A Local Writer’s Snapshots of Spitalfields in the 1980s

 

Clive Murphy (28 November 1935 – 17 June 2021) takes us back to Spitalfields, East London 1987–1996. Clive, who lived above the Aladin curry house on Brick Lane for almost fifty years, took snapshots of things he spotted in his area. The Clive Murphy Archive is held by London’s Bishopsgate Institute.

He gave us his Ordinary Lives series of books, for which he interviewed modest but eloquent individuals who had lived through the upheavals and social changes of the first three-quarters of the 20th century and edited their taped reminiscences into compelling memoirs. His subject included a chorus girl (Love Dears), a pig farmer (Oiky) and a lavatory attendant (Four Acres and a Donkey), in which Mr Rogers shares the following about the city’s loos:

Some of the things I’ve found in the toilets you wouldn’t believe – suitcases full of clothes, holdalls, briefcases, empty money bags from banks, smashed up collection boxes for the blind and crippled children and the RSPCA. I’ve found old shoes, old underpants, in the water cisterns. I found two revolvers in a water cistern. There were Italian Berettas that belonged to some crook and I’ve an idea who they belonged to. All this had to be handed into the police, though they don’t want screwdrivers. I’ve got a finer set of screwdrivers today than any man in London, screwdrivers used for breaking into cars and flats. One screwdriver I have is sixteen inches long. Brand new it must have cost well over two pound.

 

Clive Murphy was born in Liverpool in 1935. He was educated and brought up in Ireland where he qualified as a solicitor in 1958. In the same year, he emigrated. to London and eventually settled in Spitalfields in the early 1970s. His Summer Overtures was joint winner of Adam International Review’s First Novel Award in 1972. Freedom for Mr. Mildew & Nigel Someone appeared to critical acclaim in one volume in 1975. A series of ten recorded autobiographies, as listed below, followed. Since 1999, Clive Murphy has published ten books of gay, often comic, ribaldry. The tenth, To Hell with Thomas Bowdler, Mrs Grundy and Mary Whitehouse!, was published in 2015.

 

 

You can buy a great zine of Clive pictures at Cafe Roya Books.

The Clive Murphy Archive is held by Bishopsgate Institute.