Benjamin Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap was a versatile product with the capacity to clean almost any object or surface but “It Won’t Wash Clothes” that was an unusual strap line used first and foremost to tell you what it couldn’t do. It was a ‘scouring soap’ as opposed to a ‘soft soap’ in that it contained pumice that was ideal for washing pots & pans and almost anything else according to the adverts. A Victorian equivalent of Brillo Pads or VIM perhaps.
MONKEY STREET ARTISTS: Brookes Monkey Brand advertisment 1899
Between 1899 and 1901, The Monkey Brand Soap Co, under Sidney & Harry Gross & Lever Brothers released a series of adverts based around the idea of PAVEMENT ARTISTS. Three in total that where published in various Victorian publications; The Graphic, Black & White and The London Illustrated News. Society papers of the day. Each advert featured a monkey/human hybrid acting in various guises as street artists
The advertising was dependent on use of line engraved images of a monkey/human hybrid of the type that exercised a powerful grip on the Victorian imagination.
Living creatures in human clothing were the subject of many an illustrated book and their appeal was not restricted to children. Taxidermy tableaux were especially popular with Victorian audiences. The enduring power of these images is confirmed by the continuing survival of the PG Tips chimps into the present day. (PG Tips is a Unilever company)
Monkey Brand Soap Advert: hand-tinted in colour 1899
The artworks are mostly unsigned, with the initials G. E. R. appearing occasionally but the identity of the original artist remains a mystery. Some, like the one above, appeared in magazines hand-tinted in colour.
Monkey Brand soap was introduced in around 1888 as a scouring soap. Sidney & Harry Gross opened a small factory in Philadelphia, USA
Lever Brothers bought the company in 1899 and transferred the production of Monkey Brand soap to Port Sunlight on the Wirral. The name ‘Benjamin Brooke’ was used to promote the Monkey Brand soap both in the States and in Britain.
The soap was a popular product, as were the adverts which usually featured monkeys washing dishes, or involved in other household tasks.
There is a lot more that could be said about the advertising for Monkey Brand Soap and the use of pavement artists and monkey/human hybrids…this was certainly a fascinating and almost surreal advertising campaign that brings to the surface certain attitudes regarding Victorian tastes and social order.
A strange ‘operatic’ story of Arthur Stace, (9 February 1884 – 30 July 1967), petty criminal who haunted Sydney’s seedy bars and brothels, experienced a revelation one night in a soup kitchen chapel. The next day he showered, shaved, swore off the drink and embarked on a forty-year odyssey. Every night, as the city closed down, he would emerge and tread the streets of Sydney, chalking his timeless message in perfect Copperplate script – ETERNITY.
Movie Still: GRANT DOYLE plays Arthur Stace (Mr Eternity)
In 2003, Australian composer Jonathan Mills and novelist and poet Dorothy Porter combined to create an opera based on Stace’s life. Julian Temple, director of music-related films such as The Filth & the Fury and Absolute Beginners, has joined this creative team to film the opera live on Stace’s Sydney streets.
Movie Still: The Eternity Man 2008
Mr Eternity; Arthur Stace was born in Balmain, in the inner-west of Sydney. The child of alcoholics, he was brought up in poverty. In order to survive, he resorted to stealing bread and milk and searching for scraps of food in bins. By the age of 12, Stace, with virtually no formal schooling, had become a ward of the state. As a teenager, he became an alcoholic and was subsequently sent to jail at 15.
Movie Still: Mr Eternity strikes again!
In his twenties, he was a scout for his sisters’ brothels. In March 1916, at age 26, he enlisted for World War One with the 19th Battalion 5th Brigade AIF, entering with the 16th Reinforcements, service number 5934. He suffered recurring bouts of bronchitis and pleurisy, which led to his medical discharge on 2 April 1919.
Movie Still: Arthur Stace chalks outside the brothels of Sydney
Stace converted to Christianity on the night of 6 August 1930, after hearing an inspirational sermon by the Reverend R. B. S. Hammond at St. Barnabas Church, Broadway. Inspired by the words, he became enamoured of the notion of eternity. Two years later, on 14 November 1932, Arthur was further inspired by the preaching of evangelist John G. Ridley, MC on “The echoes of Eternity” from Isaiah
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Was it by fortuitous good luck, accident or design that Walt Disney decided to merge the Pamela L Travers character of BERT into a Sweep, one man band BUSKER & pavement artist SCREEVER, for his new 1964 film MARY POPPINS. Of course, Travers had written them as separate characters in her 1934 book.
It was this combination of Musical Busker and Pavement Artist that struck a chord with me; both are born of common ancestry, both street performers, entertaining the public in return for pennies, through their chosen artistry but apparently poles apart in their appearance and attitude; one outgoing, loud and extrovert, the other quiet, hunched over and introvert.
Naturally enough thought, there has always been a great comradeship and mutual respect between the two art forms. A relationship that in London dates back over 300 years; gone are the street potters, harpists, strolling German Bands and Gypsy girl dancers, Irish singers and the Herdy Gerdy man; gone also thankfully, the dancing bears, monkeys, bull baiters and the likes. Through two world wars, the great depression and numerous other upheavals, the Buskers & the Screever survives today more or less intact….more than ‘survives’ if the numerous busking and street painting festivals worldwide are anything to go by.
