi Germany. Photo Alison Cotton
Hilaire’s poem captures the sister’s close relationship, and their dedication to helping people and opera, through an imagined late-night conversation between them as they worry about other people’s lives as opposed to their own. On occasion we’ve read the poem together at live events, as a two-hander, taking a sister’s part each. When Alison asked permission to include the poem, we suggested that two voices might be used at her event. We were so moved when she told us that she’d invited two local female students to read the poem side by side, as seen in this wonderful photo of the event , and that they had been practising together to get it right. The strength of women working together, helping each other out – even when they don’t know each other – is truly a super power we must treasure.
Sadly, neither of us could make it to the event, but judging by the response and success of the night, it won’t be long before it takes place again due to public demand. If it does, don’t miss it!
“Dedicated to refugees both then and now.” Alison Cotton
We will be reading individually, and together – one poem each from London Undercurrents – on Wednesday 22nd March 7pm at The Sun, 21 Drury Lane WC2 £3 entry, as part of Loose Muse FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY event, organised and run by the amazing Agnes Meadows. It’s a women’s writers event, so men can attend but not read.
Join us! Joolz will be reading from Face the Strain – her pamphlet published by Against The Grain press – and Hilaire will be reading from Triptych Poets and indoors looking out. Sue Johns, Charlotte Ansell, Racheal Joseph and Agnes will read and there will be open mic slots too – sign up on the door.
Sunday found us sitting outside the Barbican Centre in the early spring sunshine, catching up on life and our individual poetry adventures. And what about our shared poetry project London Undercurrents? Happily, we’re both keen to get back to researching and writing about more of London’s unsung heroines.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve dipped toes into east and west London histories and discussed different kinds of collaborative writing. We’d applied for an Arts Council Developing your Creative Practice grant some time ago, the money would have given us time and space to try all sorts of collaborative writing together, something we haven’t tried before. All the poems in London Undercurrents part one were written individually by each poet, away from each other and only shared with the other poet when the writer felt happy with it. Which made sense – we were each writing about the part of London where we’ve lived for years, and the connection to that part of the city was each poet’s ‘territory’. Now, east and west London both hold different meanings for us that we can explore together. On Sunday, we reviewed a couple of rough drafts from previous online catch-ups, wrote out different lines from each poet’s drafts, then shared them with each other and wove together lines into two collaborative drafts. It felt great to be trying something new! Play time.
There’s a long way to go, and more fun to be had, but it definitely feels like we’ve started writing together, and that there’s new London Undercurrents poems yet to come.
We had a blast reading from London Undercurrents last Saturday morning in Battersea’s beautiful Northcote Library. And what a lovely audience we had!
Beautifully dressed audience at Northcote Library
The event was unusual for a couple of reasons. This was our first in person reading together since early 2020. And performing in the morning is definitely a novelty! Luckily the walk from Hilaire’s place to Northcote Library was a good 45 minutes in fresh sunny conditions, so we were both warmed up by the time we arrived.
Senior Library Assistant Courtney had thoughtfully set out a table display of books by and about women writers, plus a plate of chocolate biscuits and some bottled water for us. All we had to do was add a few copies of London Undercurrents to the display.
We began with a brief overview of our book, and how we came to write it, followed by reading the first fragments and Hilaire’s opening poem First Crop, which imagines a Huguenot woman in the 17th century tending her asparagus crop in Battersea Fields. We roughly alternated north and south poems, with Hilaire reading a couple more from the south side of the river given our partisan audience.
It felt special to perform The Cook Sisters Contemplate a Final Trip to Nazi Germany together, Hilaire reading Ida’s lines and Joolz Louise’s, less than 10 minutes’ walk away from the sisters’ former home on Morella Road. Jeanne Rathbone, whose recently published book Inspiring Women of Battersea includes a chapter about Ida and Louise Cook, informed us that there are two biographies of the sisters coming out later this year.
There were other fascinating anecdotes from the audience, recalling Battersea in the sixties, and other characters from the past. We answered questions about our research, and discussed how important our local libraries and archive services have been. And at Jeanne’s request, Hilaire read her poem Battersea Pre-Raphaelite Diptych, about another inspiring local woman, the artist Marie Spartali, to round off the event.
Books and biscuits!
What a life-affirming return to reading in real life, rather than online. Support your local library – we’re so lucky to have these free resources on our doorstep. It could kick-start your own research into local women or local history. Thank you to Northcote Library for the warm welcome, and to everyone who attended our event, engaged in lively discussion and bought our books.
We’re excited to be giving our first in-person reading together in a loooong time on Saturday 25th June at Northcote Library in Battersea. As well as reading poems from our collection, we’ll discuss how we found out about and researched the women in our book, including Charlotte Despard; 17th century asparagus growers in Battersea Fields; Price’s Candles factory workers, and their north London sisters.
When: Saturday 25th June at 11:30am Where: Northcote Library, 155e Northcote Road, London SW11 6HW Booking: the event is free, but please register your interest so the library has an idea of numbers by emailing northcote.library@gll.org or phoning 020 7223 2336.
London Undercurrents 