Earlier this year I was contacted through this blog, by one time London busker ROD WARNERwho told me about his screever friend Bob Hanley. This is what Rod had to say:
“I was a busker for many years, starting out in London and graduating to the cinema queues round Leicester Square in the wake of Don Partridge and a couple of other younger buskers who had managed to get a foothold on the scene after some battles with the older generation of street musicians.
Don himself started up busking at the Irving Statue next to the pitch of the resident street artist there who would have been a guy called Bob Hanley, from Northern Ireland, Belfast maybe, can’t remember! But I got to know Bob very well over the next few years.
Bob was very successful and branched out from day to day chalking – he kept his base at the Irving Statue but he had done some pen and ink drawings of London sights, plus when Swinging London hit a bunch of crude cartoons of hippies, CND peace signs – crap really. But he had a squad out on the streets in the West End who sat on pitches and coloured them in/sold them neat, paying a royalty to Bob of course. Then he franchised the cartoons out to plastic bag/poster makers and you saw them everywhere – Carnaby Street especially, Piccadilly, wherever there was a kiosk, it seemed. Of course he made a lot of money…”
Bob Handley as featured on the cover of The Daily Telegraph Magazine 1975
Ron continued; “I left London in 1975 and travelled between Dublin and the continent – London had become too crowded plus the fines went up astronomically. But Bob was part of the fabric of the West End for those years. I don’t know when he started out as he was older than the rest of us but Don Partridge knew him from about 1964.”
What Rod was telling me was totally fascinating…I knew about pavement artists who would ‘franchise out’ pitches, this had been going on since the 1800’s, but it had never been described to me in as much detail…I pressed him further on the relationships between BUSKERS & SCREEVERS;
“we were in no conflict and when we were playing the cinema queues in Leicester Square, would book spots at various times which necessitated leaving guitars/instrument cases on the pitch. So there was usually a symbiosis of street rabble! We’d watch theirs and vice versa, between the pub, the cafe and the bookies.”
And what of the franchising out of pitches?
“Bob as far as I remember chalked on his own – but as his outfit grew he employed on a loose arrangement a surprising amount of people who would find a pitch somewhere and sit and colour in the drawings or just display and sell the drawings – copies of course. Bob was the benign godfather who caught on to the idea of FRANCHISE! A Warhol of the streets perhaps”
I was interested in knowing more about the relationship with the law and other aspects of working the London streets as a Busker and Screever;
“The relationship with the police was a complex one but in the main amicable. Buskers used to be fined £2 for Highway obstruction; I would assume that the print sellers would come under the same umbrella, as it were. There were laws against begging but these were more severe – and rarely used by then, I suspect. As a busker in the West End you could expect to get picked up once a month, on rough average. Usually no more than a trip to Bow Street, out fairly quickly, up before the beak next morning, guilty, two quid. Back to work.
What killed off the West End for a while until Covent Garden came along – and that was and is a totally different setup, much more organised – was the number of buskers growing to stupid proportions, the law changing, so that the fine upper end was £50!, which was a lot of money in the early 70s – and cinemas going over to booking rather than queuing. I assume that there were still queues around (I decamped in 1974-5 for more easy busking environments) but nowhere near the scale as before. You could always make money doing street pitches – Soho, Brewer Street/Berwick Street market, Carnaby Street, Portobello Road on Saturdays, Petticoat Lane Sundays etc., the theatre ‘bursts’ – hitting the punters as they came out of the show – but the queues were the gold mines. With a good bottler you could make a fast and lucrative hit.
There were always pitch wars of some description. In my book I describe Don’s experiences – he started out with his friend Alan Young (Catch the film: The London That Nobody Knows’ or check out the clip on the book blog – he’s in it with Jumping Jack/AKA The Earl of Mustard) playing by the Irving Statue, back of the National Gallery, where Bob Hanley used to let them play next to his pitch – probably while they looked after his stuff while he was down the bookies/pub whatever – so that was a symbiotic relationship between pavement artist and busker.
Don Partridge: The King of the Buskers!
But Don got wind very quickly of the opportunities to be had in Leicester Square and Coventry Street down to the Pavilion in Piccadilly. That brought them into conflict with the older buskers – accordion players and other eccentrics – but he cultivated two of them. One was Meg Aikman – the Piccadilly Nightingale, the other Jumping Jack, the tap dancer. He originally got in a fight with Don and they were promptly arrested which brought them together. Jack was a crazy bastard but like a fox. He saw the future and made alliances with the young brigade. I played with him a lot and learned much – to be in his company was a surreal experience. When I started out there were still conflicts between young and old but they were fizzling out. But people were jealous of their pitches. Basically you couldn’t just walk up to a queue and play – usually someone had booked it by leaving an instrument so for the really big films, you could be hanging around for hours just to play to that one queue.
Bob Handley as featured in The Daily Telegraph Magazine 1976
Pavement artists weren’t really a problem. There were never many round the area that I remember anyway. Bob was on his pitch, which he may have shared with others, I can’t remember, but his army of print floggers might set up in the doorway with us before queues as they would watch the gear and we would reciprocate. Some of the bottlers were recruited from their ranks and vice versa so it was a symbiotic friendly relationship in the main.”
I’ll be publishing more on this subject in a future blog, but I’d like to thank Rod Warner for sharing his first-hand account of street life and culture in 1960’s London. I’m totally fascinated by his stories, and if anybody knows what happened to Bob Handley or is related to him in any way, then please get in-touch!
Writted by Philip Battle with additional material supplied by Rod Warner & Pat Keene.
